Throw Out A Fleece?

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. We are still in this kind of snarky sermon series. I do admit to snarkiness. I don't know if it's a spiritual gift, but I have it, okay? And I think it's a way to kind of interact sometimes, not necessarily always beneficial. Sarcasm can only go so far. I mean, the word sarcasm, you know what it comes from. It means to cut into the flesh. It's not always a good thing. But I think we can make fun of ourselves a bit and how sometimes we misquote or misuse or misinterpret scripture. And that's just a human tendency. I tend to read it through the lens of myself and the way I want to see it rather than what's really there. Maybe it's not something that's going to relate to you. I don't know. This is something I really struggled with in high school. So I know for some of us, when I was in high school, you weren't even a glimmer in the eye of your parents. They might not have been married. My 45th high school reunion is this fall. I've never made it. They always have it at a time I can't make it. Okay? It's okay. I don't know if I want to see them. I don't know if they want to see me. Anyways, but we're going to look at this because I struggled with it in high school. I struggled with it in college. I still sometimes wonder about how do you make decisions? How do you know God wants you to do this, that, or the other thing? Right? Have you ever asked those questions? Okay. And today we're going to look at a passage that has been used, and I believe not only misquoted and misunderstood, as a process for decision making. Have you ever heard someone say, well, I really want to know what the Lord's will is, so I'm going to throw out a fleece. Anybody ever hear that? Raise your hand if you've ever heard somebody throwing out a fleece. Most of you have never heard that? Well then, I might as well not preach. Okay, well, maybe you've heard something similar. It's a story from the book of Judges, and a man named Gideon who does throw out a fleece a couple of times to, well, it's not to try to make sure that it is God's will. It's actually, we'll find out. It's kind of, the story tells almost the opposite, okay? This is how John White describes it, by the way. Gideon's fleece has become the basis of a practice among some Christians which is called putting out a fleece. In essence, when you put out a fleece, you say to God, if you really want me to carry out plan A, then please make the telephone ring at 9, 10 p.m. Then I will know that plan A is what you want. You can make the fleece anything you wish, just so long as it can serve as a sign to you, okay? What do you think? Nah? Nah? We're going to be now looking at the text specifically about this throwing out a fleece from the book of Judges, chapter 6. This is what we read. Then Gideon said to God, if you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said, behold, I am laying a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece alone and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said. And it was so. When he rose early next morning and squeezed the fleece, he wrung out enough dew from the fleece to fill a bowl with water. Then Gideon said, let not your anger burn against me. Let me speak just once more. Please let me test just once more with the fleece. Please let it be dry on the fleece only, and on all the ground let there be dew. And God did so that night, and it was dry on the fleece only, and on all the ground there was dew. This happens when you can take a passage like this and not read the rest of the story of Gideon and get a totally different interpretation of what it means to throw out a fleece, if you do that. And I think a lot of people have. By the way, you can look up, and it was in the newsletter this week, the Bible Project has a video that deals with this story and how if you just take this section and run with it, you're not understanding what really is going on here. You need the whole arc of the narrative. So that would be a good place to look. We're going through the same points we've done over this series, and hopefully, even though you've never heard, I'm still surprised. Maybe I was just in a weird, semi-spiritual, pietistic, semi-charismatic sort of background that I had people talking about the Lord, trying to show that, and you guys all didn't have that. I don't know. But we're going to go through these three points, what God, what Judges is not saying, in this, what Judges is saying, and why it's really better. So throwing out a fleece, so many people have asserted that that's an act of faith. But Judges is not saying that Gideon was actually a man of faith at all. If you read the whole text, Gideon is not doing this out of faith, but he's doing it out of...