Judges 6. 11-24: “Go in the strength you have!”

All-age Service with Bible teaching in three parts.

Talk 1. Threshing wheat in the wine-press.

Greek Threshing floor by Stan Zurek. Creative Commons license

What is “threshing"?

Do you ever find husks in popcorn or porridge or rice. All grain has husks which we can’t eat. So the farmers have to separate the husks. Nowadays that is all done by a fancy machine, but the basic method of doing this was by spreading them on a flat, round “Threshing-floor”, and breaking them open using a flail (two sticks joined with a couple of links of chain) or threshing sledge and letting the wind blow away the lighter husks.

What is a wine-press?

It’s something that is used to get the juice out of grapes. In ancient times farmers squeezed the grapes with their bare feet, in a big tank cut into the rock, called a wine-press. The juice would usually run of into a lower, deeper tank.

Why was threshing wheat in the wine-press so unusual – and difficult? In the wine-press, which was lower down and often had a wall around it, the wind couldn't get there to blow away the husks.

So why was Gideon threshing wheat in the wine-press?

He was afraid of the Midianites…. Do you think Gideon felt like a “mighty man of valour”?

I wonder what we are afraid of…

Talk 2. Go in the strength you have…

Question: Who does the story begin with? No, not with Gideon – but with the Angel of the Lord. It begins with God. And what is really important in all the Gideon story, isn’t so much what Gideon did, but what God did.

The Lord is with you

Gideon problem wasn’t just that he was scared – I think he was scared because he couldn’t see God in the situation. The important point in the first thing the angel said to Gideon was not “you can do this, Gideon;” it wasn’t even “you’re rubbish, Gideon, but God can use you anyway!” It was simply, “The Lord is with you!” That’s the first thing Gideon wants to argue with. Sure, he was beating out wheat in a wine-press. Sure he was scared of the Midianites. Sure he felt like a bit of a loser. Sure, he may have felt “That’s all I need – a sarcastic angel!” It looked like God wasn’t with Gideon and his people. They were in a mess because of the Midianites. So Gideon answered back to god.

So the first thing Gideon needs to get straight in his own mind is simply this – and we will come back to this again and again in the story - “is the Lord with me?”

Hear it people: the Lord is with you… if he is, you can’t lose. If he isn’t, you can’t win.

The strength you have

Then the angel says “Go in the strength you have…” God doesn’t engage in sarcasm and irony with us. When he calls Gideon a “mighty man of valour”, he means it: he can see something in Gideon that maybe Gideon can’t see in himself. He knows what he is going to do with Gideon. So Gideon is to “go in the strength he has”.

Not in the strength he feels he has – because that isn’t very much. In fact he wants to argue: “Look Lord, there must be some mistake. Check the records. I’m a nobody… from a nobody family…”
Not in the strength he wishes, or brags to his mates he has, because that’s not real.

Just in the strength he has. “Gideon, there are things in your life that I have already put there. There area gifts that grew in you as you grew up. I can use that.”

But Gideon wants to answer back again, and the answer to Gideon’s weakness is this: the Lord says “I will be with you, and you will defeat the Midianites”.

So, as we reflect on our smallness, and the threats and challenges in the task we face as a Church, in the West, in Scotland, we can easily feel hopeless. As we think about sharing the Good News with people in Rosyth, we wonder how to go about it. Thinking about the future, we cab be tempted to feel, we haven’t got the resources to do the kind of things we need to be doing. We look at the task and the obstacles. How can we do this? I believe God says, “Go in the strength you have...” and “I will be with you...”

Talk 3. Worship: Yahweh-Shalom.

Gideon just needs to be sure that this experience has really been the Lord. He needs to be at peace with everything. So he rushes off, and prepares an offering: a sacrifice – bread made without yeast, and a young goat, made into a kind of stew… He comes back, (he must have been some time?) and the angel tells him to put his offering on the rock – we guess the rock that the wine-press was dug out of…

And the angel touches Gideon’s offering with his stick, fire flares up to burn the offering – and the angel disappears. Gideon is left feeling a bit scared because he has really seen God’s angel – maybe God himself. But the Lord speaks – Peace, son; you're not going to die – you have a job to do.

So Gideon builds an altar and calls it Yahweh-Shalom – the Lord is peace.

In response to this word from God, the call to “Go in the strength you have” despite the challenges, we need to spend time with God: to worship. That means sacrifice. It takes many different shapes: for Gideon, bread without yeast, meat; building an altar. For us, singing God’s praises, breaking bread together – and making our lives a living sacrifice to God. And as we worship, we know peace in the midst of challenge.

God says “Go in the strength you have”. And our response to that call, the beginning of the journey, is to worship him.

Picture of Threshing floor by Stan Zurek, used under Creative Commons License.