Don’t Confuse The Gift With The Package

When God Speaks—Be Quick to Obey!

SUMMARY: Newsflash: Your spiritual leader is flawed. Gifted, yes, but also flawed. So don’t confuse the gift with the package. Lift them to God in prayer today. He or she is probably wrestling with a personal flaw. Instead of idolizing them, intercede for them. That would be the best way to return the favor for their spiritual oversight in your life.

God Speaks—I Obey // Focus: Judges 11:29-31

At that time the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he went throughout the land of Gilead and Manasseh, including Mizpah in Gilead, and from there he led an army against the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord. He said, “If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will give to the Lord whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return in triumph. I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

From a historical perspective, Israel may have been scraping the bottom of the barrel when Jephthah was chosen to lead them. God had an altogether higher purpose in using this unlikely man as a judge, deliverer, and leader of the nation, but Jephthah was a piece of work. He was an outcast in his family, literally and figuratively. Born from a union between his father and a prostitute (Judges 11:1), his brothers from another mother flat-out rejected his legitimacy to their father’s inheritance. And they were not shy in telling him why he would do well to get the heck out of Dodge (Judges 11:2).

As a result, Jephthah removed himself from his father’s “real” family—there is some indication that it wasn’t just a good idea that he leave, it was good for his health, as in, they would have killed him. He lived in exile, and while there, developed quite a reputation as a fighter and leader of a band of marauders who made their living taking what they wanted, perhaps even exhorting money in exchange for protection from the locals (Judges 11:3).

Now the Israelites had once again fallen under the dominion of a foreign nation—this time, the Ammonites—and no one else in Israel stepped to the plate as a leader. So the elders turned to someone they despised but whose fighting skills they reasoned would serve them well now that they needed a deliverer. They came with hat in hand to Jephthah to ask him to lead (Judges 11:4-6). Jephthah agreed, but only after extracting an admission that they had been jerks to him all his life and that they would make him ruler over them should he win the battle against the Ammonites (Judges 11:7-11). They didn’t have much of a choice, so they agreed to his conditions.

Now here is where the story gets even weirder: as Jephthah leads Israel to war, we are told that the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him (Judges 11:29), but in the very next two verses, we see that the first thing he does is to make one of the most foolish vows you can imagine:

Meanwhile, Jephthah had vowed to the Lord that if God would help Israel conquer the Ammonites, then when he returned home in peace, the first person coming out of his house to meet him would be sacrificed as a burnt offering to the Lord! (Judges 11:30-31, LB)

Alternative meanings have been assigned to this rash vow to sanitize it for our modern minds. Precisely because of the juxtaposition of these two verses with the antecedent verse, that is, how could someone filled with the Holy Spirit make such an evil vow, commentators have suggested that Jephthah’s declaration really meant that he would force his daughter (the first thing coming out of his house) to become the living sacrifice of a young woman living in perpetual virginity. But the simplest way to read the verse is to understand that he meant to literally offer a human sacrifice if the Lord gave him victory.

Pretty messed up, wouldn’t you say? So the question is legitimate: how could someone filled with the Holy Spirit make such an evil declaration? And perhaps we wonder that in our own context when we see leaders who have been uniquely gifted by God turn around and say weird things or do dumb stuff. How could an amazingly gifted communicator or a miracle-working faith healer or mesmerizing worship leader misappropriate money, or have an illicit affair or promote a false teaching?

I think the easiest explanation for that is simply that we should never confuse the gift with the package. In other words, God’s gift is always placed within flawed human packages—and even if the person so gifted never goes off the rails, they are still sin-broken people. The fact is, God uses broken people to accomplish his purposes, and that is a grace to his people. If he used only the perfect, he would use no one.

Of course, that does not excuse bad behavior; it just explains it. So, the bottom line is that as you view the gifted spiritual leaders in your life, celebrate the gift that God has placed upon their ministry, but don’t idolize the person. Like you, they, too, are human. Furthermore, don’t limit God from empowering you with his Holy Spirit by thinking you are too flawed and unqualified. Remember, as someone has said, God doesn’t choose the qualified, he qualifies the chosen.

Thank God for his gifts. They are a grace to us.

