The Strength You Have

The LORD turned to [Gideon] and said, “Go with the strength you have, and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am sending you!”

Judges 6:14

In Judges 6, God comes to a young Israelite named Gideon during a time when God’s people were being harassed and overrun by the Midianites. Gideon is hiding when God interrupts his life and calls him: “Mighty hero, the Lord is with you!”(v.12). Gideon wants to make sure that God has not accidentally called the wrong person, so he replies, “How can I rescue Israel? My clan is the weakest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least in my entire family!” (v. 15). Here’s the sentence that got me. After Gideon carefully explains why he cannot possibly be the one for the job, God says to him, “Go with the strength you have, and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am sending you!”

Whatever you have—surrendered for God’s use—will do. In the end, Gideon wins a great victory. But the road to a big victory was paved with a whole lot of small.

The Spirit of the Lord fell on Gideon, and this essentially weak, frightened man began to behave as if he were a mighty hero, even as he sees God downsize his already small army: “You have too many warriors with you. If I let all of you fight the Midianites, the Israelites will boast to me that they saved themselves by their own strength” (7:2).

A silly riddle—the kind that comes on bubble gum wrappers—says, “What gets bigger the more you take away?” The answer is “a hole.” But I think we might answer the question “faith.” God wants the resources to be scarce so that no one will be confused about the source of the victory. When we learn how to answer a big call with small resources, we have a recipe for flourishing faith. The old, small Gideon had become the mighty hero. When our resources are diminishing, we must trust that the strength we have is the strength we need.

Lord, here I am. The strength I have is yours. Fill in the gaps with yourself.

The will of God will never take you to where the grace of God will not protect you. To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.

Bernadette Devlin(1947–), Irish activist and former member of Parliament