Redirected Worship

Redirected Worship

Pull down your father’s altar to Baal, and cut down the Asherah pole standing beside it. Then build an altar to the LORD your God here. Judges 6:25-26

GOD GAVE GIDEON, A VERY INSECURE ISRAELITE, a mission to overthrow an oppressor. “Go with the strength you have,” he said (Judges 6:14), though Gideon was convinced he didn’t have any. The fact that God was sending him should have been enough to persuade Gideon that victory was certain, but it wasn’t. The mission would require a lot of faith, and Gideon needed his to be revived, nurtured, and strengthened before he had the nerve to take God’s word into battle.

We find ourselves in that situation often—theoretically believing in God’s power (Gideon was well aware of past miracles) but hardly expecting it to apply to our own lives in the here and now. We have faith that God can do anything, but we don’t necessarily have the faith that God will do something. Like Gideon, we need our faith restored, activated, and turned from past glories into present applications. We need to believe the God we believe in.

The first step in that resurrection of faith is a resurrection of worship. Gideon’s great adventure of faith began with instructions to tear down the family’s idolatrous altar and replace it with an altar to God. When we are worshiping the wrong things—when our attention is constantly directed elsewhere and we are drawing our energy and life from temporary fixes rather than the eternal source—our faith breaks. It’s impossible to root our faith in God when we are investing our hearts in other things. Gideon had wondered why the Lord didn’t seem to be with Israel, yet local worship practices provided a clear answer: Israel wasn’t with the Lord. As the deliverer, Gideon would have to get his own priorities right before he could deliver. His faith had to turn toward truth. So does ours.

Anchor your whole self in God before you try to anchor your faith in him. Saturate yourself in worship, where God’s presence and power become easy to see. A heart fixed on him begins to believe, and faith leads to victories he has promised.

The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in.