🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

It had been seven years of unfathomable oppression. To make matters worse, God's people brought on their oppression with their own idol-worshiping hands. Desperate Gideon, the youngest in an insignificant family from a small tribe, was quite literally in a low place. He was doing chores below ground. Grain was typically threshed on a hilltop so the wind would blow away the chaff. Gideon was threshing wheat in a sunken winepress to protect it from the locust-like Midianites. He might have been wondering how things got so bad, even though his father's had idolatrous shrine loomed above him.

While Gideon was suffering and humiliated at rock bottom, "the Angel of the LORD appeared to him, and said to him, 'The LORD is with you, you mighty man of valor!". (Judges 6:12) Gideon stumbled through the holy interaction with doubt and argumentativeness, debased by his depravity. Gideon's underwhelming, "Ok, but..." was enough. He didn't have to feel like it was true. He just needed to listen and obey Truth Himself.

There were SEVEN long years of violence and malice. And then Scripture uses the phrase, "That night..." four times as Gideon's outrageous story rapidly unfolds. The underdog in hiding rises up as the man of valor God always knew he was.

Let God's Truth be your truth, even while the enemy persists and wounds still fester. Muster your bravest, "Ok" while you're still sunken in suffering. It's good enough for God. Worship Him in spirit and truth. Your soul's hiding places and discrepancies will fall away in His presence. Listen to "God of This Place" by David Leonard.