Choose You This Day: Lift your spiritual leader in prayer today. He or she is probably wrestling with a personal flaw. Instead of idolizing them, intercede for them.

“	If God only used perfect people, nothing would get done. God will use anybody if you’re available. —RICK WARREN

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From Promise To Fulfillment: The Story of Faith and Obedience

When God Speaks—Be Quick to Obey!

Quotable: “Ruthless faith and risky obedience—that is the story of those who possess the promises.”

SUMMARY: God has made over thousands of promises in his Word to his people. Some of them are specific to that time and to those people, but most are general promises that are for you to possess. Picture them! That is an act of faith. Then align yourself to possess them. That is an act of obedience. Faith and obedience—may that be the testimony of your life.

God Speaks—I Obey // Focus: Joshua 11:16-18

So Joshua took this entire land: the hill country, all the Negev, the whole region of Goshen, the western foothills, the Arabah and the mountains of Israel with their foothills, from Mount Halak, which rises toward Seir, to Baal Gadin the Valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. He captured all their kings and put them to death. Joshua waged war against all these kings for a long time…. So Joshua took the entire land, just as the Lord had directed Moses, and he gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions. Then the land had rest from war.

God had promised Israel a land—the land of Canaan. The promise was made to Abraham hundreds of years before Joshua 11 as a condition of the covenant the Lord made with this man who would become the father of many nations, including Israel (that story is contained in Genesis 12-25), and much later, the father of our faith (Romans 4:16) The rest of Genesis all the way thorough Judges tells the story of Israel’s circuitous journey to physically get to the Promised Land (Exodus-Numbers), enter it to possess it by dispossessing the nations who lived there (Joshua), and then settle it (Judges).

Joshua 11 is at the heart of the conquest story—it is where the rubber of faith meets the road of fulfillment. When the Lord had commissioned General Joshua to lead Israel to cross the Jordan and go into the land to drive out the nations, he first gave him a picture of what the Promised Land would look like:

I promise you what I promised Moses: ‘Wherever you set foot, you will be on land I have given you—the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites.’ No one will be able to stand against you as long as you live. For I will be with you as I was with Moses. I will not fail you or abandon you. (Joshua 1:3-5)

Joshua needed to picture what God wanted him to possess. He also needed to hear God’s twin promise of presence and power to maintain the courage it would take to go up against nation after nation that were bigger, better equipped, and more experienced in war than the Israelite army. Which brings up several important points relevant for our faith journey today about moving from God’s promise to their fulfillment I our lives:

We have to picture God’s promises if we hope to possess them—that is what “faithing” it is all about (“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation.” Hebrews 11:1-2)

The best of God’s promises are way bigger than what we can imagine, and even way bigger than what we need. God’s promise to Joshua was basically the entire Middle East. What that tells us is that God gives in abundance, which, simply defined, is more than we need. (“God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.” Ephesians 3:20)

The bigger the promises, the bigger the opposition to those promises we will face. The Enemy knows what is at stake in the people of God possessing the promises of God, so he throws up obstacles of every kind to discourage us from staying at the task of claiming them. Even though he is a defeated foe, he won’t go down without a fight. (“Since the first day you began to pray for understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your request has been heard in heaven. I have come in answer to your prayer. But for twenty-one days, the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me, and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia.” (Daniel 10:12-13)

The promises of God are sure, but they are not automatic. We have a part to play: we have to possess them. God can’t possess them for us; we have to give spiritual effort to bring them into our possession. That, too, is called faith: bringing in through spiritual effort from the unseen realm into our reality what God has already established. (“Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.” Philippians 2:12-13)

God promised a land, then empowered Israel to possess it, but Joshua and company had to go out and fight to claim what was theirs by divine declaration. And they did. Notice how similar the reality of their victory was to the original promise:

Joshua conquered the entire region—the hill country, the entire Negev, the whole area around the town of Goshen, the western foothills, the Jordan Valley, the mountains of Israel, and the Galilean foothills. The Israelite territory now extended all the way from Mount Halak, which leads up to Seir in the south, as far north as Baal-gad at the foot of Mount Hermon in the valley of Lebanon. (Joshua 10:16-18)

God has made promises to you, too. It may not be a literal land, but it is a territory. Faith is the activity of claiming it; of bringing it into your possession. Picture what he wants you to possess—that is faith. Believe that it is yours by divine declaration—that, too, is faith. Then get after it. Possess what you have pictured. Align your prayers and your resources—spiritual, physical, financial—to possess it. Giving spiritual effort to possess God’s promises—that is called obedience.

