Well, hi y’all.
It’s a privilege to be able to be with you this morning and to be able to do what I love.
And that is to just share with you a little bit from the word of God, believe in the power of the word of God.
Anybody else, I believe it is gives us life.
And so it is my privilege to be able to serve you in this way.
I told the earlier service this and I will say it again that your ministry, your women’s ministry in particular through shine has been such a personal specific blessing to me the past seven years that I have been engaged in one form or another.
Um I have been a beneficiary of the ministry that has come out of this house.
And so to be able to just pour back into you in this small way this morning, really, really is a privilege and to have been able to hang out with the girls all weekend and shine that we had a lot of fun, didn’t we all?
We had some fun. God was here and I’m so excited now to be with you on this Sunday.
Morning, I want to say this as well.
I had the opportunity to already again say this at first service, but I want to say it again because I, I mean it um Jerry and I, my husband and I and our boys have the privilege to be in a lot of places to share God’s word and, and to serve.
And um you need to know that at this church, the leadership that God has given you and your pastors, but not only pastor Stovall and pastor carry, but the leadership team that God has given to shepherd this house.
You all the pastors and the leaders that God gives us in our lives.
At my home church, at your home church, these these people have given their lives to help to shape our souls.
They have given their lives to make sure that when we see Jesus face to face, we hear well done.
People are given their lives to do that.
And God at this church has given you all some great shepherds and I hope you never take that for granted.
And so it is a privilege of mine today to be able to serve under the authority and leadership of great folks like this.
It’s a privilege and it’s an honor. I want to pray for you, Lord Jesus.
Thank you so much for your word.
Thank you that it is living in sharper and active than any two edged sword.
I pray Lord in these few moments we will spend together that you will do what you do.
And that is take one message divided thousands of different ways so that every single person under the sound of my voice hears directly from you in jesus’ name, everybody says, Amen.
Amen. Um We have been so excited to be here over these three or four days that we’ve been here.
Not just my husband and I, but my boys are here as well.
I’ve got a 10 year old named Jackson, an eight year old named Jerry Jr and our little surprise one, his name is Jude.
He’s four years old. We don’t really know how he got here and I named him Jude because that is as close as I could get to revelation because it is finished.
So Jackson J C and Jud, they’re actually in the kid’s ministry.
I think they’re, they’re serving over there today. We all wanted to jump in where we could and serve.
So I think they’ve helped take up offering and pray over the offering and stuff over where your Children are.
So we all just love diving in together and my boys are little athletes.
They just like whatever is in season at the time, they want to play it right now.
It’s baseball and my second son is our one that really is engaged in baseball.
Now, you need to know about my, my Children.
My husband is not in here for me to introduce him to you. He’s in the back.
But Jerry is a, is a big guy.
He’s six ft three and just looks like a football player, you know, £250 or so.
And my boys are following suit. These little boys are giants.
My 10 year old is nearly as tall as me. He wears a size 10 men shoe already.
My eight year old looks like he’s probably 11 or so.
And so any time we go out on that Little League baseball field, the referees and all the officials that we always have to show a birth certificate because they don’t believe that our Children are the ages that they are and they already eat too much.
I am in big trouble, big trouble. And so my little boy is in baseball right now.
We love the beginning, the beginning of the baseball season because it’s still cool outside.
You still can actually enjoy the baseball game on Saturday. But y’all know what happens in the summer months.
I live in Dallas, Texas. I’m assuming it’s not too different from Jacksonville, Florida. What the summer is feeling like?
I mean, it’s just excruciatingly hot and I’m already thinking back to last summer when we were sitting through the Little League World Series because my boy is a pretty good baseball player because of his size.
He can already knock a ball over a fence. He’s a good first baseman.
He makes lots of catches and stops and gets folks out and he’s got a great team.
So they did pretty good. Last year, we went all the way to the Little League World Series, which I think is hysterical because by World they mean the people who live right in our neighborhood.
So we were out there at the Little League World Series and you know what happens?
Those of you who have sons, you know what happens when they get to a series in any sport.
It means that you go out early in the morning and you play one game and then if they win, they go to the next game, if they win, they go to the next game, you’re just out there all day basically until they lose over a series of days whenever they and they’ve disqualified themselves from the series.
So we’re sitting out there in the hot Texas sun playing game after game waiting for our next turn playing another game.
And I don’t, you know, you’re hot.
