Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Danger of Success | Judges | Judges 8:22-35

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're going through the Book of Judges. Hey, Patrick and I are starting a new podcast. It's called Truth Over Tribe, where we talk about cultural and political issues from a Christian point of view. If you're interested, subscribe to Truth Over Tribe on your podcast player, so you won't miss any of the episodes.

Starting point is 00:00:31 I want to start today by asking you a question that I've been asking a lot of people lately. I love good questions because they get me to think deeper about my life or they get me to think about life in a new way. So here's my question for you. How much of your professional success is due to your hard work and good choices and how much is due to luck? I'm not talking here about your relational successes or even your emotional or physical health. health, I'm just thinking of your professional and educational success. How much is due to hard work and how much is due to lock? When I've asked people this question, I've gotten a wide range of responses, but most people probably come down somewhere near 50-50, recognizing that some things

Starting point is 00:01:19 that have happened to them are outside of their control, and yet they had to work really hard to get where they are in life. It's not uncommon for someone to say maybe 70-30, one direction or another. Every once in a while, someone will say 90-10 hard work or 90-10 luck. Now, another way to ask the question is how much of your professional success comes from things in your control versus outside of your control. Of course, those things outside of your control are what we are referring to as luck. But I say luck in the question because I know that a lot of us, just kind of are repulsed by that word. It's hard for us to say that we were lucky. We like to play up how hard we worked or

Starting point is 00:02:05 how smart we were. It's hard for us to say, I got where I am in a lot of ways just because I was luckier than most people. Now, I know that luck is not a word that Christians usually use to describe their life. We recognize that everything is under God's control. And yet, I think we are familiar enough with the word and the idea that we get the point. Now, there's not really a right or wrong answer to this question. We can't turn to sociological research, or we can't even really turn to the Bible and say, hey, in this chapter and verse, this is the answer to this question. A certain percentage is based on what you do and a certain percentage of your success is based on things outside of your control. There's no divine answer. So instead of arguing about who is right or who is

Starting point is 00:02:54 wrong or which answer is closer to the truth, what if we just asked how different answers play out in our life? I think the more successful you are, and the more you attribute that success to things under your control, such as hard work and wise choices, the more likely you are to fall prey to the danger of success. Did you know that success can be dangerous? Success threatens our soul in a way that failure doesn't, because success has a way of telling us that we are in control of our life, that we can fulfill ourselves, fulfill our desires, that other people, well, they're not as good as us. They're not as wise, smart, and hardworking as we are. Remember when the Lord found Gideon, he was threshing wheat, and God told him he was going to be a mighty warrior who delivered Israel

Starting point is 00:03:49 from their enemy, the Midianites. And remember how Gideon responded? He was full of self-doubt. He was like, who am I? You're not going to use me, right? I'm a nobody. But now by chapter 8, he has all the trappings of a king, including great wealth and many wives. Gideon even has named his son Abimelech, which means my father is king.

Starting point is 00:04:19 So Gideon is starting to fall prey to the dangers of success. He went from a guy who is doubting himself to a guy who is full of himself. And all that's happened is that he has had some success in life. But Gideon should know, just like you and I should know, that all that success has come from God. Judges chapter 8, verse 22, the Israelites say to Gideon, rule over us, you, your son, your grandson, because you have saved us from the hand of Midian. So the Israelites are offering Gideon a family dynasty.

Starting point is 00:04:59 We want you to rule over us, and then your son and your grandson. And they're really clear why they're offering this to him. It's because they say that Gideon has saved them from the Midianites who were oppressing them. Verse 23, Gideon told them, I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. the Lord will rule over you. Now, that sounds like the right answer, doesn't it? It sounds like Gideon is saying, look, God is the king. I don't want all the privileges that come with being a king. It sounds like Gideon is fighting the dangers of success here. But I don't think that's right. We see in this chapter that Gideon is getting really wealthy. He has all these wives. He's starting to accumulate

Starting point is 00:05:46 power to himself? What's clear is that Gideon knows the right answer intellectually. He knows he should stay humble. He knows he should attribute all of his success to God and his grace. But here's the problem. What he knows intellectually has not grabbed his heart. Because in the very next verse, he begins to accumulate even more power and wealth. There's this disconnect between his head and his heart. I heard someone say once that the longest distance in the world is between our head and our heart. Isn't that true? I mean, aren't there so many areas of your life that you know what to do? You know the right thing to do. You just don't actually do it. Maybe it has to do with your health, or maybe it has to do with saving money, or maybe it has to do with how you talk to your spouse or your kids, or maybe it has to do with

