This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back for day two of week three of our Look Through the Book of Judges.
We're going to look at Judges chapter 8 verses 5 to 27 today. Yesterday you
might remember we began to look at how you survive your successes and Gideon
taught us yesterday that to survive your successes you have to be humble, to
survive your successes you have to be faithful.

Two more lessons a day. The third lesson is if I'm going to survive the
successes of life I have to turn away from the drain of detours. I have to turn
away from the drain of detours.

When success comes into your life the attention that it brings also brings from
within yourself and from outside of yourself the temptation to take a lot of
detours. In the increased attention that comes because of the success, in the
increased opportunities that come because of the success, you're going to have
many, many opportunities to take detours. Now those detours can come by seeking
personal acclaim, they can come by resting upon your past successes, they can
come by involvement in the unimportant, they can come in the way that you relate
to others, there's a lot of ways that you can go down these detours.

Many of the detours have to do with new opportunities. Should you take advantage
of all those opportunities or do you need to still be faithful to the one that
God has put in front of you? Gideon's temptation was that of wasting time on
those who wouldn't support him in the cause.

It was a detour. He had this great victory but not everybody was on board with
him. He could have wasted time on those who weren't supporting him.

When you get 70% on board you can waste a lot of time trying to get the other
30% on board. All you need is the 70% to move ahead. So listen to what happens
to Gideon.

When they reach, this is Judges chapter 8 starting in verse 5. When they reach
Succoth, Gideon asks the leaders of the town, "Please give my warriors some
food. They are very tired.

I am chasing Zeba and Zalmunna, the kings of Midian. " But the officials of
Succoth replied, "Catch Zeba and Zalmunna first and then we will feed your army.
" So Gideon said, "After the Lord gives me victory over Zeba and Zalmunna, I
will return and tear your flesh with the thorns and briars from the wilderness.

" Now Gideon obviously has some difficulties with emotions in this moment but he
doesn't get stuck in a detour. Even though he's angry, and sometimes your anger
can get you stuck, he moves on into what God wants him to do. There's this
temptation to get caught into fighting his own people, fighting those who
wouldn't support him instead of fighting the enemy.

How did Gideon handle the temptation? Single word, later. He said, "I'll come
back later and do this.

" He recognized his priorities and he stuck to his priorities. So to survive
your successes you have to be single minded. Success can cause you to focus on
the past or can cause you to get caught up in the detours that are right in the
present.

If you're going to enjoy the successes and go on to the next one that God has in
your life, you have to be single minded. You can't get caught up in all the
detours. There's many, many, many companies who've had to learn that lesson.

There's many, many, many parents who've had to learn that lesson. There's many,
many involved in ministry who've had to learn that lesson. To survive success
you have to be single minded.

And now a fourth lesson from Gideon about how to survive success. Number four,
you resist the temptation of the pedestal. Resist the temptation of the
pedestal.

Any time there's a success, any time there is a victory, a pedestal committee
immediately forms. This group of people who want to lift you up, put you on the
pedestal, honor you, tell you how great you are, partly so they can sort of bask
in the glory of your success. Maybe it's because they love you and they really
want to lift up what you've done.

But they want to put you on a pedestal. Take care when they nominate you for a
pedestal. Pedestals look pretty, but they destroy usefulness in your life.

They destroy it in two specific ways, that pedestal that people want to put you
on. Number one, they separate you from your purpose. Battles have been won from
horseback and mountaintop, from battleship and tank and fighter jet, but no one
has ever won a battle from the top of a pedestal.

Pedestals are for statues. Pedestals are for dead people. So they separate you
from your purpose, from what God has for you to do in your life.

And the second danger of a pedestal is they fill you with pride. "Oh look, I'm
up on this pedestal. Oh look, I'm looking down on everybody else.

" Gideon's response to the pedestal committee? Well there's some really good
news and bad news here. First he does the right thing.

