Turn to Judges chapter 6. You don't know how painful it is for him not to sing, but I'm trying to save my voice here. That was a good song. I just like that song. Judges 6, we'll start reading in verse 36 through the end of the chapter, and then we'll pray. Then Gideon said to God, if you will deliver Israel through me as you have spoken, behold, I will put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece only and it is dry on all the ground, then I will know that you will deliver Israel through me as you have spoken. And it was so. When he arose early the next morning and squeezed the fleece, he drained the dew from the fleece, a bowl full of water. Then Gideon said to God, do not let your anger burn against me that I may speak once more. Please let me make a test once more with the fleece. Let it now be dry only on the fleece and let there be dew on all the ground. God did that. God did so that night for it was dry only on the fleece and the dew was on all the ground. Let's pray. Father, I thank you that you are a God that gives good gifts to your people. I pray that you'd be with my vocal cords and my words, that you'd be with the ears that listen as well, that you would reveal to us your truth this evening. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. I have a document in my pocket that I carry with me all the time and has a date on there, March 10th, 1967. And what it is is a restricted radio telephone operator's permit. And one of the first things you do if you want to become a pilot is to get one of those. You have to get a medical certificate as well. So you have to be able to operate a radio legally and a medical certificate. But that year, and I'm reminded of that often, but that also when I read this scripture, I was reminded of an event that happened in 1967 in my life. I was, what, 15 years old, a freshman in public high school, and I'd been taking a I think it was an economics course, something like that. It's so vague. That was a long time ago, 1967. But it was some kind of a course. But anyway, I'd written a paper on the stock market and it was really a pretty good paper, I thought. And we presented our papers. The professor, like the week after, was a man in high school who was teaching us back then. Maybe a little unusual now, but anyway, he said, I'm going to call on three people to come before the class and make a presentation on their paper. So he names two people, and then he names me. Now, I know it's hard for you to believe, but I used to be really nervous about public speaking. So it's like, oh, OK. Well, I had a couple of weeks to prepare, whatever. As I come closer to that time, I, especially that morning, went to my mother, man, I'm not feeling good. I think I've got a fever. Give me a thermometer. No, you don't have a fever. Man, I just don't think I feel good. I just, man. OK, I'll drive you to the bus stop. Thanks, Mom. That's not what I was looking for. But when I read this passage from Judges in this particular episode, in Gideon's life, I was sort of reminded of that because it seems almost like he's trying to come up with an excuse in one way. He says, because remember what happened previous, the preacher had come to him and then the angel of the Lord came to him and told him what he was supposed to do. The angel of the Lord being the second person of the Trinity came to him and told him what he was supposed to do. And then he, in verse 34, No, 35 it says, he sent messengers throughout Messiah, and they also called together and followed him. A bunch of his countrymen came to his aid, and he's still not convinced that this is what he's supposed to do. So the Lord tells him directly, and then a bunch of people, and what more verification would you need to know that this is what the Lord wants you to do? So at the very beginning of this passage, we need to think that Gideon is not going, I wonder what I should do. Let me put a fleece out, and if it's wet, then I know the Lord wants me to do that. It's not that. It's not trying to decide what to do. It's not a decision making thing. That's sort of a, I've read that in some literature, and it used to be a popular saying back in the old days. put a fleece out to find out what we want to do for the future. Who do we want to marry? We put a fleece out, right? Has anybody heard of that before? Okay, that's not what's going on here at all. That's a total misunderstanding. What this is, is Gideon, a display of the fact that Gideon has very faint, just a little tiny bit of faith. Weak, weak faith. But we can understand that, because think about his father, he was double-minded. He was a Jehovah worshipper, but he also had Baal altar. So he's raised with this duality of who do we trust? Who's most powerful? Well, Jehovah, obviously. He's the national God. He takes care of all the big things. But you know, we really need the rain and all the people around us, they worship this Baal God. So we better have him as well. So you can sort of understand Gideon's predicament. We can't really blame him very much. We have a tendency to, when we read this kind of stuff, we have a tendency to be very critical because we have the whole Bible. We know the end of the story, but Gideon didn't know the end of the story. He was in this