I don’t know if, if it ever is okay for you to pray that your kid loses so that y’all can go home.
I don’t know if that’s ever okay and I will neither confirm nor deny that I ever did that.
But you’re just sitting out there pouring sweat and we were getting ready for the next game and my son realized who the next team was that they were playing and he got a little insecure these boys on this other team that we were getting ready to play, that were the next in the series for us to contend with.
They had already played my son’s team earlier in the season.
And when my son’s team, which was a pretty good team, met up with this other team, those boys on that team had annihilated my son’s team.
I mean, these were serious baseball players, you know, where the kids are serious and the parents are serious and everybody’s serious on that team over there little boys that seemed like they were born and immediately their parents gave them a baseball and a mitt and decided that they were gonna play baseball.
I mean, these are just those kids that you want to race out there on the field and knock somebody out from messing with your kids, those kind of kids.
And my son saw that this was the team that they were going to be playing and his hands got all sweaty and his heart was beaten in his chest.
He was getting all nervous and his head was hanging down.
As we walked over, we gathered up all his gear.
We were walking over to the field and he just was insecure and lacked courage.
And as we walked over to the dugout to get ready for the game, we, we had to actually pass the other team.
They were sitting all on the grass underneath the tree trying to get some shade and as we passed them, me and my son, J C, my second son’s nickname is J C.
We heard the other team, two of the members of the other team say this.
There’s J C, you know, he’s the, remember him, he was the first baseman that made all the stops when we played them.
It’s, it’s J C, the one that hit the ball and it went over the fence. That’s him.
My son heard his name crossed the lips of two members of the opposing team.
And all of a sudden that head that had been hung down was straight up in the air.
All of a sudden, he poked his chest out.
All of a sudden, his palms weren’t sweating anymore and confidence overcame him.
It’s amazing what happens to you when you over here, what the enemy really thinks about you.
There is a man in scripture that I want to talk to you about today whose circumstance pretty much, I’m sure in a group this size mirrors your own circumstance because there’s a man named Gideon that is going up against a battle where he feels outnumbered.
He’s completely insecure, he lacks courage and confidence because he feels like he does not have what it takes to contend with what’s in front of him.
And many of you are in your own personal battles. There’s a battle in your marriage.
There’s one in your finances, there’s something going on with your parenting right now or there’s a struggle happening on your job and you’re feeling, you feel like you’re in the fight for your very life.
And don’t you know that when we have physical struggles, there is always a spiritual reality that is underneath them, that we are literally waging spiritual warfare.
Really, the physical things that are happening are really just symptoms of the real problem.
The real problem is that we have an enemy that is waging war against our soul.
You and I are in spiritual warfare.
We are in a the battle and if we’re not careful, we can look at the battles that we are fighting.
Look at, look at the symptoms, the marriage struggles, the struggle with our Children or in our own hearts or in our own minds or in our bodies.
We can look at the struggles and deal with the daily rhythm of those struggles and we can lose our confidence and like my boy J C, we can see the difficulty in front of us and our start wringing our hands and hang our head down because we lack security.
But everything changes when you know what the enemy thinks about you.
Because listen, my friend, even if you don’t believe what the Bible says about you, your enemy knows that what God says about you is absolutely true.
So, so even if you don’t believe it, you need to know that, that He knows that you and I are already victorious.
Even if you don’t believe it.
He knows that you have been forgiven even if you don’t believe that the enemy knows that he is already under your feet.
He knows that you have been given power and authority that he will never ever have access to.
He knows that he can form a weapon against you but that, that weapon will never be able to prosper.
He knows that since God is for you, nobody, not even Him can ever be against you.
He knows that you have been made competent by God’s spirit.
It would be ashamed for the enemy to know all that stuff about us but us not know all that stuff about us.
It would be a shame for the enemy to be more convinced about our potential and about our power than we are.
Everything changes when you know what the enemy thinks about you.
When you know brother sister that when He sees you coming, he is shaking in his boots.
There’s that child of God that has the blood of Jesus Christ sprinkled on her.
There is that man who is fighting for his family because of the Holy Spirit’s power that works within him.
Gideon is afraid he’s got 300 soldiers. They are going up against the media night camp.
The media night army has 135,000 soldiers. The ratio is 450 – one. Talk about being the underdog.
Gideon lacks courage and has complete overwhelming paralyzing insecurity.
