The following message is by Pastor John Piper.
More information from Desiring God Ministries is available
at www.desiringgod.org.
I invite you to turn with me to
the text for Pastor John's sermon this morning
in Judges, chapter 7, verses 1 through 22.
Then Jerobel, that is Gideon, and all the
people who were with him, rose early, and
camped beside the spring of Herod.
And the camp of Midian was on the
north side of them, by the hill of
Morah in the valley.
The Lord said to Gideon, The people who
are with you are too many for me
to give Midian into their hands.
For Israel would become boastful, saying, My own
power has delivered me.
Now, therefore, come, proclaim in the hearing of
the people, saying, Whoever is afraid and trembling,
let him return and depart from Mount Gilead.
So twenty-two thousand people returned, but ten
thousand remained.
Then the Lord said to Gideon, The people
are still too many.
Bring them down to the water, and I
will test them for you there.
Therefore it shall be that he of whom
I say to you, This one shall go
with you, he shall go with you.
But everyone of whom I say to you,
This one shall not go with you, he
shall not go.
So he brought the people down to the
water.
And the Lord said to Gideon, You shall
separate everyone who laps the water with his
tongue as a dog laps, as well as
everyone who kneels to drink.
Now the number of those who lapped, putting
their hand to their mouth, was three hundred
men.
But all the rest of the people kneeled
to drink water.
The Lord said to Gideon, I will deliver
you with the three hundred men who lapped,
and will give the Midianites into your hands.
So let all the other people go, each
man to his home.
So the three hundred men took the people's
provisions and their trumpets into their hands, and
Gideon sent all the other men of Israel,
each to his tent, but retained the three
hundred men, and the camp of Midian was
below him in the valley.
Now the same night it came about that
the Lord said to him, Arise, go down
against the camp, for I have given it
into your hands.
But if you are afraid to go down,
go with Purah, your servant, down to the
camp, and you will hear what they say,
and afterward your hands will be strengthened so
that you may go down against the camp.
So he went with Purah, his servant, down
to the outposts of the army that was
in the camp.
Now the Midianites and the Amalekites and all
the sons of the east were lying in
the valley as numerous as locusts, and their
camels were without number, as numerous as the
sand on the seashore.
When Gideon came, behold, a man was relating
a dream to his friend, and he said,
Behold, I had a dream.
A loaf of barley bread was tumbling into
the camp of Midian, and it came to
the tent and struck it so that it
fell and turned it upside down so that
the tent lay flat.
His friend replied, This is nothing less than
the sword of Gideon, the son of Joash,
a man of Israel.
God has given Midian and all the camp
into his hand.
When Gideon heard the account of the dream
and its interpretation, he bowed in worship.
He returned to the camp of Israel and
said, Arise, for the Lord has given the
camp of Midian into your hands.
He divided the 300 men into three companies,
and he put trumpets and empty pitchers into
the hands of all of them with torches
inside the pitchers.
He said to them, Look at me and
do likewise, and behold, when I come to
the outskirts of the camp, do as I
do.
When I and all who are with me
blow the trumpet, then you also blow the
trumpets all around the camp and say, For
the Lord and for Gideon.
So Gideon and the hundred men who were
with him came to the outskirts of the
camp at the beginning of the middle watch
when they had just posted the watch, and
they blew the trumpets and smashed the pitchers
that were in their hands.
When the three companies blew the trumpets and
broke the pitchers, they held the torches in
their left hands and the trumpets in their
right hands for blowing and cried, A sword
for the Lord and for Gideon.
Each stood in his place around the camp,
and all the army ran, crying out as
they fled.
When they blew the 300 trumpets, the Lord
set the sword of one against another, even
throughout the whole army, and the army fled
as far as Beth Shittah toward Zariah, as
far as the edge of Abel Mahola by
Tammoth.
This is a great story about a great
God, and I'd like us to pray before
we get into it.
Lord, your ways are not our ways and
your thoughts are not our thoughts.
Who would have ever conceived of such a
battle strategy as this?
