Stinking Thinking

¹¹ Then the Lord’s messenger came and sat under the oak at Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite. His son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from the Midianites. ¹² The Lord’s messenger appeared to him and said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior!”

¹³ But Gideon replied to him, “With all due respect, my Lord, if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his amazing works that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, ‘Didn’t the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and allowed Midian to overpower us.”

¹⁴ Then the Lord turned to him and said, “You have strength, so go and rescue Israel from the power of Midian. Am I not personally sending you?”

¹⁵ But again Gideon said to him, “With all due respect, my Lord, how can I rescue Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I’m the youngest in my household.”

---Judges 6:11-15

Many of us get to the place where we are tired of things the way they are, but we don’t have any other options. Someone asks us why we are doing what we are doing and we tell them, “I don’t have any choice,” or “I have to do it!”  If so, then we have become victims of an assailant that attacks millions of people every day.  It is the same person who conquered Gideon in the scripture above.

Gideon knew the truth in the world; he had seen it every day in his life.  A foreign nation had power over Israel.  They were taking their food and resources.  Obviously, God must have abandoned them.  ‘Not having any other choice’ Gideon was threshing wheat in the winepress. Why? Who would think to look for grain where you would process grapes?  He was hiding from those who had taken over.  Gideon had found a way to deal with the new normal in Israel; it was just the way things were.

 

The messenger of God spoke to him and tried to explain that God was actually getting ready to set the people free and that Gideon would lead them.  He looked around, saw the reality of his world, and stated firmly “with all due respect,” that isn’t true. He was so certain of God’s abandonment that it was an indisputable fact.  The messenger responds that God is actually going to use Gideon.  Again, he just doesn’t see how that could be possible.  Most of Gideon’s story as judge is a demonstration of just how much our thinking can impact our ability to see the ways in which God is choosing to work in the world.

In The Deep Change Field Guide, Robert Quinn says it this way, “When we accept the world as it is, we deny our innate ability to see something better, and hence our ability to be something better.” Our perception helps to form the reality in the world around us as we use our assumptions to interact with others. 

But there is always the possibility to see something better.  Even in the worst of times, there is hope. The Apostle Paul saw it when he wrote to the church in Rome and said,

“But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

Our thinking is powerful.  God does not want our thoughts stuck in the same ruts in which the rest of the world spins.  Instead God challenges “don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.” (Romans 12:2)

Let’s let go of our bad assumptions, give up our stinking thinking, and allow God to do a new thing in our families, in our churches, and in our communities!

Grace and Peace,