But right before the battle, God sends Gideon down to the enemy camp.
He stations him right beside the tent where two men are talking. Gideon hears his name past the enemy’s lips.
He hears the enemies say that if Gideon in the 300 come that they know they are going to be annihilated, Gideon can’t believe they even know who he is.
Much less that they’re afraid of him.
But once he, he here’s the enemy, speak his name and realize that the enemy is so insecure thinking about Gideon in the 300 coming a confidence overwhelms him.
He is ready to go to battle knowing that the Lord will give the victory.
It’s the same way that you and I can leave this place on this Sunday morning, approaching the battles that are in our daily lives.
We can have security because now we know what the enemy thinks about us.
Now, we know that he already knows we have the victory.
And so Gideon confident and secure is getting ready to go into battle.
And in judges chapter seven, he’s getting ready to show us how to win a battle.
Anybody interested in how to win a battle in your life.
If you have your Bible with you turn the judges chapter seven or your iphone, your ipad, any manner of iness just flip on over to judges chapter seven because there are some details in here.
There are many actually. But I’m gonna pick three of them to share with you three things that are going to help us know how to advance into battle and claim the victory.
That is ours. Judges, chapter seven verse 15 starts this way and it came about when Gideon heard the account of the dream and its interpretation from those two men that he bowed in worship.
Let’s just start right here. Gideon was once insecure and timid and paralyzed because he had no courage.
Gideon now is closer to the battle than he has ever been.
The rumors of the battle are what have permeated the verses leading up to this point.
But now the battle is imminent.
He is uh more close and more up close and personal with the dilemma than he has ever been before.
But we see him Making a decision to worship God in advance.
He doesn’t know how he’s going to fight the battle.
He doesn’t have a strategy for what specifically he’s supposed to do.
He has no details yet on how he’s supposed to instruct the 300 as to how they are to advance in battle.
And yet he shows us that if we want to win a battle, we have to begin the battle on our knees.
We have to choose to worship in advance before we see how God is going to work out the situation.
And so he worshiped in the face of impending danger.
He worshiped in the face of adversity, he worshiped even though he was still outnumber and stretched far beyond his reach.
He he worshiped before one instruction of strategy for warfare was given, he worshiped because the enemy was already afraid of him before the battle was already was begun.
And so even in your circumstances, my friend, even if you have no idea how in the world, God is gonna fix the dilemma that you’re facing in your life right now, the way you win a battle is to begin that battle on your knees, to make a decision to be the kind of man, to be the kind of woman that worships God in advance.
Even though they have no clue of how God is going to work that situation out. Think about Joshua.
He goes into the promised land with the Children of Israel.
And as soon as they crossed the Jordan river, there is a battle to fight Jericho sitting right there.
The scriptures say that the walls were tightly shut up. That means they were pretty much Impenetrable.
They wanted to be secure. They had closed themselves up and tightly shut up walls so that people could not get in and um and wreak havoc in their city.
But Joshua and the people of God surround them. God gives them instructions.
He says, for six days, you walk around the walls on the seventh day.
Here’s what I want you to do.
Walk around the Wall seven times and then shout and then the walls will come down.
Don’t wait for the walls to come down and then shout, shout first before you have seen one brick fall from that Impenetrable wall.
Shout in advance and in response to your worship, I’ll make those walls come tumbling down.
I just wonder if the walls that you’re waiting to come down in your life.
You’re waiting for the bricks to start falling and God’s waiting for you to start falling down on your knees with your arms outstretched, thanking him in advance for the victory in your life.
You want to win the battle, whatever battle you’re facing, whether it’s in your own mind or in your own heart or in your marriage or in your family with your Children in your singleness on your job.
If you want to win the battle, if I want to win the battles of our life, we have to make a decision to begin the battle on our knees.
I had the opportunity to go to Kiev.
I was in the Ukraine just a couple of weeks ago and it is a community, a city, a country that is really steeped in a lot of history and tradition.
And I had an opportunity to visit a lot of sites while I was there.
One of the things that I could not wait to see was the orthodox Christian temples and churches that are still set up there from centuries ago.
And so I was able to go in into these very ornately decorated kind of golden.
Uh The churches are just unbelievably beautiful and you walk inside of them and all the things that you might expect just um golden ornate designs and candles lit everywhere.
And there are a lot of tourists like me that come in just to get a glimpse of it.