And so humble us now and do your
mighty hand that we might listen and learn.
I pray that we'd have ears to hear
what you're saying to us through this story
at this crucial juncture in the life of
our church.
Guard us from the evil one now who
would love to distract us and to make
us hard and unhearing and unfeeling against this
word.
I pray for salvation and I pray for
sanctification in this room.
I pray for great joy and I pray
for laughter at rolling barley loaves that level
tents.
What a strange thing.
Lord, open our eyes to see what you're
meaning by these stories.
Why do you do history this way?
Oh, God, guard your church from being in
a rut of worldliness, thinking the way the
world thinks, doing things the way the world
does them.
Grant us to hear and be changed, I
pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
June 1, 1998, I took a paper called
The Gideon Venture.
Should we build without debt to the elders?
That's almost two years ago now.
And I had already talked with the staff
about those ideas.
Now we were ready to take them up
more fully as a council of elders.
And what I want to do this morning
is take you into the sequence of thought
and study and prayer that brought us from
those days almost two years ago to what
happened last Wednesday night, what's happening this morning
as we'll give out the pledge cards at
the end, and what is happening, Lord willing,
in the next two years.
We're at a very, very crucial juncture, and
God is putting together some remarkable things.
We began even before then by thinking about
debt.
And as we looked at the Bible, what
we noticed as a council of elders regarding
debt was that almost all words about debt
in the between people is in the form
of a warning not to get into it.
Texts like Proverbs 22, 7, the rich rules
over the poor and the borrower becomes the
lender's slave.
I could tell many stories that I've heard
from you to that effect.
Or Romans 13, 8, owe nothing to anyone
except to love one another.
Now, the elders being the sensitive Bible readers
that they are did not make a precipitous,
hasty jump to condemn all borrowing and all
lending because we saw texts and instances where
there seemed to be guidelines given for borrowing
and lending.
And there doesn't seem to be an absolute
condemnation of all debt and all lending.
And yet we saw that the drift of
scripture is clearly away from debt towards being
free from debt.
And therefore, we took it as a cue
that we should be very, very slow to
get into debt again as a church.
And we were confirmed in that by a
couple of things that were circumstantial in the
life of this church.
One was that it was right at the
end of 1996 that through a strategy called
freeing the future, you eliminated all debt from
this church and we don't have any debt.
There's no debt here.
You gave 1.1 million dollars in those
few months towards the end of 1996 to
eliminate it.
And in those same months, we had a
master planning group and they produced a little
booklet and had about 72 value statements in
it.
One of them, number 22, under the ethos
of our church is we value being debt
free very highly, something like that.
So the elders had the experience of getting
debt free in 96 through a significant work
of God.
They had the value statement from the master
planning committee.
They had all these texts warning against debt.
And then they noticed in the Bible that
the few building projects that there are, there
aren't many, were all built with money up
front.
For example, in Exodus 35, 5, the tabernacle,
take from among you a contribution to the
Lord, whoever is of a willing heart, let
him bring it as the Lord's contribution.
And they did that and they gathered all
they needed and they built it, no debt.
The temple, 1 Chronicles 9, 29, 5, David
says, who then will offer willingly, consecrating himself
today to the Lord, do it.
And they gathered it all.
And now the point of those stories, the
point of those stories is not that debt
free is the only way to build a
building.
The point of those stories is God made
the people joyfully generous and willing.
That's the clear, repeated point in those stories.
He put an amazing generosity into the hearts
of the people, but those stories did give
us a pattern.
They did hold out to us.
Well, there's one way that it was done
in the Bible, gather what you need to
build up front, count the costs, move into
it.
Don't end when you're halfway done, finish it,
come out of it debt free and pour
your lives and your money into mission and
ministry.
So we began to meditate on God's strange
ways because it seemed to us at the
time, and now it seems even stranger, very
strange that so much money could be pursued
in such a short space of time by
so few people to move into a building
debt free, like March, 2002 to the tune
of $9 million from this size church.
Yeah.