Ruthless faith and risky obedience—that is the story of those who possess the promises.

Choose You This Day: God has made over 6,000 promises in his Word to his people. Some of them are specific to that time and to those people, but most are general promises that are for you to possess. Picture them! That is an act of faith. Then align yourself to possess them. That is an act of obedience. Faith and obedience—may that be the testimony of your life.

“	God is not a deceiver, that He should offer to support us, and then, when we lean upon Him, should slip away from us. —AUGUSTINE

Arresting Spiritual Drift

When God Speaks—Be Quick to Obey!

SUMMARY: Who is going to be God in your life? That is a pertinent question for you today, because you are going to worship someone, or something. Your god is whatever you are putting your full-throttled dependence upon and allegiance to. Take it from the ancient Israelites—there is only one God who is worthy of your dependence and devotion. They learned that the hard way so you don’t have to.

God Speaks—I Obey // Focus: Judges 10:15-16

But the Israelites pleaded with the Lord and said, “We have sinned. Punish us as you see fit, only rescue us today from our enemies.” Then the Israelites put aside their foreign gods and served the Lord. And he was grieved by their misery.

Same song, twenty-ninth verse: Israel abandons the worship of God only to chase after the local deities of the Canaanites. So, God lifts his hand of blessing from them and allows them to have what they want—a visible, controllable, lucky-charm god. But as before, again sad results ensue: They are left defenseless against cruel enemies, their agrarian economy collapses, their families suffer undue hardship, and their lives are miserable under the rule of foreign gods and nations. Then, predictably, they come to themselves, cry out to God, repent, and God sends a rescuer. That is the story repeated over and over in the Book of Judges.

Of course, we have the advantage of looking back at this four-hundred-year period and viewing it only as a relatively short snapshot of history. It wasn’t. There were long patterns of obedience and blessing on Israel’s part—ten, twenty, fifty years of faithfulness to God. But then Israel would cycle into spiritual lassitude and moral drift until finally they were into full-on backsliding. And the oppressive consequences would follow—ten, twenty, thirty years of domination by godless and ruthless enemies.

So why didn’t the children of Israel learn their lesson after the first beating? Why did they drift into idol worship over and over again? What was their infatuation with other gods? Again, we look back upon their history without understanding the long, dark periods of time that the nation cycled through, and in so doing, we fail to realize that we are prone to the same kind of drift and wrong dependencies as they were—we’re just a little more sophisticated with our worship of idols. The Quest Study Bible offers some reasons for their infatuation with local idols, and as you ponder these, see if you can identify your own tendencies to drift from utter dependence and ruthless obedience to God:

1. Idols were physical objects that could be seen (Leviticus 26:1). Israel’s God, on the other hand, was unseen.

2. Idols could be carried, controlled, and confined. Israel’s God, however, was an awesome and mysterious God who could not be manipulated by his people. He “moved” whenever and wherever he wanted.

3. Foreign gods were thought to have power over crops, a prime concern of the Israelites. The people were superstitious and didn’t want to risk their harvests by offending the pagan gods.

4. Some foreign gods were believed to give fertility to the womb. The worship of these gods involved religious prostitution 1( Kings 14:24) and other sexually immoral practices, which appealed to the sensual desires of the Israelites. The Israelites may have concluded that it was better to indulge in these pleasurable activities than to displease the gods of fertility.

5. Idol worship was a cultural norm. The Israelites often found it easier to join in local customs than to go against them.

Who is going to be God in your life? That is a pertinent question for you today, because you are going to worship someone, or something. Your god is whatever you are putting your full-throttled dependence upon and allegiance to. Of course, we don’t worship literal images made of wood, stone, silver, or gold as the ancient Israelites did, but wouldn’t you agree that we are just as susceptible to the seduction of less visible but highly sophisticated idols like money, sex, and power?

