Discovering Jesus

First of all, we apologize for the abysmal audio quality, something was wrong with the calibration of our sound system. Next time it should be a lot better. Anyway, this week we learn the answer the the question that the author of Judges has been leading us to this whole time: Why has everything gone so terribly wrong and why are all the deliverers so awful and incompetent? The answer, it turns out, presents a large challenge for the modern church that asks us whether we want to be dead weight dragging the church down or working with the Holy Spirit to move the church forward.

This week we look at the infamous story of Samson and Delilah, why they may not be as terrible as we think, and what their misadventures have to teach us about the state of churches in North America.

This week we take a look at the first half of the story of Samson, a compromised man who has rejected God's call on his life. We learn how his life holds great warning for those of us who also refuse to give up our compromises with sin and ignorance of God's will.

This week we take a look at the origin story of the most powerful and worst deliverer in the book of Judges: Samson. Samson was called to deliver Israel, and though he took a long, painful, hedonistic road to get there, he couldn't escape his calling. And neither can we.

The story of Jephthah piercingly outlines Israel's spiral into decrepitude. Jephthah is a man that does not respect God, listen to him, or know him. This week we will see how all these things add up to Jephthah being completely antithetical to God's purposes for Israel, and in his efforts to make a name for himself, how he completely and foolishly removes his name from Israel. We will then learn how this unfortunate and sad story can inspire us to hold to our membership in the body of Christ with even greater conviction and why it is so important that we not give up being part of the church.

Abimelech was Gideon's son with a concubine, and that meant Abimelech was not heir to Gideon's throne like his other seventy brothers. So Abimelech decides to do something about that, namely, slaughter his family. This week we look at the consequences of his actions and what we can learn, ironically, about the love of God from the carnage that ensues.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." This is the quote that best sums up the story of Gideon. Often when Gideon's story is told it ends right after the miraculous defeat of the Midianite army, thus extracting a moral along the lines of "If you have faith, God will defeat your problems," or "It is okay to test God to receive a sign." The problem with these moralizations is that they oversimplify the biblical narrative and completely ignore the latter half of Gideon's story. This week we look at how Gideon, once he got a taste of victory, turns his holy calling into a revenge mission and completely destroys everything God called him to do, eventually stealing the throne from God and leading the people he was supposed to save back into apostasy. We will then look at how this story can bring us, not a simple moral on how to manipulate God with our prayers, but a deep insight into why God chooses to work within human history and why the Bible takes on a narrative form.

The story of Gideon is often moralized into a lesson about how we should have faith like Gideon, even if we falter sometimes. This week we learn that that isn't really the point of the story at all. Instead, the story points toward the faithfulness of God, the coming Kingdom of God and, as always, Jesus Christ. The story of Gideon is actually a plea for us to repent and get ready for the imminent kingdom. Along the way, we explore just why the Israelites started worshiping the foreign Canaanite gods, how Gideon "circumcised" his household, and what else was going on in the world at this time in history.

Often the stories in the book of Judges are moralized and allegorized to fit our modern Christian lives. Today we look at how the characters and stories within defy and resist that trend and how the book of Judges points ultimately toward the faithfulness of God, but in a way that is different, more challenging, and possibly more formidable than we may have previously thought. And ultimately, we will see how these two sides of God's faithfulness are embodied in Jesus Christ on the cross. Gods' faithfulness, and the cross, are a double-edged sword.

A sermon on the double-edged sword of God's faithfulness.