You can walk down into some, stare down some stairs that go down underneath the church buildings and many of them where there are caves and labyrinths of tunnels that take you to where monks used to live centuries ago.
And underneath there not only are there rooms, you can see where monks used to live, but there are caskets, glass caskets that contain bodies of people that were considered to be the saints of old.
Those bodies are wrapped up in towels and they’re, they’re in glass caskets.
And again, there are tourists just like me.
But there are also people who very much still believe that there is power in those saints, the bodies of those saints from centuries ago.
So we saw throngs of people, thousands of people coming themselves, bringing their babies, bringing their spouses, bringing the sick, the people that needed healing, whether emotionally, financially or otherwise so that they could come in and touch that casket or kiss that casket so that some of that power would leave this casket and and come to them, that person, that dead person and come to them and while I was watching that happen, I thought to myself that that person dead certainly can’t do anything for you because when they were alive, they couldn’t do anything for you.
But our Jesus is not dead.
He is alive and seated at the right hand of the father and all power is in his hand right this moment to help us wage the battles in our lives.
And not only that in one of those churches, I went, there was a beautiful platform kind of like this when it was ornate in gold and candles everywhere.
And people were coming in to kneel in front of that platform.
And there was an entry way almost like a parting right in the middle of this um this staging that was at the front of this church.
And you could look through this entryway, like someone could walk through the middle of the stage.
And you could see there was another golden ornately decorated room through the center of the, of the, of the church, the stage there.
And I said to the woman who was with us who was helping us to figure all this out and kind of giving us a tour.
I said to her, who goes back there and she said, well, we can’t go back there because women aren’t allowed back there.
Only men can go. And she said, not all men can go, you have to be a certain kind of guy from a certain echelon and life, a certain affluence in the community, everybody is not allowed back there.
And I said, well, what’s back there?
She said, well, it’s kind of considered like the holy of Holies and, and only certain men can go back there.
And as I watched people literally standing at Bay from what they consider to be the glory of God, the presence of God, the ability to worship God.
When I watched them standing back and away from that, because they weren’t the right gender or they weren’t the right race or they weren’t the right affluenza, alle status in society to be able to go back there.
I thought thank you Jesus Christ.
2000 years ago, when you died on calvary, you tore the veil from the top to the very bottom.
And so we all have the privilege. We all have the privilege to worship God. Y’all.
We should never take that for granted that no matter what your gender, no matter what your race, no matter what your background, no matter what educational level you come from.
You. And I all have the privilege to go boldly to the throne of God.
Hebrew says and worship Him in spirit.
And in truth, we should never take for granted, never take for granted that we have the privilege to begin the battle on our knees because yeah, he listen.
Now he doesn’t need our worship. He receives it because he wants to. But he doesn’t need it.
He’s still God, whether we worship him or not, he just is who he is.
And so we have the privilege while others right now in the year 2013 still don’t think they have access to him.
You and I can come boldly to the throne of grace.
He gives us the privilege to win a battle by beginning the battle on our knees.
The question is why did Gideon think or what gave Gideon the courage to worship God, even though the many a nights were rallying their troops for battle right there in front of him.
What gave him the courage to do that? I think we find our answer.
At the end of verse 15, it says Gideon returned to the camp of Israel and he said, arise for the Lord has given somebody say, has given The Lord has given the camp of Midian into your hands.
I love this so much. Gideon goes back to the 300 and he says to them, get up boys.
The Lord has already given the victory into our hands.
He does not say to them y’all get up because I hope God’s gonna give us victory today.
He doesn’t say arise, let’s go in hopes that maybe possibly, if we work hard enough, we can claim the victory.
That’s not what he says. He says, guys, let’s go because the Lord has already given us exactly what we’ve asked him for.
You know how you win the battle.
You begin the battle on your knees and you face the battle from a stance of victory.
There are some things in your life, my friend, simply because you are a believer in Jesus Christ that have already been accomplished for you.
They have already been done. You are not fighting in your battle right now that you’re facing in your life.
You are not fighting for victory. You are fighting from victory. You are already victorious.
I am already victorious because we are part of the family of God. He has already overcome the world.
Satan knows it. You and I need to know it as well. That victory is already ours.
You begin the battle on your knees and you face the battle from a stance of victory.
What does that mean? You know what it means?
Listen, The Bible is filled with promises that are available to believers in Jesus Christ.
