The Sacrifices of God 1982

I'd like to read today from Judges chapter 6 verses 11 through 15 and jumping over to 25 through 29. Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ahphra which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the mighty man of valor. Gideon said to him, pray sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this be fallen on us? Where are all his wonderful deeds which our fathers recounted to us saying, did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? But now the Lord has cast us off and given us into the hand of Midian.

And the Lord turned to him and said, go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Do not I send you? And he said to him, pray Lord, how can I deliver Israel? Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh and I'm the least in my family. The Lord said to him, but I will, I will be with you and you shall smite the Midianites as one man.

That night the Lord said to him, take your father's bull, the second bull, seven years old and pull down the altar of Baal, which your father has and cut down the Asherah which is beside it and build an altar to the Lord your God on top of the stronghold here with stones laid in due order. And then take the second bull and offer it as a burnt offering with a wood of the Asherah, which you have cut down. So Gideon took ten men of his servants and did as the Lord told him, but because he was too afraid of his family and the men of the town to do it by day, he did it by night.

When the men of the town rose early in the morning, behold, the altar of Baal was broken down and the Asherah beside it was cut down and the second bull was offered upon the altar, which had been built. And they said to one another, who has done this thing? And after they made search and inquired, they said, Gideon, the son of Joash, has done this thing. Now Gideon, as we all know, went on to deliver Israel from the grip of the Midianites in the power of God.

Just as God said, I will be with you and you're going to smite the Midianites as one man, he did it. But the turning point for Gideon, the event which transformed him from a cynical onlooker into a man who was radically committed to the purpose of God, was the night he took his father's bull, pulled down his father's altar to Baal, cut down the Asherah, which was the female counterpart to Baal, and used the wood of this Asherah, this idol, for a sacrifice after he built an altar on top of this mess to the Lord. Built an altar to the Lord, laid the wood from the broken idol, set it on fire, and on top placed the bull that was his father's as a sacrifice.

By morning, the whole town was in an uproar. And Gideon found himself, to his own amazement, taking a bold, public, uncompromising stand for the Lord. When God calls us into the purpose of his kingdom, he usually begins by giving us some sign of mercy.

He does some clear thing to show us that he has put his hand upon our lives for blessing. But what most of us want to do all the time is stop with that. You know, thank you for the blessing and off we go.

Always after that sign of blessing, there follows the command, in one way or another, to pull down the altar of Baal, cut down the Asherah, and build an altar to the Lord. God calls us to perform some specific act, to do some definite thing that will disrupt our lives sufficiently that it puts us clearly on God's side. Uncompromisingly on God's side, and clearly against the kingdom of Satan with his Asherah and his Baal, these idols, really, idol gods, of lust and power.

Actually, that's what baptism really means. Baptism is a public renunciation of Satan and his kingdom. And it's a public commitment to the land of God, to his death, to his resurrection, and to his obedience.

And this public commitment is always followed by opportunities to prove that we, in fact, renounced Satan and that we, in fact, committed ourselves to the Lamb. From Luke, chapter 12, verse 32. Wait a minute, verse 51.

Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two, two against three. They will be divided father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Jesus is here describing the disruption that always comes to those who obey the command to pull down the altar of Baal, cut down the Asherah, and build an altar to the Lord and start serving God. Now, if we're not prepared to allow our lives to be disrupted to that extent, then all we're going to ever do is just go drifting through life in a twilight zone of indecision, where we'll be muttering against evil, but we'll never conquer evil. And we'll be saying, Lord, Lord, all over the place, but never doing the things He commands.

Now somebody says, wait a minute, why do you have to be so negative? Wonderful things are going on before our eyes these days. We see it all around us. We see it in this place week after week.

God is stirring, the Spirit is moving. We are seeing awesome things. All right.

Nobody can deny that God is in that way moving, and He's moving not only here, but in countless places across the earth. There is a worldwide scope to a visitation of the Spirit of God to the body of Christ at this hour. But this visitation of God's Spirit to the Church will bring about lasting change only if there is a response on our part.

It doesn't happen automatically. Many, many times down through the centuries, the Spirit of God has visited the body of Christ with great power. There have been signs and wonders and miracles and visions and revelations.

Crowds have been brought together to just really enjoy the glory of heaven. And then it just peters out, drifts away. Everything settles back to just what it was before, death.

And the reason there was no change is because the people who were visited by the Spirit didn't allow any change. It was as if the Spirit washed over them and that felt really good. But the Spirit never got inside them because they didn't allow the Spirit to get in.

