Rising Up, Not Hunkering Down

Sometimes, because of life circumstances outside our control and a little bit of brokenness, we will start doing something that makes no sense. And then we do the thing that makes no sense for so long that the things that make sense don’t make sense—because we have been doing the thing that makes no sense for so long that it seems normal. Make sense?

For Gideon, the “thing that made no sense” was threshing wheat in a winepress. His story is found in the book of Judges in the Bible. When you hear people talk about him, it’s usually only about how he laid out the fleeces to test if God’s declarations were for real. At a time when there wasn’t much good to talk about, Gideon became known as a hero, a mighty warrior. But before all that, he was threshing wheat in a winepress.

Most of us probably know little about the ancient techniques for making bread and wine. But we wouldn’t be surprised to know that wheat had to be threshed and grapes had to be pressed. And, even with our limited knowledge of three-thousand-year-old Middle Eastern agricultural practices, we can easily surmise that wheat was not supposed to be threshed where grapes were pressed. A winepress is for making wine. A threshing floor is where the process of separating wheat happens.

Gideon was threshing the wheat in the winepress.

Why?

He was hiding out. He was lying low. He was hunkering down. Gideon lived in a time when his people, the Israelites, were an oppressed people. They were under seven-year oppression by the Midianites. Not only that, but the people of God had taken on the idols and begun to worship the gods of the other people groups in the new land. They forgot God, they forgot his ways, they forgot his commands.

The people of God in Gideon’s day were living in the actual, bona fide, without-a-doubt promised land, and they stopped listening to God. God reminded them, “I delivered you from Egypt. I freed you from a life of slavery. I rescued you from oppressors. I pushed them out of your way and gave you their land.”

Here’s his message in Judges 6: “I said to you, ‘I am GOD, your God. Don’t for a minute be afraid of the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.’ But you didn’t listen to me “(vv. 8–10 MSG).

They stopped listening to God, and that’s all it took for them to think that god over there looks good. And that god offered some good things to them culturally in that time. But not the real thing. They stopped listening to God, and then, all of a sudden, they didn’t farm their own land, they didn’t live in their homes anymore, and just to get bread, they crawled down in holes that weren’t made to thresh wheat. That’s how it works for us. When we stop listening to God, we think that god over there looks good. And the moment we do that, we are settling.

When we stop living totally dependent on God and start depending on other gods, we get really afraid. When we have fear in our lives, we should ask, What am I dependent on? Whether that god is your job or your kid, any other god leads to a life of fear. We live in fear because nothing else can deliver what the real thing can. We start hiding instead of thriving, and that is settling.

Most of the time we don’t know we are settling and once you see that you are settling, it is hard to forget that you are.

It will feel uncomfortable at first. We will feel much discomfort when we realize it makes no sense to be in the hole we are living in while God is calling us out. Imitation of life can be comfortable. It won’t be easy to just step out. At first, we will probably remind ourselves, and maybe even God, why we can’t stop living this way. But we can’t let the initial discomfort dissuade us from rising up.

As we begin to rise up out of holes we’ve hunkered in for a long time, we are going to see clearly some truths that we won’t be able to easily unsee. I hope it is hard for us to forget. I hope when we get lost in our phones instead of dancing with our kids, we remember. I hope when we are so tired because we’ve worked and worked and worked instead of resting in spacious places, our spirits are troubled. I hope that once we see these areas where we have settled, it will break us, break us open, to where we can’t get it out of our minds that God is promising us more.

Believe him. Believe that your God, who created you, knows the real you.

Gideon did not consider himself great. Gideon did not consider himself tough. Gideon was hiding. He was hunkered down in a cave trying to make bread in a place made to make wine. He had one eye on his work and one eye on the Midianites. God said to him, “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”

Hear it. “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”

When we hear it, we resolve to rise up. We are done settling. If God says we are mighty, we’re going with God. The way God got his people back to the real thing was by telling them they were mighty warriors before they were really mighty warriors. Maybe it will work for us too.

Say it: “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”

This devotional by HarperCollins/Zondervan/Thomas Nelson is available at Bible.com.