In chapter 8 verse 22, "Then the Israelites said to Gideon, 'Be our ruler. You
and your son and your grandson will be our rulers, for you have rescued us from
Midian. ' But Gideon replied, 'I will not rule over you, nor will my son, the
Lord, will rule over you.

'" What a perfect answer. He recognized that success and pedestals don't mix,
and he drew the people's attention away from himself and he put the attention on
God. Perfect.

In his first response, Gideon teaches us this fourth quality that you and I have
to have to survive success. To survive successes, you have to have a servant's
heart. You have to have a heart that looks at the success and realizes it's from
God.

So I'm grateful that God allowed me to be involved in that success, but it's
from him. So the glory is his, the pedestal is his, all of it is his. And I just
get to be involved in what he is doing.

And Gideon immediately does that. So he does the right thing first, but then the
bad news is he immediately does the wrong thing. He makes the huge mistake of
trying to put God on a pedestal.

Verse 24, look at what happens. However, Gideon says, I do have one request,
that each one of you give me an earring from the plunder that you collected from
your fallen enemies. The enemies, being Ishmaelites, all wore gold earrings.

Gladly, they replied. They spread out a cloak and each one threw in a gold
earring that he had gathered from the plunder. And the weight of the gold
earrings was 43 pounds, not including the royal ornaments and pendants, the
purple clothing worn by the kings of Midian or the chains around the necks of
the camels.

Gideon made a sacred ephod from the gold and he put it in Ofra, his hometown.
But soon all the Israelites prostituted themselves by worshipping it and it
became a trap for Gideon and his family. So he does the right thing first,
exactly the right thing, and then he does the wrong thing second, exactly the
wrong thing.

That's why I think so many of us can relate to Gideon because we tend to mix
doing the right thing and the wrong thing in our life just like he did. And so
the wrong thing that he did was he tried to put God on a pedestal. He made a
golden, sacred ephod, which he put in his hometown so everybody could recognize
that God was the one who'd done this victory.

Now what's so wrong with this? Well, God said, "You shall not make a graven
image of me. " It's one of the Ten Commandments.

He's breaking the Ten Commandments here. And the reason it's so wrong is because
it limits God to that pedestal or that image. You can't put God on a pedestal
because nobody could build a pedestal large enough.

We simply need to recognize God's presence in every day, in every moment of our
lives. And any time you try to build something, some kind of an idol that we
worship that recognizes who he is, it always limits God. And the other thing it
always does is it makes us feel like we can control God because I can move that
idol around.

I can put it in my hometown so everybody can recognize where this came from. We
begin to think wrongly that we can control God. Now I don't want to end with the
negative because there's so much positive in Gideon's life.

So back to the positive, these positive truths that we learn from Gideon. How do
I survive successes? Through humility, through faithfulness, through
single-mindedness, through a servant's heart.

That's where you see the open doors to the usefulness that God has for your
life, to the next great thing that God wants to do in your life, to the being
faithful with the great things that he's just done in your life. That's where
you see all that happen. Now all of these things, as we talked about yesterday,
they all come from him and not for us.

So we're trusting him for all of them. Let's trust him once again. Would you
pray with me?

Father, once again, we trust you as we did yesterday for humility, for
faithfulness in our lives. And we add to that, that we want to trust you to have
that single-minded focus about the purpose that you have for our lives. It's so
easy to get distracted in this world.

Lord, help us to not be distracted. We need your help. We need your strength.

Help us to stay focused on what's most important, what you want us to be doing
right now. And Lord, give us a servant's heart. Jesus, you have a servant's
heart.

You showed it to us when you came and you gave your life for us. You didn't come
to be served. You came to serve.

Give us your heart towards people. We need you to give us your heart. In
ourselves, we tend to focus on ourselves.

We tend to become prideful and self-centered. We don't want that. We want a
servant's heart.

We want to look at other people with love, with your love. And so we ask that
you'd work this into us because of your heart for us, Jesus. We ask it in your
name.

Amen. Well, tomorrow we're going to learn how to get off the shelf from a judge
by the name of Jephthah.