If you are placing importance, expending energy, and making a personal investment in things that drown out your full-throttled devotion to and dependence on God, you have made them into an idol. But here’s the deal: At the end of the day, those things will have amounted to nothing. In fact, they will have done real harm to the blessings that God would have poured out in your life had you waited upon him in devotion and dependence.

If reading through this is convicting you at all, I would suggest you quickly get on your knees and cry out to God in sincere repentance, as the Israelites did. Put aside your wrong dependencies and misplaced devotions and worship God alone. Perhaps he will be grieved by your misery and reach out to you in love.

Rather, it is more likely that he will reach out to you in love.

Choose You This Day: Where have you put devotion and dependence on someone or something other than God? Arrest that spiritual drift by crying out to God, rejecting your false gods, and turning fully toward him. Allow him to bless you once again—he really wants to.

“

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

— RALPH WALDO EMERSON

When God Fights For You

When God Speaks—Be Quick to Obey!

SUMMARY: Make no mistake: God still fights on behalf of his people. In a realm that you usually can’t see, there is a battle, and God is at war to bring about complete and utter victory for his kingdom. And while in the seen realm we may not see that victory, let’s be perfectly clear about this: The outcome is predetermined and the victory has already been won! If you don’t believe that, then as they say, fast-forward to the end of the book, and you will see it: we win!

God Speaks—I Obey // Focus: Joshua 10:9-13

Joshua traveled all night from Gilgal and took the Amorite armies by surprise. The Lord threw them into a panic, and the Israelites slaughtered great numbers of them at Gibeon. Then the Israelites chased the enemy along the road to Beth-horon, killing them all along the way to Azekah and Makkedah. As the Amorites retreated down the road from Beth-horon, the Lord destroyed them with a terrible hailstorm from heaven that continued until they reached Azekah. The hail killed more of the enemy than the Israelites killed with the sword. On the day the Lord gave the Israelites victory over the Amorites, Joshua prayed to the Lord in front of all the people of Israel: “Let the sun stand still over Gibeon, and the moon over the valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still and the moon stayed in place until the nation of Israel had defeated its enemies.

Obviously, it doesn’t always work this way, but when it does, boy howdy! The situation was different back then, and it called for God to step in on Israel’s behalf in a way that left no doubt in the minds of friend and foe alike that Yahweh was on the side of his people. Like the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, clearly God was fighting for Israel. And it wasn’t a fair fight. It never is when God gets involved.

Israel was taking possession of their Promised Land in fulfillment of the centuries-old covenantal promise that God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That meant the Canaanites, a particularly brutal, sinful, godless amalgam of city-states, had to be dispossessed from that land. So city-by-city, Joshua was on a winning streak where Israel didn’t barely eek out victories; these were blowouts. And in this case, not only was the Israelite army crushing the Amorites, but God stepped in and, through a hailstorm of epic proportions, laid waste to the enemy. We are told that more died by the hail than by the sword.

Then, if that weren’t enough, Joshua put his foot on the gas to completely destroy whoever was left. The day was coming to a close, the sun would soon set before the job got done, so he even called out to the sun and moon for them to freeze in place. Imagine that: a man making demands of the solar system just so he could finish his work before nightfall. And it happened! Seriously, the only time before or since the sun literally stood still and the moon didn’t budge until Israel had pitched a complete game—a shutout, and a no-hitter at that.

Don’t you wish that were your testimony with every problem you face? I do! But most times, that is not what is called for. Typically, God has other methods for accomplishing his will. We are not literally going into a physical land to dispossess nations, so what Joshua did would be completely inappropriate for God’s people today. We are to take possession of spiritual lands by capturing people by persuading them through the gospel and bringing them under the loving reign of Jesus Christ. Obviously, it is a bit different today than in Joshua’s day.

However, make no mistake: God still fights on behalf of his people. In a realm that you usually can’t see, there is a battle, and God is at war to bring about complete and utter victory for his kingdom. And while that victory may not be seen like you and I would want it to be, let’s be perfectly clear about this: The outcome is predetermined and the victory has already been won! If you don’t believe that, then as they say, fast-forward to the end of the book and you will see it: We win!