In fact, there are over 8000 promises, over 8000 promises that are written in the scriptures that can be claimed by believers in Jesus Christ.
8000 opportunities for us to experience what the Bible says because I don’t know about y’all.
But listen, I don’t want to just know that he’s powerful because I read about how he can divide the Red Sea and the Old Testament, how he raised Lazarus from the dead and the New Testament.
I appreciate what he did in the scriptures.
But what I want is to see all of that experience in my own life.
I want to experience God for myself.
So he’s given us over 8000 opportunities to experience Him through the scriptures, to experience him personally in our life.
But most of those promises, he did not place in our hand, he placed them within our reach.
That means that there is a process involved. You have to cooperate with Him in order to experience the victory.
That’s already yours. It’s not that you don’t have the promise.
It’s just that you have to cooperate with him in order to experience it and grab hold of it in your life.
You and I have the opportunity to walk in victory to claim the victory, to experience the victory that is already ours.
Do you remember when Joshua and the Children of Israel when they went into the promised land?
Joshua chapter one, God said to Joshua every place you put your foot, that land, it’s yours, it’s already yours.
But you have to put your foot on it and claim it in order to experience it and to enjoy it.
Do you know that the Children of Israel spent many years, dozens and dozens and dozens of years holed up in a little side of Canaan when the entire land of milk and honey, the entire promised land of milk and honey was available to them.
They were holed up in one little corner of the promised land ba because the enemies were over there and they didn’t want to risk what it might take to fight those enemies.
They were so intimidated by the enemy in Canaan.
They stayed in one corner instead of experiencing all that God had for them. It wasn’t that it wasn’t theirs.
It’s just, they weren’t willing to go get it.
What would happen if you and I decided we’re not going to be intimidated by, by the enemy over there anymore that we’re going to decide to stand on the victory that the scripture says is already ours and then place our feet firmly on the promises of God believing that what he said is exactly what he can accomplish in our lives.
You win the battle, my friend, you win the battle by beginning the battle on your knees and facing the battle from a stance of victory.
Think about how the 300 must have been affected when Gideon came back and said, arise, the victory is already ours.
I mean, think about that because the last time they saw Gideon, he was leaving the camp in fear and insecurity to go down to listen to those two men on the enemy’s team, talk about him When he left.
He was insecure and he lacked confidence, but now he’s coming back and his head is up in the air and he’s saying, guys, Let’s go get us a victory.
How do you think the morale of the 300 changed when their leader came back confident in what God had said, the whole camp was completely 100% different.
The morale rose, their confidence all rose.
It swept through there like a wildfire because one person came back believing in God.
What would happen if you were the one that went home confident that that maybe our marriage can be saved?
Mm I’m going back assured because on the authority of God’s word, the two of us, we can make it on the authority of God’s word.
I am standing confidently on what God says, believing that victory is already ours.
What kind of environment would change in your life on your job in your home, at your high school, in your university?
If you just went back believing that God is who he says he is and that he can accomplish what he says.
He can accomplish everything hinges on one person, believing God On one person choosing to be the one that will take God at his word.
I have a friend that lives across the street from me. Her name is Rachel.
She’s actually been one of my closest friends for about 10 years now.
So it’s neat to leave to be a neighbor with a very close friend and Jerry and I live in a very rural part of Dallas fort worth.
We like it that way. Um There are creaks and, and trees and mud and bugs and all the things.
Little boys need in their life. And so we like living there for that reason.
Um, I like to send them outside to play anytime they come inside and say, mom, we’re bored.
I say, oh no, you’re not. You see that tree out there, go play with it.
You can eat it, you can play tag with it.
I don’t care what you do with it, but you’re not gonna be born today out in the country here.
Boy. So we love living out here.
But I’ll tell you a problem we had when we first moved out to this, this little area of Dallas and, and I moved there because my friend was there and I would go visit her and we loved the area so much every time I would visit her.
We thought, let’s see if we can find a place for ourselves out there.
We found a wonderful little house and this little house actually is, we weren’t as much as excited about the house itself, which is a great little house, but it was the land that I loved.
I love that my boys could run and play tall trees.
I just love trees and this house is nestled underneath a bunch of tall trees and it’s beautiful, but it posed a problem because we could not get for the life of us a strong signal so that we could get wifi high speed internet access.
It was a problem. It took us about two or three months to figure out how we need to navigate on the air space so that we could kind of peel through these tall trees and get the signal we needed for, for this high speed internet access.
