Gideon is faith is really challenged when his plans for success fall by the wayside. He calls for an army and gets a mob. He thinks “What can I do with a mob?” and gets told it’s going to get even tougher! Sound familiar.

Do you ever feel like God simply isn’t listening to your plans?

Do you ever feel like God is making life unnecessarily harder?

Have you ever been in a dry season in your life and thought you couldn’t take much more?

Then you understand the story of Gideon!

During the time of Gideon (Judges 6& 7), when the people of Israel would grow desperate and cry for help, God would raise up some unlikely leader to conquer whatever enemy was oppressing them. These deliverers, known as “judges,” weren’t necessarily upstanding models of spiritual virtue. But the Lord would empower and use them to deliver His people from servitude or national disaster. And then when peace was restored, the nation would fall right back into another long stretch of sin and apostasy. It happened every time. The cycle is repeated over and over again.

In Judges 17:6 and 21:25 (the book’s final verse), the writer sums up precisely why it was such a miserable time: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Here’s the Key: Are we still “trying to do what is right in our own eyes?”