Starting point is 00:06:44 what you know God wants you to do in your life as far as being in community or reading your Bible or serving in the church. You know what to do. It's not a knowledge problem. It's an obedience problem. It's a heart problem. So that's the same problem that Gideon is facing. He knows what to do, but he's not actually doing it. He knows he shouldn't take this role as king. Like he's already said, God is the king. And yet what does Gideon do? He begins to act like the king. He acts independently of God. He acts like he is the author of his own success. One way he does this is he takes the gold that the people have given him and he makes it into an ephod. Let's read verse 27 and then I'll explain what an Ephod is. Gideon made the gold into an ephod, which he placed in his hometown. All Israel prostituted themselves

Starting point is 00:07:44 by worshipping it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and his family. All right, so what's an Ephod? Well, an Ephod was the garment worn by the high priest in the tabernacle. It was kind of like a robe, and on the front of the robe were two stones called the Urim and Thumum. Those are hard words to say. I think I got them right. The Israelites use these two stones to determine the will of God. Ordinarily, the Ephod would be kept with the high priest wherever the tabernacle was located. But what Gideon has done is he's made his own Ephod out of the gold that the people gave him. So Gideon is essentially setting up his own hometown as a rival place for worship. He's saying, you don't need to go to the tabernacle anymore. You can come to me.

Starting point is 00:08:35 me. You don't need God's guidance from the Umum and Thumumum in connection with the high priest. You can come to me for divine guidance. Gideon is using God. He's using religion to consolidate his own position and to accumulate more power. And the effect that this has on the people is they prostitute themselves by worshipping there. So here Gideon was raised up by God to deliver God's people from the Midianites. But even more importantly than that, he was supposed to turn their heart away from sin and toward God. But Gideon is leading them into further sin. So we're told that the Israelites had 40 years of peace under Gideon, but it's the kind of peace that is compromised. It is peace without worship, peace without obedience.

Starting point is 00:09:35 It's not going to last long. Now let's go back to these two stones that were on the Ephod, the Urim and the Thumum. These were designed to help the people of God know God's will. Remember, they don't have a Bible at this time. When Gideon creates his own Ephod, his own Yuram and Thumum, what he's doing is he's making himself into a channel of God's direct guidance. Instead of relying on the means that God has set up, he and the Israelites are now creating another way of doing it, another way of finding God's will.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Now, we don't have Ephods, we don't have high priests or tabernacles, and yet sometimes I think that we fall into the same trap. In that, we try to find alternate ways to have spiritual experiences, alternate ways of finding God's will for our life. We have a hard time trusting God's provision. God gives us the Bible, and he gives us the Holy Spirit to guide us. And yet, we want something even more than that, something more direct. We want someone to tell us exactly what God wants for us. We want to hear God himself speak to us.

Starting point is 00:11:02 And if possible, we'd love that to even be audibly. God gives us means to follow him, but we ignore them and create our own ways to follow him. And it even goes beyond finding God's will. I mean, think about the basic things that God has put in our life that he calls essential. for the Christian life. He says we need community, other Christians in our life. He says that we need to take part in something like communion, that that's a really important part of our faith. But we find justifications of why we really don't need community, why we really don't need to be in our Bible, why we really don't need communion. We diminish the importance of all the things that God has set in

Starting point is 00:11:52 place to help us grow in our faith. There's a couple things we can learn from Gideon. First, the danger of success. Be careful that we don't think that our success is due to our hard work and our smarts. We have been blessed beyond measure. All the good things we have in life, they come from God. And second, let's don't fall into the trap that Gideon did and diminish the things that God has given us to follow him and instead create our own ephods, our own ways of

Starting point is 00:12:30 doing the Christian life. We don't get to define our faith. We don't get to define what it means to be a Christian. We don't get to define what it means to follow Jesus and how we follow Jesus. That's God's job. Maybe the things that God has established, communion, worship services, community, small groups, Bible study. Maybe those things get old. Maybe those things get boring. Maybe we want to try something new and different. But when we do that, we are justifying something to ourselves that isn't good for us. It's not good for us spiritually. The old things, the tried and true things, the things that God has established. That's where we need to walk. Those are the things that we need to hold on to. God is in them. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Danger of Success | Judges | Judges 8:22-35

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