situation, even though the second person of the Trinity appeared to him and explained to him what he was supposed to do, he still had this struggle, a very weak faith. We know that God's all-powerful. We know that he's sovereignly able to save. He doesn't need help, but Gideon doesn't know that. At this point, he doesn't know how it's going to work out. He may have had, he certainly had an intellectual understanding of what he was supposed to do, but it hadn't gone from the head to the heart at this point. We really see Gideon thinking like a The term had not been invented, I get it, but he was thinking like an Arminian in one sense, and really all the people were thinking that way. Look at chapter, flip over to chapter 7, the beginning of 7. In verse 3 it says... I've got to go a little further here. Chapter 7. Let's start in verse 2. The Lord said to Gideon, the people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands. Okay, that's verse 2. Verse 3 says, the Lord said to Gideon, the people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands. For Israel would become boastful saying, my own power had delivered me. Okay, that's the thinking of the free will, people that think we have the will to do this. And Gideon was maybe thinking this way, I believe. He was thinking, how am I going to work this out? Instead of, if you had enough faith, you'd go, well, the Lord's going to work that out. But, I mean, we all sort of feel that way, I think, at one point or another. So Gideon is at that point where he doesn't quite He understands what he's supposed to do, but he doesn't have the faith to trust the Lord to make this happen. He thinks he's going to have to work it out himself. So he's working that out. And so this request of his to see this fleece was a way for him, in his thoughts, was to verify this dilemma that he's in. He thinks Like we all do sometimes, we are, or he is, the primer, the principal actor in the upcoming battle. But what I want you to see here is that the Lord, it's just sort of characteristic of the Lord, and especially, remember, this is the angel of the Lord interaction with him, if you can see it that way. The characteristic of our Lord is that he's patient with his people. And that just reminded me of that passage in Isaiah 42 where the prophet's talking about the coming Messiah and he says that a bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. This is the picture of Gideon at this point. If it had been me, and after all this stuff, I would have been very judgmental at this point. But the Lord isn't judgmental. He doesn't say. He's condescending to him. He says, okay, this is a pretty cheeky request, but okay, I'm going to do this. You're asking for more proof? I spoke to you, man, face to face, and you have all these people calling you. So I'm going to condescend and actually perform this miracle for you to help you out. And that's so very much like our Lord Christ. A bruised reed, what's a bruised reed? A reed is like a stiff piece of grass, like a little bamboo shoot. I've got them in my backyard. It gets bruised, it gets hit or something like that. It's close to breaking, right? It's just, ooh. The Lord Jesus doesn't come and go, dah, go away from me. No, he condescends and he loves that reed. A smoldering wick, what is that? A candle? You've seen candles, right? And they're just barely on, or maybe a lamp or something like that. Gives out a lot of smoke and hardly any light and hardly any heat. The Lord doesn't go, pfft, blow it out. He kindles it and strengthens it. And this is what he's doing. And it's not just this section. Throughout this section of Gideon's life, the sign of the fleece, the 300 chosen men in chapter 7, and all of the stuff he's doing, he is gently working Gideon and the people at that time towards Greater faith. He's moving them in this direction very patiently, right? What is that whole thing about the 300 men? It's about remembering that the Lord is doing this. You're a part of it, but you're not the primary actor here. So Gideon's a man with weak faith. He's still not quite grasping the fact that Jehovah is the one who will fight the battle. He's trying to work it out himself. He's trying to figure out how he's going to work it out. And in the following passages, following sections, we show how the Lord's gradually working with him and the people to understand that. So this is the test. This test is Gideon simply needing some assurance that Jehovah is stronger than Baal, right? And the answer to that is God showing him this miracle. And again, it seems very strange after reading about that previous passage about the angel of the Lord and the response of his countrymen. God is so much unlike how we deal with ourselves. And, you know, we can be, some of us can be very hard on ourselves. We want to remember the Lord Jesus is not like that. Some of us can be very hard on other people, but we have to remember, especially other believers, but that's not how the Lord deals with us. It's the strangeness of the Lord's condescension to Gideon's request just reminds us of how gracious he is. To help a man with the weakest of faith, because of God's everlasting covenant love for his people, he faithfully saves his people. In fact, the whole book