So we began to read the Bible with
our antennas up for strangeness because this is
strange doing it this way is strange.
And what we found is that God's normal
way of acting is strange.
God doesn't have a non strange way of
acting.
He seems to always be doing things in
a strange way.
For example, build an arc in the desert
or escape, not around the sea escape through
the sea or when your people are thirsty,
speak to a rock or when you want
a city to fall and become subservient to
you, walk around it seven times and blow
horns or when there's a giant in the
land, find a boy with a slingshot or
when you want fire to fall from heaven
and burn up a bunch of wood, be
sure to put a lot of water on
the wood or when you want to feed
5,000 people, find a little boy with
a lunch and tell 12 men to divide
the lunch among the 5,000.
These are strange ways of getting things done.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
God's ways are not our ways.
And the elders brooded over these things.
All that I've said so far was our
meat and potatoes for several months in those
days.
In fact, it's been on our table for
two years.
Now, we're not unaware of the danger here.
Handling the Bible this way can be abused.
There are people who have died from drinking
poison and letting snakes bite their hands and
drowned.
I heard of three Korean girls who drowned
trying to walk on water.
We're not unaware that the Bible can be
misused, mishandled and abused by trying to be
more radical so that God gets more glory
and children die because their parents won't give
them medicine.
So we're not unaware of that.
However, we do see some things that make
us think that probably most Christians play most
things too safe and too worldly.
We just look around and say, how does
the world do this now?
How does the world get $9 million out
of 1300 members and five or 600 giving
units?
The arithmetic doesn't work, by the way.
You may as well put your calculators away.
This doesn't work.
There's absolutely no reason to do any computing
here.
It's so far off the charts.
You will only be discouraged.
And so just put the calculators away.
Forget the arithmetic.
This is not about arithmetic.
I've not even tried it.
I'm afraid of what those numbers would look
like.
They are ridiculously high and it isn't going
to happen that way.
It's going to happen in a way nobody
can imagine it happening.
And that's the point of this story that
we're going to look at in just a
moment.
We saw a pattern in the Bible.
We're not about to come to you with
any sense of triumphal.
This is the way it's got to be
done.
God says it has to be done this
way.
Not to do it this way is to
be disobedient.
We're not condemning you if you do your
personal finances differently than this.
We're not condemning other churches if they are
led into another strategy.
We did it with another strategy.
That's not the point to point any finger
at any body.
We're not saying that God is bound to
bless this thing.
We're not saying it's going to necessarily succeed.
Well, what are you saying?
Here's what we're saying.
We see a pattern in the Bible of
counter-cultural, unusual, God-exalting, non-man-dependent,
but God-dependent ways of doing things that
look out of sync with the ordinary way
the world does them.
And we hear a beckoning from our Father.
Test me.
Try me.
Come this way, not that way.
Move toward the radical, not toward the comfortable,
the easy, the predictable.
And we fast, we pray, we wrestle, and
we sense that education for exaltation should be
pursued along with a nine million dollar building
program built in two years, debt-free, is
something God would be pleased with.
That's all.
So let's go to judges.
I'll show you what was in that paper
that I laid before the elders two years
ago and what we saw as we meditated
for quite a while on this text.
Now, let's get the background in judges here.
You know, you know when the judges happen.
You got Moses leading the people out of
Israel, out of Egypt, through the wilderness.
Then you have Joshua takes them into the
promised land and defeats lots of the cities.
And then Joshua dies and there's this huge
leadership void.
And the point of the book of judges
is when there's no king, the people do
what is right in their own eyes.
Says that twice at least.
So what happens?
As they do what is right in their
own eyes, God gives them over into the
hands of their enemies.
Then a cry goes up.
God has mercy upon them.
He raises up judges.
They're called judges.
The judge takes the bull by the horns
and in the name and the power of
God, he defeats the enemy and gets 20,
30, 40 years of peace for the people.
And then they sin again.
He hands them over again.
This is an awful rhythm of the book
of judges or the glorious rhythm, depending on
whether you're focusing on the sin or the
mercy of God, which is great.
