Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When 'Find My God' Fails | Historical Books | Judges 6:11-35

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Do you have a fear of missing out? Do you try to use a 'Find My God' app? Will God give us answers? In today's episode, Jeff shares how Judges 6:11-35 reminds us of the good news that God gave more than answers; he gave himself. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Judges 6:11-35

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. All right, confession time. I am terrible at keeping track of and taking care of my phone. This is no exaggeration. As a part of my track record, I've lost a phone by leaving on top of our family van only for it to be accidentally dropped off near a city park while we're driving. I've even lost a phone in one of the most of the most of the most of the phone. most confined places you can imagine. Inside a gondola on the side of the mountain in Colorado. No kidding. That phone was trapped on the gondola for six months before it was found by their staff. It's a story for another day, but needless to say, I have a problem when it comes to

finding things. That's why it was really good news for me when Apple released the Find My iPhone app about 15 years ago. And while that app didn't necessarily help me locate and recover the van phone or the gondola phone, it does help me with the more mundane phone rescue missions. A couple of years after releasing, Find My iPhone, Apple unveiled the Find My Friends app to help people keep track of their friends and their kids. Then in 2019, Apple shifted to the more all-encompassing Find My app, where you can find pretty much anything or anyone that gives you access. As the years have progressed, the Find My app has become a fixture in friend groups, couples, and for families. It's almost like a badge of inclusion into a community group. And of course, there are many benefits

to having this kind of visibility and access into the whereabouts of our loved ones. But at the same time, there's another side to the coin of the access that the Find My app gives us. Back in 2022, Callie Huang wrote a piece for the New York Times describing the gift, that the Find My App can be for many relationships, but she also described the cost of it as well. Her article details how a pervasive fear of missing out is sometimes amplified by an awareness of where people are without you. One researcher described the effect on some people as troubling and emotionally difficult. Because even if you can generally tell where people are, you can't always tell what they're doing or why they're doing. Or why they're

doing it. In this strange way, this general sense of awareness can actually fuel a greater sense of anxiety. That desire for access and for visibility, it makes me rethink what I believe about God's presence in my life. I mean, if we're honest, a lot of us wish that we could just have a kind of Find My God app. If we could just know where he is, if we could just track his movements in his presence with precision, then maybe the life of faith would be more manageable. I mean, wouldn't it make things easier if we could just keep track of God? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Because just as the Find My app can't tell you exactly where people are or what they're doing or why they're doing it, a Find My God app, a perspective of the creator of all things like that,

it would probably leave us with just as many questions as answers. The passage that we encounter today in Judges 6 will center on these questions about God's location and God's activity. Where is God? And what on earth is he doing wherever he is? And thankfully, the answer to these questions will be both different and better than we tend to expect. And as we get ready to approach God's word together, let's just, as usual, pause and ask for His grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath in this day. That is a gift from you by your grace. We thank you for that. We thank you for your word. And we bring before you all of the complex and yet real parts of our lives,

our joys and our sorrows, our anxieties, our excitement, our calendars, and our contingencies. Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth here and now. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move through this time in judges. And as we read these words, by your grace, would you let these words read us and restore us in Jesus' name? Amen. Okay, let's get some context going into our text for the day, because that always matters. In the first 10 verses of Judges 6, we learned that Israel is oppressed by the nation of Midian because of their unrelenting refusal to love God and love other people. I mean, God's people, are continuing to spiral into further sin.

And into that reality of disorientation and difficulty with the Midianites approaching, we meet a new figure in judges named Gideon. Now, he's going about his business when the angel of the Lord appears to him and says, The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Now, Gideon responds to the angel of the Lord with a question that is oftentimes our question. It's the question we thought about earlier. Let's read this in verse 13. Pardon me, my Lord, Gideon replied, but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?

Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, did not the Lord bring us out of the land of Egypt? But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian. This is the central question as we get into the Gideon narrative of judges. Gideon and God's people, they want to know where is God really? I mean, you're saying that he's here, but it sure doesn't seem like he is. If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? I think all of us ask these questions in some way, shape, or form. Like, you might be somebody who's used to feeling like God is with you,

but now you feel like you're in a kind of spiritual desert because of doubt or suffering or pervasive sin struggle or maybe even just a nagging stagnation that makes God feel distant. Or you might be somebody who's not fully sure what you think of God right now. You don't consider yourself a follower of Jesus just yet, but there's a kind of potentiality of faith surfacing in your life. And it's causing you a lot of confusion or a lot of uncertainty. If I surrender my life to God, what's going to happen with my relationship?

with my career, with my sense of identity. Where exactly is God in my doubt, in my suffering, my sin, my stagnation? Where is God in the confusion and in the uncertainty? Not only where is he, but what is he doing? This is Gideon's question, and this is our question. In moments like this, it sure feels like we could use a Find My God app. But look at how God responds to the questions in Verse 14. The Lord turned to him and said, go and the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you? Now, notice how Gideon, he starts with wanting to know where God is, but God flips the script. He doesn't give Gideon an answer. He gives him a job. Go. Go. Am I not sending you? I mean, this is so counterintuitive to our expectations of modernity that demand airtight,

understandable answers. But God doesn't give Gideon or us a solution. God draws Gideon further into his story. And as the narrative goes on, we notice how Gideon objects to this invitation from God. He claims that his background, his own limitations, make him incapable of pressing into the story that God has. And we do this too, don't we? I mean, we find ways to dodge this invitation from God. And more often than not, we appeal to the very things that caused us to ask where God is in the beginning to make this protest. We protest with God suggesting that our suffering, our doubt,

our sin, our stagnation, all those things that they're too daunting. We let him know, which give him a heads up, that our confusion and our uncertainty should keep us out of the story. Now, here's the thing. There's a sense in which Gideon is exactly right. He cannot save Israel with his power. We can't go further up and further into God's story on our own power. But God's response to this objection gives Gideon and you and me a clarifying truth. In verse 16, the Lord answers, I will be with you. It's God's way of saying, yes, you are a lot of saying, yes, you are unfit to carry this out. But the question isn't how able are you. The question is, who is with you? If you've been through the book of Exodus, this narrative, this moment will remind you of the

conversation that God has with Moses when he asks Moses to save his people from oppression and slavery in Egypt. This is intentional. This is a pattern for God's work in people's lives. This is God's calling card. When he responds to our questions about his location and his activity, he gives us something bigger than an answer. He gives us himself. The problem with the Find My God app approach to life and faith is that it assumes that we hold God's presence in the palm of our hands. It assumes that we can and should see things from his perspective. It assumes that God is this little icon that we can follow or manipulate or master. This is not the God of the Bible. God's location and activity are not things for us to track, not things for us to manage.

They're things for us to surrender to. As Gideon's life story continues, we'll continue to see how he's a mixed bag, like all of us. But our introduction to him here focuses our attention on God's presence that draws him and draws us further into his purposes. And that theme will continue for Gideon. Near the end of the section we see in verse 34 how the spirit of the Lord clothed him while he prepared for battle. This is the good news for God's people and the good news for people like you and me. God gives us more than answers. He gives us himself. The question is not how able are you and The question is who is with us. Father, we thank you for your steadfast, constant presence with people like us, with people who are in process.

Jesus, we praise you for giving yourself in the most ultimate way when you died on a Roman cross. Spirit help us respond to your invitation to go further up and further into the story that you have for us. In Jesus' name, amen.