of Judges is a story of that. It's a story of a people who are generally unwilling to help themselves. They had everything they need. They had the promises of Joshua made, the Lord's promise clear to them. They just had to fight and they could have achieved all of this stuff, but they didn't have the desire of their own to relieve themselves of that oppression. In every situation of each of those judges, the Lord came upon a man so that he would save that nation. It takes the Lord who came upon a man to initiate the salvation for his own people. So again, the point here is that God's more interested in saving his people than people are in saving themselves. And we know that. We know that, right? We weren't interested in being saved. The Lord saved us. So how gracious is the Lord to work out our salvation? And not only the salvation, but our sanctification. Even when we seem less than interested in doing that. The people here were not interested, really. They cried out because they didn't like getting their food stolen from them, or whatever situation they were in, but they weren't really interested in being saved as much as being that problem, or that frowning providence taken away from them. He loves us too much for letting us stay within our sin. The Lord sees us as we really are. bruised, almost broken, smoldering wick, almost extinguished. And we thank the Lord that it is not us but Christ in us. We thank the Lord that we walk by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us. So what we should gather out of this is that if this is Christ's response, is the Son's response to Gideon's request, we ought to be patient with other believers as well, and with ourselves. We should encourage them, certainly, but we should be patient with people. And, you know, knowing that he's like this, if you're not a believer, I don't understand why you're not. You know, have you ever met a man like that? Be so gracious to us. Well, that's the end of the sermon. However, I have three more things to talk about, because we can't leave this passage without addressing some other issues. Gideon's test has some other significance beyond which we would obviously see. And some of you may have thought about this, maybe not. But the fall of the sons of Jacob, the whole story of judges, this fall that they had from into idolatry was not, again, not a total abandonment of Jehovah. They were trying to do both. Jehovah's the big god, and we have these small local gods. So, they would call on Yahweh for protection, say, against another nation, perhaps, or something like that, that might attack them. But they'd call about the gods of the local people that they lived around. They let those people, and they married into these families, these pagan families that worship Baal. They did all the things they weren't supposed to do, and therefore they would appropriate them as their god as well, because Baal was the local god of the storm, the rainstorm. His girlfriend was Asherah, so he would, you know, he'd bring the rain, she'd bring the fertility as far as plants and the animals having babies and what not. So they worshipped those as well. And we know that Gideon's father had a bale altar on his property. So when Gideon asked that the fleece be wet with dew and the ground dry, he was asking for a direct challenge to bale's authority. Bale's the one that brings the rain, right? Well, now Jehovah brought the rain. Oh, OK. And then the reverse. Well, that might have been just a coincidence. But then the reverse came about. Well, now everything else is going to be wet. Who did that? Bale or Jehovah? No, I asked Jehovah to do it. Jehovah did this. So it was a direct challenge to bail. And something to think about, too, is the scripture doesn't say, so maybe I'm using too much imagination, but it's possible that other people were witnessing this particular miracle. At least the people in his household would have known what's going on. And that would be sort of characteristic of Elijah's contest with the 450 prophets. It was a very public thing. It wasn't a private thing. So it's possible Take what you want of that, but it's possible the sign of the fleece was not just for Gideon, but it might have been for others in the area. So this was the proof that Baal was impotent and Jehovah was omnipotent. The second thing we want to consider is that testing a lord is prohibited, right? So this comes to another one of these areas where We see a description of something that's happened, but it's not something that we would go, oh, let's all do that. Let's all put fleeces out and ask the Lord. No, it's prohibited in Deuteronomy 6, 16. It says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massa. Now, this kind of a test that was at Massa, well, actually, In Deuteronomy chapter 9, Moses accused the people by reminding of this to happen, and he says, you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You neither believed him nor listened to his voice. You have been rebellious against the Lord from the day I knew you. So this kind of a test is not like this kind of test. The kind of test that's prohibited is the kind of test that has no faith. And that's what they were doing in Massah and other times in the wilderness. The people were rebelling