Revolution Begins with Reform at the Home Office

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Judges 6:25–26 (NIV) That same night the LORD said to him, “Take the second bull from your father’s herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Then build a proper kind of altar to the LORD your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering.” CONSIDER Reviewing our words of encouragement from the story of Gideon so far: 1. God chooses the unlikely to accomplish the impossible. 2. A change of life only begins with a change of heart. Today we come to yet a third encouraging word—or at least it is a word that requires encouragement to undertake. Yet before that, let’s once again revisit our working definition of biblical encouragement: To encourage in the biblical sense of the term is to stand in the stead and agency of Jesus, participating in the work of the Holy Spirit, to minister grace to human beings at the level of their inner person, communicating, conveying, and imparting life, love, courage, comfort, consolation, joy, peace, hope, faith, and other dispensations and manifestations of the kingdom of heaven as the moment invites or requires. Now to the challenging encouragement from today’s text: 3. Revolution begins with reform at the home office. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal . . . Whatever Gideon was hoping he might hear from God, I can assure you it was not this. It reminds me of that time as a kid when my best friend took it upon himself to throw away an entire carton of his father’s cigarettes. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Here’s how I imagine Gideon’s initial response went: “Come on, Lord. We made peace. Remember our altar moments? You and me are back now. Things are good. Cozy even. Can we just work on having some better devotional times together? Why do you have to take it here so all of a sudden? This is not what I signed on for.” And that’s the problem, isn’t it? We want God to comfort us in our problematic life. We want him to bring the cozy into our chaos, to hold our hand, to make it better. In this frame, faith becomes more escape than engagement. We must remember verse 4 and what drove us to our knees to begin with: “They [the Midianites, Amalekites, and other eastern peoples] camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys.” Even worse is verse 2, which reminds us how we allowed ourselves to deal with such oppression: “Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds.” There is only one reason the people of God find themselves exiled in their own home. It’s because their home has become compromised through allegiances and alliances with other gods, false teaching, counterfeit gospels, and idolatrous ideologies. The problem is not out there in the culture. That’s the symptom. The problem is in here. After all, it is the very first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). Revolution begins with reform in the home office. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. This takes enormous courage. There is perhaps no more essential encouragement that we need to receive and to give to others than this. Revolution begins with reform in the home office: “For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household” (1 Peter 4:17a). PRAY Father, let the revolution of awakening begin with reform in our hearts and at our home offices. Where have we compromised our allegiance to your sovereignty by some alliance with a lesser god, some other solution that promises comfort or prosperity? Is it money or some other addiction that has trapped us and made us exiles in our own homes? So we continue to pray, Lord Jesus, send your Spirit to search us and know our hearts. Test us and know our anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in us, and lead us in the way everlasting. In Jesus’s name, amen.