So one of those folks is Gideon.
Now in chapter six, verse one, the chapter
before the one Kenny just read, God comes
to Gideon and he says he's going to
rescue the people from the Midianites.
Verse 14 of chapter six, God says to
Gideon, go in this your strength and deliver
Israel from the hand of Midian.
But Gideon is like Moses here.
Verse 15.
And he says, oh, Lord, how shall I
deliver Israel?
Behold, my family is the least in Manasseh
and I am the youngest in my father's
house.
Stop.
He doesn't get it.
Gideon doesn't get it.
That's why the Bible is being written here.
Gideon, your family is small and you're a
nobody.
Therefore, I'm coming to you.
You're my man.
You don't use that as an argument for
why I shouldn't use you.
It's my argument why I use you.
This is God's way.
Gideon doesn't get it.
Many of us don't get it.
Take heart.
Nobody's.
You are God's kind of people.
God gets things done through nobody's.
Oh, Lord, how shall I deliver Israel?
Behold, my family is least in Manasseh and
I'm the youngest in my father's house.
I can just imagine God rolling his eyes,
shaking his head and said, yes, yes, that's
the point.
Verse 16, God always answers that kind of
objection this way.
Surely I will be with you and you
shall defeat Midian as one man.
So God already has in his mind, this
is going to be some spectacular deliverance.
You're going to defeat them as one man.
Now we come to chapter seven.
Here's the situation.
Thirty two thousand troops in Israel.
I see that in verse three.
Thirty two thousand troops in Israel.
How many among the media nights in the
Amalekites?
Verse 12.
They were lying in the valley as numerous
as locusts and their camels were without number
as numerous as the sand on the seashore.
I take that to mean that as you
stand at a distance and look out over
this huge valley, the camels are so many
they merge into a beach of camel humps.
It just looks like one vast, long stretch
of beach of camel fur.
There are so many you can't distinguish them
and count.
So there is an outnumbering here, even while
Israel has thirty two thousand troops.
Now, what does God do?
God sees thirty two thousand of his own
people.
He sees an innumerable host of Amalekites and
Midianites coming against each other.
What does he do now?
That's where the paper started in June of
ninety eight.
And we saw six things.
And I'll just tell you what the elders
saw and how they applied to our situation.
Number one, verse two.
Let's read it.
The Lord said to Gideon, the people who
are with you are too many for me
to give Midian into your hands, for Israel
would become boastful.
God does not like boasting.
Saying my own power has delivered me.
Stop.
So we inferred this as a council of
elders.
It seems as though God would want us
to pursue a way of building a building
in this church.
That would be harder for humans to take
responsibility for and get credit for rather than
easier.
So we are pushed by many stories, but
this one in particular, we feel ourselves pushed
towards a strategy that would make us lean
more on God and less on man.
That's point number one.
Number two, God pairs down the thirty two
thousand to ten thousand by letting the faint
hearted go home.
Two thirds are faint hearted and they get
to go home.
Now he's got ten thousand left and he
is not ready to move with ten thousand.
He does a little test.
I don't know what's going on here.
I really don't.
Here's what here's what he does.
He says, send people down to the water
to drink.
Ten thousand people go get a drink.
Nine thousand seven hundred of these people kneel
down to get their drink.
I don't know what they do after they
kneel down, but they kneel.
Three hundred don't kneel.
They lap using their hands.
Now, how do they do that?
Well, I don't know.
I suggested in the first service they stay
standing and they scoop with their hands and
they lap like this.
A guy came up to me and he
said, I don't think that's what happened.
I think they laid down flat on their
faces and and went like this.
And God was showing that prostrate people are
the kind he'll use.
Well, maybe, maybe.
I thought it was vigilant alert people with
the kind he use who don't kneel down
and take risks.
I don't know what's going on here.
But here's the point the elders drew from
this observation.
God seems to say I can do this.
Not without reference to quantity, but with reference
to a certain kind of people.