against the command of the Lord. They were saying, is the Lord among us or not? That kind of test is prohibited during the scripture. But unbelief is different than weak faith. We all have relatively weak faith. I get that. Some more than others. The Lord is gracious. But the Lord also said that one who has faith like a mustard seed could do what? Move mountains. So the opposite of the testing in unbelief is the kind of testing we find the psalmist talking about when he says, taste and see if the Lord is good. That's the kind of testing that is approved, I think. It's like, come and hear the words of the Lord and test them to see if they're true. But that's only done experientially, that's only done in long-term consumption of the word, whether it's preached or reading, it's not something you just Well, it's not the foxhole kind of test, right? If I don't die, I'll build an orphanage for you. That's not the kind of faith we're talking about. Not the kind of a test that would be approved. One of the commenters said that it's proof by experience. When we remember in thankfulness what the Lord has done. And that's sort of the point, part of the point of the Old Testament is that we look at what the Lord has done and we have proof. That is the test. We look at the Testaments and we say, oh, here's what the Lord has done. Yeah, he's always been the same. He's faithful. He will remain that way. Faithless testings are often found in the day of trial. And often by people who have not prepared themselves in advance for those kind of trials, One of the things we're asking people to do is, and it's biblical, we should regularly attend the public worship. We should regularly attend public worship because a constant intake, weekly intake of the word of God is what builds us up so that we're prepared for the trials, right? To wait for the trial and then show up and say, I need help. Now you're being foolish because the food's been prepared for you. and you're not willing to consume it until you need it, that's not wise. The Israelites listened to one of the greatest preachers for 40 years, yet the first day, from the first day, Moses said, from the first day they were rebellious. Most people today listen to two sermons per year and then have the audacity to pray to the Lord for a sign to show them the way out of a difficult situation. What in the world? It's sad. But I'm just like that, though. You know what I mean? It's a struggle. I understand. We all have very weak faith. Okay, a couple more things. The dangers of testing the Lord to determine His will for our life. The danger of that is that you're not relying or trusting in the sufficiency of the Word. And that's a bad place for a believer to be, if you can't trust what the Word says. would destroy the underpinnings of understanding the character of God. Is he capricious or does he lie? Is he powerful enough to save? Does he want to save us? Those are the things we have to trust the word for saying, for telling us and revealing to us. And again, all through Judges, that's what the message is. And putting some test before the Lord also exposes us to the fact that our minds are What's the word? Deceitful of all things. We can convince ourselves of all kinds of contrary biblical interpretation of providence. God's his own interpreter. We are very poor interpreters. And often, almost always, we can't see the end of things. So the charge here is to search the scriptures among a fellowship of believers in a biblical church. It's the same old message and I'm speaking to the choir, I know. Since we're talking about the will of God, just a really little short ending here. Let's look at 1 Thessalonians 4. 1 through 8, 1 Thessalonians 4. Finally, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus that you receive from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, and that you excel still more. For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification. That is, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God. And that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the manner because the Lord is the avenger of all these things, just as we have told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. That's the will of God. Pretty simple. But you need to be in the Word, consistent intake of the Word, meeting together because part of receiving the Word is also the fellowship of the saints together, and the iron sharpened iron factor there. So if you have not fled to Christ, come to Christ. We don't wait for our emotions or for any imagined fitness. before bowing to Christ as great king. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you do not love us according to the size of our faith. Your loving kindness to us, to your people, is everlasting. Yet, we do ask for an increase in our faith. Make us as interested in our own sanctification as you are. Help us to hunger for your word and for righteousness. We are thankful again for your mercy to us and we pray that you would continue and not abandon us to our sin. We know that you won't. It's a lesson that we learn from judges. Pray to be with us this week as we go off on our different ways. I pray that you bring us back again safely here. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.