They would not allow their lives to be disrupted. When the Spirit told them to pull down the altar of Baal, cut down the Asherah, build an altar to the Lord, nobody moved. When the Spirit told them to open their mouths and take a stand, nobody spoke.

Example, Palm Sunday. On Palm Sunday, Jerusalem looked like a day of renewal. Everybody was having a great time.

It looked like a revival because it was a definite moving of God's Spirit. Prophecy was on every lip. Hosanna to the Son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. That was prophecy. How long did it last? Not even a week.

Because nobody allowed his or her life to be disrupted. In order for a visitation of the Spirit of God to turn into genuine revival, we have to pull down the altar of Baal. We have to cut down the Asherah, and we have to build an altar to the Lord.

First, we have to pull down the altar of Baal, which simply means a clear, definite break with the God of this world. We can't have it both ways. When Satan took Jesus up on a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him that he would but bow down and worship, Jesus never denied that those kingdoms were under bondage to Satan.

Jesus simply refused to bow. He took a stand against Satan and began moving toward the cross at that point. The cross where he ultimately conquered Satan.

Now, there needs to be the same kind of clear-cut stand against the spirit of deceit, better known as Satan, which holds the nations of the world to this day in its grip, so that we no longer accept as just one of those things that we have to put up with the fact that the air we breathe is deceit. Now, so the air we breathe is deceit, we'll keep breathing it the rest of our lives, and we'll just continue to lust after the deceitful pleasures and covet the deceitful riches. After all, this altar to Baal has been sitting on this hill for generations, ever since our earliest forefathers.

Everybody's accustomed to it. Why should I have to make a scene? But the spirit says, pull it down, break with it, take a stand against it, expose the evil. We have to cut down the Asherah.

The Asherah is the female counterpart to Baal, the goddess who promises fulfillment and satisfaction. We don't see these poles all over the place. Now she's on TV.

She's in the air we breathe. It's the spirit behind that idol which urges us to become obsessed with our own comfort and security and pleasure. So that pretty soon, even in the lives of believers, the bottom line is these three things.

You know, we mouth the Christian faith, but when it comes right down to the issues, the decisions we're making in our lives every day, the thing we're after is our comfort and our pleasure and our security. To cut down the Asherah is to renounce that, that preoccupation with comfort, pleasure, security in every form, and to see that our obsession with these three things has actually brought us into a death. Renouncing these things to proclaim to ourselves, to each other, and to the world that the life God now gives us is worth far, far more than any comfort or any pleasure or any security that this world offers.

Amen. Amen. Then we have to build an altar to the Lord, which means a clear, bold, open commitment commitment to Jesus.

When Gabriel, the people of that town, saw that the altar to Baal was gone, the Asherah was gone, and in their place was this altar to the Lord, still smoking with Gideon's sacrifice. Now they knew where Gideon stood. But do they know where we stand? To build an altar to the Lord simply involves obedience to Jesus' commands with total trust, so that when he says purity, I mean purity, I mean purity, instead of arguing over how much purity you mean, Lord, here.

We do it and trust that he will give us all we need to obey. And when he calls us to love our enemies, instead of haggling over which enemies and with what exceptions, we do it, trusting that he'll give us all the power we need to love our enemies. To build an altar to the Lord is to obey him, Jesus, with trust, and to confess his name with unashamed boldness to each other and to the world.

That altar of Gideon's was a bold statement. And even if you say, well, he snuck around and he started building it at night, it was still there in the daytime. He didn't change his mind.

He didn't tear it down. At least he stuck with it. What kind of statement are we making? When the world hears from our lives, day in and day out, in what we say and do absolutely consistently, that Jesus is Lord, they will see from our lives Gideon's altar and they will know that God is talking to them.

When the men of the town rose early in the morning, behold, the altar of Baal was broken down and the Asherah beside it was cut down. The second bull was offered upon the altar which had been built and they said to one another, who has done this thing? And after they had made search and inquired, they said, Gideon, the son of Joel, has done this thing. This is the turning point of Gideon's life.

It's also the turning point of our life. The Spirit of the Lord moving upon us is calling us to pull down the altar of Baal, to cut down the Asherah, and to build an altar to the Lord, to make a clear, uncompromising stand against evil, the evil that's within us and around us, and to take a clear, uncompromising stand at the cross of Jesus, even if this means the loss of everything we have, including our own life. Now, are we ready now to make that stand? If the answer is yes, then let's say yes to God in some clear way right now.