Forget quantity, forget the thirty two thousand, forget
the ten thousand.
I'll take three hundred lappers, dog lappers, dog
like lappers.
I don't know what he was looking for
in that, but he found it.
So we simply generalize this way.
Forget the numbers at Bethlehem.
Don't compute.
Think in terms of devoting your energies to
build a kind of people at Bethlehem, build
a kind of people.
So I've been preaching now, what, nine weeks,
eight weeks on education for exaltation.
And it's all about a kind of people.
It's not about a building, mainly the building
we got to do.
We think in order to press on with
the vision we have for the kind of
people, but it's the people we want to
be get.
Let me give you a teeny illustration, because
in this room right now, there are no
doubt this kind of people.
Suppose you live in the Twin Cities.
You're twenty five, thirty five, forty five years
old.
You just moved to the cities.
You're a believer, but kind of haven't been
to church for a long time, maybe.
And you live alone and you have no
contacts in this city.
And you just start feeling lonely and like
you'd like to go to church somewhere.
So you flop open the phone book or
drive by one of our signs on the
freeway or whatever.
You say, well, I wonder when their services
are.
You check it out.
Nine, ten, forty five.
And you showed up here.
You're in this room right now.
What I want more than I want a
thousand people in this room is people who
won't let that person get out of this
room without being spoken to.
Would you be that this morning as you
walk out the aisle?
Don't just zero in on your tried and
true little friend click.
Open your eyes.
Look around.
There's eight hundred people you do not know
in this room and find one of them
and say, hi, my name's John.
Are you new?
I've been here 20 years.
Let's see what they say.
Who knows what they might say?
I've been here 50 years or this is
my first Sunday.
Doesn't matter.
What matters is you had the grace to
get beyond your little world and to pour
yourself out in some little teeny weeny risk
and be the kind of a person that
might make their day, win them to Christ,
plug them into a family and change their
future forever.
Let's be that kind of people.
So the point on number two was I
don't know what's going on with the dog
lappers, but it was something.
And so I know what kind of people
God wants to be breeding in the church
today.
Christlike, loving, humble, vengeful, bold people.
And so that's what education for exaltation is
about.
Mainly number three observation.
The Lord is merciful to work with a
less than ideal person and people like Gideon.
Where do we get that?
Look at verse nine, nine to 11.
Now, the same night it came about that
the Lord said to him, arise, talking to
Gideon, arise, go down against the camp.
For I have given it into your hands.
Stop.
God says to Gideon, you go down and
deliver them.
I mean, he's already said, I will deliver
them as by one man.
So in the middle of the night, he
says, all right, go do it.
The next verse.
But if you're afraid.
I got a plan B.
Is that incredible?
Here's what the elders heard there.
If you're afraid, go down with poor, your
servant to the camp, you will hear what
they say.
And afterward, your hands will be strengthened and
you may go down to the camp.
So go down now.
Go down.
If you're afraid to go down, then take
your servant and just go stand on the
edge.
And I've got a word for you.
Here's the lesson we heard.
God is not an all or nothing God
in his mercy toward us.
He doesn't come to you one time and
says, OK, now here's the kind of life
you're supposed to live.
Live it.
You blow it.
OK, I'm done.
Next person.
You live it.
OK, you blow it.
All right.
That's not the God of this passage or
any other passage in the Bible.
He says, I want you to go down
there.
Go.
I'm telling you to go.
If you're afraid, here's what we'll do.
And Gideon opts for plan B.
We heard this elders of Bethlehem.
You've got fears.
You've got misgivings.
You've got uncertainties.
You know what?
You're not disqualified from a great work because
Gideon wasn't disqualified from a great work by
his fears.
Plan B is a great plan.
Number four.
In his mercy and patience, God gives this
fearful man Gideon a providential encounter with a
dream and an interpretation of a dream, the
content of which is phenomenally relevant to his
situation.
Let's read it.
Verses 13 and 14.
This is simply amazing.
I mean, put yourself in the position of
Gideon.
You just went out on plan A.