And, you know, it’s hard to go back to dial up once you’ve had a taste of high speed, it just, it just doesn’t work out too well.
And at the time I was in the middle of writing a Bible study.
And so I really needed the research, easy access, quick access of my computer and internet and had to send huge files back and forth to publishers.
And so I was really having a lot of trouble.
So I was so grateful for my friend Rachel because my friend Rachel, even though she has a lot of huge trees around her house as well, they had long since figured out this internet thing.
And so I would just grab up my book and grab my Bible and grab my laptop and I would grab my purse and I would march across the street and sit down at her kitchen table and mooch off of her high high speed internet access.
In fact, she began to expect me one time I went over the door was just wide open, just there was just a screen door there.
She knew I was coming. She wasn’t even home.
She just left the door open the screen door and I walked right in and there at her kitchen table, she had put a lamp right there and a cup of coffee she knew I was coming.
So I sat right there every day for quite some time and just mooching off of her high speed internet access.
It was so great to have somebody near me that had the connection that I did not have based on the positioning that I was in right then it should be that in your life.
And in mind that when our circumstances position us in a place where we’re just underneath a lot of tough circumstances and issues and dilemmas that are keeping us from having the high speed connection that we want to have of peace or joy or faith.
We gotta have people in our life where we can go over into their life and mooch off of a little bit of their high speed faith or joy or peace relationships worth having that.
There are people that changed the entire environment of our home or our job or our organization because they come firmly established on the promises of God, But even more important than us looking for somebody else to do it.
How about you? Do it? How about you be the one that other folks can come to because you’re the one firmly planted on the truth of God’s word, God’s word.
How do you win a battle?
You begin the battle on your knees and you face the battle from a stance of victory.
Now, I don’t know if it was while Gideon was on his knees or while he was racing back to the 300 um to tell them arise.
Let’s go. I don’t know when exactly it happened.
But at some point, God downloaded to him the instructions, the strategy for the battle.
Verse 16, he says to his men or he divided the 300 men into three companies.
He put trumpets and empty pictures into the hands of all of them with torches inside the pictures.
Verse 18, he said to them, when I and all who are with me, blow the trumpet, then you also blow the trumpet around the camp and say for the Lord and for Gideon.
Now in my Bible, there are headings that are above I read from the New American Standard Bible and there are headings above each chapter.
Just a little synopsis of what that chapter is about.
But also inside of each chapter, there are verses grouped together. They’re, they’re actually called Perico Peas.
They’re these sections of scripture that are grouped together and above each Perica p. There’s another label in my Bible.
So you might have a couple of verses together in the Bible in your version.
And then it will have another label above it.
So you can see what these verses in particular about above the verses that I just read.
You were right right in that vicinity. There’s a heading in my Bible that says the confusion of the enemy.
Now, I know the Bible is completely inerrant and that nothing should be changed.
But if I had been writing this particular part, I probably would have labeled this part the confusion of the 300 because if Gideon had come back to, if I were one of the 300 Gideon had come back and said, go get a jar, a light and a trumpet and let’s go to battle.
I would have said you have got to be kidding me.
You mean you don’t want me to get a sword.
You don’t want me to get a bow and arrow.
You don’t want me to take off my jewelry and take off my earrings and ball up my fist and get some Vaseline and get ready to rumble.
You gotta be kidding me. What kind of battle strategy is this?
It makes absolutely no sense. And here’s the deal, my friend. Most of the time, God’s strategy doesn’t make sense.
You want to know how to win the battle.
You begin the battle on your knees, you face the battle from a stance of victory and you choose to plan for battle using divine strategy.
God’s strategy will rarely match up with your strategy.
In fact, Isaiah 55 puts it this way, his ways, they just aren’t your ways, his thoughts, they’re just not your thoughts.
We would be so much better off if we stop trying to make his thoughts are thoughts, stop trying to make his ways, match our ways.
I don’t know about you guys.
But listen, I oftentimes rationalize myself out of being obedient to God because if it doesn’t make sense to me, I think it must not be God.
But the contrary is often true.
If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably God because only God could come up with something like that.
And some of you have had a solution for that problem. Bubbling up in your spirit for a long time.
You’ve been thinking about it and it wakes you up in the middle of the night, but you keep discounting it because it doesn’t make sense.
And maybe the spirit of God is saying to you today, plan for battle using that divine strategy.