Take heart today, my friend. In whatever battle you face, you have a God who fights for his people. Surely the Lord fights for you in the unseen realm—sometimes in a way that even leaks into the visible realm—just like he fought for Joshua:

Surely the Lord fought for Israel that day! (Joshua 10:14)

In an earlier battle, once again Joshua led Israel to a stunning victory over the evil and defiant Amalekites. When the battle was over, we are told that Moses built an altar there and named it “Yahweh-Nissi (which means ‘the Lord is my banner’). He said, ‘They have raised their fist against the Lord’s throne, so now the Lord will be at war with them.’” (Exodus 17:15-16)

Yahweh Nissi—the Lord is just as much your banner as he was Israel’s!

Choose You This Day: What is your battle today? Take heart, Yaweh-Nissi will do whatever it takes to march you on to victory!

“	There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. — C.S. LEWIS

A Pox On Both Your Houses

When God Speaks—Be Quick to Obey!

SUMMARY: Predictably, what we see and sense today at the highest as well as the lowest levels of culture is what happens when, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” As believers, we must let the moral decay of our nation turn our stomachs, but then we must let it turn our hearts to God in intercession for a sweeping spiritual awakening.

God Speaks—I Obey // Focus: 9:56-57

In this way, God punished Abimelech for the evil he had done against his father by murdering his seventy brothers. God also punished the men of Shechem for all their evil. So the curse of Jotham son of Gideon was fulfilled.

Admittedly, this is a weird story, and it’s even weirder that it was included in the Bible. Like a few others we have come across as we read the Old Testament devotionally, this is a head-scratcher. But at the end of the day, this story of Abimelech’s brief but brutal rule as a judge of Israel and his abrupt, gruesome death is a reminder of what happens in a person, and in a society, when God has been left out of the picture.

Abimelech was one of Gideon’s sons—one of seventy or so. And it just so happens that he was the one son from Gideon’s union with a concubine who lived in a different town, Shechem. So, there was probably no love lost with his many siblings; he was likely looked down upon by his brothers his entire life. There is a good chance Abimelech had a chip on his shoulder (that unfortunately ended with a millstone on his head—literally. See Judges 9:50-55).

So, Abimelech decided to do away with his seventy brothers, which he did in the most grisly fashion (Judges 9:5) by beheading them at one time. He killed all but one, Gideon’s youngest son, Jotham, who escaped and hid, and then resurfaced with an incendiary prophecy (Judges 9:7-21). This prophecy was a kind of “pox on both your houses” statement that ultimately came to pass. The prophecy was that in selecting Abimelech to be their king, the citizens of Shechem would end up paying for it with their lives, and Abimelech would likewise come to a brutal end for the murder of his brothers. That is the rest of the story of Judges 9.

Now take away the raw brutality of this story, sanitize it a bit, and what you have is the story of leadership in our current culture. Far too common is the way leaders attain power and the way the citizens surrender power to them. Lying, cheating, doing whatever it takes to make their opponent look bad, saying one thing to get elected, then leading another, coming off as a servant of the people but living like a king once in power, seems to be just the way it is in our political world. Often in elections, we feel like we have no choice but to hold our noses to cast our ballots. But we get the leaders we deserve.

Why? Simple answer: men have forgotten God. The writer of Judges prophetically summed up our twenty-first century world in the last verse in this book when he wrote, “There was no controlling moral authority to govern peoples’ lives, so everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 21:25) Unfortunately, in our day, as was the case in the day of the Judges, “what was right”, without the presence of the “Controlling Moral Authority”, without fail produces moral, cultural, economic, and global chaos.

Predictably, what we see and sense today at the highest as well as the lowest levels of culture is what happens when, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” In his famous Templeton Address, “Men Have Forgotten God,” Solzhenitsyn said

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century…Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.

May we never get used to it! May we never feel at home in this present world the way it is now. As believers, we have the urgent calling to humble ourselves before God, acknowledge our sin, repent, and turn to him for the healing of our land. As disgusted as you may feel reading Judges 9, let the moral decay of America turn your stomach, then turn your heart to God in intercession for a spiritual awakening once again in our land.

Who knows, God may give us a revival as he did throughout the book of Judges, as his people cried out to him.

Choose You This Day: Read 2 Chronicles 7:14 and pray your way through it on behalf of your nation today.

“	A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God. —CHARLES FINNEY