You've gone down in obedience to plan B
just to listen at the edge of the
camp.
And you're supposed to overhear something that might
encourage you and make you strong with 300
men to come against an innumerable host.
What could you possibly hear that would do
that?
So here's what God arranged.
This is God.
There's no coincidence.
Verse 13.
When Gideon came, behold, a man was relating
a dream to his friend.
So here's Gideon and his servant sneaking up
behind a rock or something, listening to two
guys talking.
And he said, behold, I had a dream.
A loaf of barley bread was tumbling into
the camp of Midian, and it came to
the tent and struck it so that it
fell and turned it upside down that the
tent lay flat.
You can hear Gideon listening to this thing,
barley bread rolling into the camp, knocking over
a tent.
What's this?
Is this me?
Barley bread?
And and then comes the interpretation of verse
14.
His friend replied.
Now, where in the world does this come
from?
This is nothing less than the sort of
Gideon, the son of Joash, a man of
Israel.
God has given Midian and all the camp
into his hand.
That's a Midianite talking.
So that Gideon could overhear it.
So that plan B would work.
Then he would have courage not to wimp
out on this one, but to go back
and rally his 300 men.
That's an incredible mercy on God's part.
I mean, he had already done this, right?
God had told him, do this.
And he said, Can we lay out a
fleece?
Yes.
Lay out your fleece dry.
Can we lay out another one?
I mean, Gideon is a very anxious, tentative
leader, and God is so mercifully so patient.
And the elders heard that.
And we really took heart and we ask
ourselves, where has God been speaking to us
that kind of language of a dream and.
I'll give it into your hand.
Do it.
It was June 1998.
Some of you been around a while.
Remember this.
How did December 1997 end in this church?
A lot of you don't know the details.
Some of so much of it was happening
behind the scenes.
We came up to the month of December
in 1997.
So far behind our budget.
We were coming off a very flat period
in the life of this church.
We were so far.
We had no idea where the money would
come from or how it would happen.
On top of that, the masterworks building five
doors down here, which we own and in
which Tim Glatter has a ministry needed $90
,000 worth of repair so it could be
used or just shut down or either start
charging Tim big bucks or what.
And the elders were faced with a very
immediate crisis of how to handle that $90
,000 need.
And we already have a budget that we
don't know how we're going to pay for
at the end of 97.
And the suggestion was made, let's borrow the
90,000 short term, get it done and
figure out a way to finance it.
And then we'll move ahead.
I praise God for one.
I think there were two elders, one of
them in particular.
I remember I won't name his name unless
you get a big spiritual head, although he
knows who it is.
Um, said, wait a minute, it's not the
end of the year yet.
Why don't we pray?
Let's call some special prayer meetings and pray
that God would not only bring in all
the money needed for this budget, but $90
,000 over budget to pay for that front
end, no debt.
And that's exactly what God did to the
penny almost.
Now here are the elders six months later
talking about this coming building and how to
fund it and how to finance it.
And we feel like in all of our
misgivings, we're a little Gideon and God has
taken us plopped us down behind a rock
to let us over here dream.
And it was he who spoke the dream.
I did that.
One elder had the courage to stand up
and say, forget that debt for another two
months.
Let's ask God to do it.
And God did it way beyond anybody's dream.
That was number four.
Number five observation is that, um, there was
a strategy that Gideon had.
He didn't go without a strategy.
Verse 20, when the three companies blew the
trumpets and broke the pictures, they held the
torches in their hands and the trumpets in
their right hands for blowing and cried a
sword for the Lord.
And for Gideon, that's the strategy.
That's an absolutely absurd strategy, because if I
were one of those 300 men and Gideon
said, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to take some, uh, pitchers can
have in it some, uh, torches and we're
going to have a trumpet and, uh, we'll
divide into three troops.
Now you have a sea of camels.
You can barely see across this sea of
camels.
So you got a hundred men across the
sea over there and a hundred men over
there and a hundred men here.
