Mighty Man of Valor

Scripture referenced

• 1 Kings 5:6
• Judges 6:11-16
• Isaiah 29:16
• 2 Corinthians 5:17
• Romans 8:15
• Romans 6:14
• Romans 8:37
• Jeremiah 31:3
• Ephesians 1:4-5
• 1 John 3:1
• John 16:33

Brian picked up a series on working with the gifts and talents God gives us, this week turning the focus to identity. Using the story of Gideon from Judges 6, he pressed on a simple question: whose label of who you are is actually true, yours or God’s? The congregation also spent time in a guided confession, renouncing false identities and speaking true ones out loud together.

What was said

Two weeks ago the series started with the Sidonians, a people with a reputation for being the best lumberjacks around. Brian argued that reputation requires sharp tools, and that for followers of Jesus the tools are the gifts and talents God gives each person to fulfill a unique calling. A dull tool is a gift used in the flesh; a sharp tool is the same gift surrendered to the Spirit. Moses was the example: the same liberating gift, used in the flesh, freed zero Hebrew slaves and killed one Egyptian. Used in the Spirit, it freed all of them.

This week Brian moved from tools to the hand that holds them, which is identity. He set the scene in Judges 6: Gideon is threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding from the Midianites, certain he is the smallest person from the weakest clan. Then the angel of the Lord shows up and greets him as a mighty man of valor. Brian let the congregation sit with the obvious incongruity for a moment before pointing out that both descriptions carried some truth, but God was speaking from a higher level of truth, the way the law of aerodynamics overrides gravity without canceling it.

The central claim Brian kept returning to was this: only the creator has the authority to define his creation. He used the illustration of a child’s Play-Doh artwork. A parent who calls it a giraffe when the child made a skyscraper is simply wrong, no matter how much it looks like a giraffe. The artist alone has the authority to name what they made. He read from Isaiah 29:16, where the prophet asks whether the clay has the right to tell the potter he did not make it.

Brian was direct about what is at stake when people reject that authority. If God is creator, he said, then his creation is responsible to him, and human pride does not want that responsibility. The reflex is to become your own god, to write your own name on the bottom of the shoe rather than acknowledge whose name is already there. He noted that the congregation’s mission field outside the church doors is largely made up of people who have, for exactly that reason, rejected the idea of a creator.

He then drew a distinction between the identity all humanity shares, being made in the image of God, and an additional dimension that opens up when someone invites Jesus in. Citing second Corinthians 5:17, Romans 8:15, Romans 6:14, Romans 8:37, and a cluster of passages from Jeremiah, Ephesians, and first John, he listed five things that become true at that point: new creation, adopted back into the family, no longer a slave to sin, more than a conqueror, and deeply loved by God.

Near the end, a woman in the congregation named Renee connected something Brian had not noticed. Gideon was threshing wheat and hiding. Later in the story, an enemy soldier dreams about a barley loaf rolling down a hill. Renee suggested that Gideon’s actual skill might have been baking, and that God had been forming patience, persistence, and attention in him through an ordinary occupation before asking him to do something that looked nothing like it. Brian said he had never made that connection and that the observation changed how he would read the story from then on.

Doing a Bible study?

1. Brian pointed out that Gideon was hiding in a wine press threshing wheat, which is the wrong place for that job, and called his tool ‘super dull and super inefficient.’ Where in your own life do you notice yourself working in the wrong place or in the wrong way, and what do you think is behind that?
2. When God greeted Gideon as ‘mighty man of valor,’ Gideon had not yet accomplished anything. How does it sit with you that God speaks identity over a person before any track record exists to back it up?
3. Brian said ‘only the creator has the authority to define his creation,’ and then asked why humanity largely rejects that. Someone in the room answered with pride, not wanting to be responsible to anyone above them. Do you agree with that answer, and where have you seen that play out in your own thinking?
4. Renee made the connection that Gideon’s everyday work as a baker, threshing wheat and making bread, may have been exactly what God was using to prepare him for what came next. Can you think of something ordinary in your own life right now that God might be using in a similar way, even if you cannot see where it leads?
5. Brian led the congregation in a spoken confession, renouncing a false identity and then naming five things that are true for anyone who has invited Jesus into their life: new creation, adopted, no longer a slave, more than a conqueror, deeply loved. Which of those five is the hardest for you to actually believe about yourself on a regular Tuesday, and why?

Topics

Gideon Gifts And Calling Identity Self Worth Who Am I

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