Hold Your Position

Read‍

Judges 7:19-21 "Gideon and the hundred men with him reached the edge of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch, just after they had changed the guard. They blew their trumpets and broke the jars that were in their hands. The three companies blew the trumpets and smashed the jars. Grasping the torches in their left hands and holding in their right hands the trumpets they were to blow, they shouted, 'A sword for the LORD and for Gideon!' While each man held his position around the camp, all the Midianites ran, crying out as they fled."

Think

Make a list of the weapons three hundred men are carrying into this fight.

A trumpet. An empty clay jar. A torch. That is the whole arsenal, going up against an army the text elsewhere describes as thick as locusts. Nobody is holding a sword. Both hands are full of things that are not weapons.

This is either the worst military plan ever recorded or it is not a military plan at all.

Here is what actually happens. Every man is holding a lit torch, but the torch is hidden inside a clay jar. So three hundred men walk through the dark and there is nothing at all to see, because the light is real the whole time and completely contained.

Then, all at once, in the middle of the night, they smash the jars. Three hundred lights appear out of nowhere in a ring around a sleeping camp, three hundred trumpets go off, and an army that has terrorized an entire country for seven years panics and runs.

Now read the last line of verse 21 again, because it is the part that should actually land on you. "While each man held his position around the camp, all the Midianites ran."

They held their position. Nobody charged. Nobody swung anything. Three hundred men stood still, made their light visible, made noise, and watched God do something they could not have done with thirty-two thousand.

That is most of what God is asking of you, and it is smaller than you think.

There is a lie that sounds spiritual and wrecks students, and it goes like this: if I bring my friend and nothing happens to him, that is on me. So you rehearse. You worry about saying it wrong. You imagine the conversation going badly and you decide not to have it at all, and the invitation you were going to give quietly never gets given.

But look at the actual job description in this passage. Show up where God put you. Let the light out. Make some noise. Stay there.

Nowhere in the assignment does it say make the Midianites run. That part was never Gideon's and it was never the three hundred's either.

You are not responsible for changing somebody's life. You are responsible for obeying God and bringing them.

That is not a lowering of the standard. It is the removal of a weight you were never built to carry. You cannot open somebody's heart. You have no ability to do it, and every honest person who has tried will tell you the same. What you can do is invite, and show up, and be the same person at school that you are at church.

And notice one more thing about the light. It was already lit before the jars broke. Gideon did not hand out torches at the edge of the camp and start striking flint in the dark. Those men had been walking with fire in their hands the whole way there.

Which means the question is not whether you have anything worth showing. If Jesus has done anything in you at all, the light is already lit. The only question is whether anybody can see it.

So who is the one person you would invite this month if you fully believed the outcome was not yours to produce?

Apply

Write down one name – Write down the name of one person you are going to invite. Just one. Put it somewhere you will see it every day. Pray for that person by name each morning, and ask them before the end of the month.

Pray

God, I have talked myself out of this more times than I want to count. I am scared of it going badly and I am scared of being embarrassed. Remind me that their heart was never mine to open. Help me hold my position, stop hiding the light, and actually ask. In Jesus' name. Amen.