And, uh, he says, now here's what we'll
do when I blow my trumpet and light
my torch and break it and lift it
and say the sword of the Lord and
for Gideon, you all do the same.
Okay.
And you would say back to him.
Okay.
Then what?
Well, I don't have any plan after that.
I have people coming to me, not many,
and some say, okay, you're going to, you're
going to take the pledges in two weeks
and you want $9 million.
And then what are you going to do?
We have no plan after that.
What was God's plan?
He didn't tell Gideon.
And that's the sixth point.
God did it.
22 verse 22, when they blew 300 trumpets,
the Lord set the sword of one against
another, even throughout the whole army and the
army fled.
Now, could they have imagined that maybe they
could have, maybe they could have imagined that
maybe a few of them said in their,
in their hearts, what God's going to do
when we blow the trumpets is they're going
to start killing each other.
I don't think anybody would have believed him.
So here we are now with $9 million
battle in front of us.
Let me say a word to parents.
My big prayer for marriages is that this
will result in some major, major reconciliation as
Noel and I bowed over the breakfast table
last night in our kitchen last night.
And, and I said, here's some ideas of
where this money could come from, but I
need you to say amen to this because
these are big, big hits.
And, uh, and for us to talk over
that, then to pray and then to talk
some more, that's going to be hard for
some of you couples to do, but good
for you.
Really good for you.
Um, Talitha is our four-year-old.
And I heard Noel say to her yesterday
now, Talitha, what did mommy say about not
crying before lunch?
If you don't cry before lunch at all,
what are you going to get?
And she said a quarter.
She did.
I don't think knows what a quarter is,
but we've taught her you can have a
quarter and we have a bank.
And so she's going to start being bribed
in these various ways.
Call it a, call it an allowance if
you like, and she'll be put to work
in various ways around the house.
And then she will, under our guidance, make
a pledge to buy two or 10 or
20 or 30 bricks over the next several
months.
And the goal is for the children to
buy all the bricks, 89,444 bricks or
something like that for this new building, 50
cents a piece.
So that's $40,000 or so for the
kids under 12 years old.
Let me say one other thing about the
Gideon venture, that paper you see in June
of 1998, Grace Church, Richfield was not even
on the screen.
Nobody was thinking.
Grace Church, Richfield is going to come along.
And in 1999, lay before us a vision
of partnering with our church to send them
a pastor and some of our people that
was not in the Gideon venture in 1998.
All that the Gideon venture meant in 1998
was do it hard and do it debt
-free and be wild and crazy in your
timeframe and everything.
Just do it hard.
This Sunday was not planned when we put
the how many sermons are going to do
12, I think when we put those together
and put dates on them, we did not
have in mind what happened at the beginning
of this service.
God has simply blown my mind by not
only bringing Grace Church, Richfield on to the
scene, but timing it such that the sending
out of those people happened on the very
Sunday I'm preaching about the Gideon venture, where
they send away people so that it's harder
to do.
That was all God's providence.
I did not plan it and didn't even
think of it in June of 1998 when
I wrote this paper, nor did I put
these sermons together in a way so that
that sermon would fall on this Sunday, because
I didn't know Rick was going to preach
next Sunday as his first Sunday.
I stand amazed at the circumstantial blessings.
It's all I want to call them.
Doesn't prove anything to me because it's not
that biblical authority, but oh, how it says
to me, God may well be so mercifully
talking to us that he's pleased that we
send people away at the very moment we
need their money more than we've ever needed
it.
And I am so glad it's happening that
way.
Oh, God in heaven, we can't manage this
any farther than we have.
We've reached the end now of our managing.
All we can do now is pray.
This is our torch.
This is our jar.
This is our trumpet.
And now how you will defeat a nine
million dollar challenge, I do not know, you
know.
And I ask that you would come in
power through the lives of your people and
beyond in ways we never dreamed to move
us to have five or 4.5 million
dollars in the bank in October.
4.5 million pledged for March of 2002
and that we move into a new building
that March, two years from today, debt free.
That's my request.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
You're dismissed.
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