This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish (Agar/Gettysburg/Onida) on Sunday, January 17, 2016.  The Bible verses used are Judges 7:1-21.

We’re in the third week of our sermon series, “Dream On”, looking at dreams and dreamers in the Bible. Our goal in doing this is to see how that can help us pursue dreams for ourselves and for the church. Today, we take a look at the story of Gideon.

At this time, Israel was under the control of a nation called Midian.  God chose Gideon to be the one who’d lead Israel to fight the people of Midian, who were known as the Midianites, and drive them out of Israel.

Now, Gideon was kind of skeptical about this, as a lot of people God calls are.  He put God to a couple of tests to make sure he had the story right. Then he’s finally convinced, and he gets an army together to fight the Midianites.  That’s where our reading for today picked up the story.

Gideon and his army are ready to go and fight, but God says, wait a minute.  This is not going to work.  I don’t want you to do it this way.  You’ve got too many people.  If you win this way, you’ll think you did it yourselves instead of realizing that I did it.  And God tells Gideon to send some of them home.  Specifically, God says that Gideon should tell his army that anyone who’s scared should leave.

And they do.  Over two-thirds of them leave.  Gideon’s army, which started with thirty-two thousand men, is down to ten thousand.

So once again, Gideon and what’s left of his army are ready to go.  And God again says, wait a minute.  This is still not going to work.  You’ve still got too many people.  You’ll still think you won this battle yourselves if I let you keep this big of an army.  And God tells Gideon to take the army down to the water to drink.  Anyone who scooped up the water in their hands would stay back, and only those who lapped the water with their tongues would go to fight.

Now, I don’t know, but as I think about that, I think that if I was to try to get a drink of water from a river or a creek or a lake or something, I don’t think it would even occur to me to lap the water up with my tongue.  And it did not occur to very many of Gideon’s army, either.  Out of the ten thousand men in Gideon’s army, only about three hundred, about three percent, lapped up the water with their tongues.  And God told Gideon to take those three hundred and go beat the Midianites with them.

Imagine how Gideon felt here.  He’d started out with this huge army, and now he was down to this little band of warriors.  He was scared.  So God sent Gideon and his servant down to the Midianite camp.  And just as Gideon gets there, he overhears one Midianite telling another a dream he’s had.  And the dream is one that says God is going to give Gideon victory over the Midianites.  And of course, that’s exactly what happens.

So what do we learn from this dream?  For that matter, what do we learn from this whole scenario?

We’ve talked in previous weeks about how what we’re looking for here is not our own personal dream for ourselves or for our church.  What we’re looking for is God’s dream for ourselves and for our church.  But when we find God’s dream, we need to let that dream be fulfilled in God’s way.  We’ll have a role to play, certainly.  But we need to play that role in God’s way and at God’s time.  And a lot of times, God’s way and God’s time are quite a bit different from what we think the way and the time should be.

Gideon thought the way to do follow God’s dream, the way to defeat the Midianites, was to build the biggest army he could get.  And to you and me, that would make perfect sense, right?  I mean, I’m not promoting going to war, but if we decide to do it, I think we’d all want to have the biggest and best military force we could get.  We’d want to go in with overwhelming force if we could.  We’d want to go in with shock and awe.

That’s what Gideon wanted.  But that’s not what God wanted.  Because God wanted Gideon and all the people to know who was going to be responsible for this dream coming true.  It was not Gideon.  It was not the people of Israel.  It was God.  They would defeat the Midianites because of what God did, not because of what they, themselves, did.

That’s an important lesson for us.  Have you ever noticed how quick we are to blame God when things go wrong and how quick we are to either take it for granted or credit ourselves when things go right?  When there’s a tragedy, when there’s a disaster, when things go wrong that don’t seem to be our fault, what do we always hear?  “Why would God let something like that happen?”  But when things go well, when we get a good break that we did not deserve, how often do we say, “Why would God do that for me?”  Not very often.

I’m guessing that for every person here, God has given us all kinds of good breaks that we did not deserve.  For one thing, I was born in the United States of America.  You probably were, too.  That’s a huge break right there.  I was born in rural South Dakota.  A lot of you probably were, too.  I think that’s a huge break.  I was born into a family that was not rich, but was certainly not impoverished, either.  I’ve never had a day where I worried about having enough to eat that day or having a warm place to sleep that night.  I suspect that’s true of most of us.  I was born into a loving family.  Some of you may not have been, but I suspect many of you were.  I was not born with any physical or mental impairment.  Again, that may not be true of all of us, but it’s true for the majority of us.

That’s just the very beginning of the list of good breaks God has given me.  I had nothing to do with any of them.  I did not cause them.  I did nothing to deserve them.  Most of us here probably had most of those same good breaks from God, things we did nothing to earn or deserve.  And of course, we’ve had a lot more throughout or lives.

Everything positive we’ve ever accomplished, really, is the result of good breaks we’ve gotten from God.  And yet, most of the time, we don’t even think about that.  We may pay lip service to it, once in a while, but most of the time, we give ourselves credit, right?  I do, a lot of times.  When someone gives me a compliment, I don’t usually respond by giving God the credit.  I don’t know a lot of people who do.  We’ll give God the blame when things go wrong, but we want the credit when things go right.

It’s a rare thing, and in fact it’s probably an impossible thing, for us to make God’s dreams come true by our own efforts.  Now again, we have a role to play.  Gideon did, eventually, go attack the Midianite camp at the time God told him to and with his three hundred men that God left for him.  But everyone knew there was no way those three hundred guys, on their own, could’ve defeated the entire Midianite army.  They knew Gideon had won because God was with him.

And that’s how we’ll achieve God’s dreams for ourselves and for our church.  We’ll achieve them because God is with us.  Or we won’t achieve them, because we’ll try to do it all ourselves.  Again, we have a role to play.  But we’re not going to accomplish God’s dreams for ourselves or for our church by our own greatness, any more than Gideon could’ve overwhelmed the Midianite army with three hundred men.  We’ll only accomplish them at God’s time and in God’s way.

There’s one other thing to note about this story.  We talked last week, in the story of Joseph, about not being afraid of a big dream if it comes from God.  The thing is, though, that a certain amount of fear in a situation like this is normal.  It’s how we respond to that fear that makes the difference.
Who were the first people who left Gideon’s army?  The ones who were scared.  The ones who were afraid.  They were afraid that things would go wrong, that they could not do it.  And notice, God does not criticize those people.  Neither does Gideon.  Nobody says that they’ve disobeyed God or that they lacked faith or anything.  What they felt seems to be accepted as a normal and natural thing to feel in that situation.

But while Gideon did not criticize those people, he did go ahead without them.  See, Gideon was scared, too.  He was especially scared when God cut the army down to three hundred.  That’s why God sent him to the Midianite camp and gave the Midianite the dream that Gideon was going to win.
Gideon was afraid, but he still trusted God.  Gideon did not let his fear keep him from following God and doing what he was supposed to do to make God’s dream come true.  And he did not let the other people who were afraid prevent him from following God and doing what he was supposed to do to make God’s dream come true.  And neither should we.

God has a dream for you.  God has a dream for me.  God has a dream for this church.  It will come true in God’s way and at God’s time.  It will come true because God made it come true.  We’ll have a role to play, but if we try to force it, if we try to do it in our way and at our time, it won’t work.  If we simply trust God, do our best, and let God handle the rest of it, we’ll see incredible things happen.  And when they do, we and everyone else will know that all the credit goes to God.