Lord, you want me to apologize to my spouse, you know, he started it right?
Lord, you want me to give that five, that little $5 financial gift to this particular ministry that that’s not gonna accomplish anything and, and its my starbucks money.
I know you don’t want me to give my $5 to the church.
Lord, you want me to move here even though it seems like there’s a better house over there.
Lord, you want me to take this job, even though they’re gonna pay me more money at this job.
Lord, you want me to leave corporate America and go to ministry. It makes absolutely no sense at all.
Nobody’s gonna understand cause I don’t even understand. My friends are gonna think. I’m crazy.
That’s the exact strategy that you might need to win. The victory that’s in front of you, my friend.
You have to decide you and I have to decide if we’ll be like Simon.
That when, when God said to him, push out into deep water and cast out your net again, will we be willing to say?
It doesn’t make sense? But at your bidding, I’m gonna say yes, Lord.
Anyway, battles are won when we begin the battle on our knees, face the battle from a stance of victory and plan for battle using divine strategy.
I’ll close with this. I was thinking about a friend of mine that works.
Um Well, she worked for our ministry. She was an intern for the summer. She traveled with us a bit.
She wasn’t familiar with the Dallas Fort Worth Airport.
And if any of you have ever flown through Dallas, you know that we have an airport in Dallas, it is big.
So we’ve got terminal A terminal B, terminal C terminal D and terminal E.
So before you can even start to begin to find your plane, you have to at least get to the right terminal.
Once you go to the terminal there, about 30 gates or so in each terminal, then some of those gates have an A part and A B part.
So it might be gate ther 30 A and gate 30 B.
So you really have to be detailed on where you are going and on this particular trip that we were taking, we were leaving from terminal D.
So we drove up to terminal D with, with my entire family and our new friend Katie and this was her first time really at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport.
And so we got into the airport, we went through security and you know what that means?
We basically took all our clothes off to get through security and Katie happened to get into a line that was going really slow.
So my entire family made it through security before Katie had even gotten close to going through.
And so we saw her there on the other end of the line and my husband decided to send her a text and he said, hey, we’ll meet you at the gate.
Our gate is 22 A. Now once you came through security in the determine our gate was literally right to the right.
I mean, it wasn’t far at all, just a few steps.
And so we said, we’ll meet you at the gate gate 22 8.
She waved back at us and said, I’ll meet y’all there.
Well, we sat there at the gate waiting for her and then they started boarding the flight.
We were still waiting for her.
We got on the plane and we sat down, man, the minutes were clicking, we were getting really nervous because it looked like she was going to completely miss the flight.
We had no idea where she was.
She was just right there with security, which was just a few steps away from our gate.
We sent her text, she didn’t answer them. We could not figure out what was going on.
But after just a few moments and I mean, literally right before the plane was getting ready to take off.
I mean, to the point where they had started to call her name across the loudspeaker in the airport.
Like you’re the last person to board this flight, we are getting ready to leave you, you know, you are in trouble when they start calling your name.
She finally raced down the jet bridge, she raced onto the airplane.
She was sweating, her hair was plastered onto her face. She looked completely spent.
She plopped down in her seat and I said, Katie, what in the world happened?
She said, well, Jerry text me to come to 22 A but I just, I assumed that he meant a 22.
So I went to a terminal, I got on the tram that takes you all the way around the entire airport and when all the way to a terminal because I just assumed that’s what he meant.
And Jerry overheard her say that and he just shook his head and he said, Katie Man, if you would have just believed that what I wrote was what I meant.
It would have saved you so much time and energy and sweat.
I just wonder today if the divine strategy you’ve been given the one that you’ve been discounting because it does not make sense.
I just wonder if the Holy Spirit of God today is saying to you, if you will just believe that exactly what I’m saying is exactly what I mean.
Victory will be yours and I’ll save you a whole lot of sweat on the way you want to win the battle.
Begin the battle on your knees, face the battle from a stance of victory and plan for battle using that strategy.
Yeah, that one. That sounds ridiculous to you. You use that strategy and victory will be yours.
Let me pray for you, Lord Jesus, thank you so much for this clear simple word from scripture.
I pray Lord that you would cause it to be embedded and sealed into our hearts so that it changes us and transforms us.
I’m praying that circumstances that are represented by those who are all over this room, circumstances will be changed.
Victory will rain down over them. In Jesus name. Amen.