Don't be sufficient in your faith

We love and root for the underdog. In some ways, being the underdog is easier than being the champion. Champions tend to have the have the best facilities, the best coaches and massive amounts of resources. Each of those blessings is accompanied with the expectation that the team who has the best will do the best. As for the underdog, if they just show up and compete, then they are doing well. No one expects them to win.

Gideon and his army did not start out as the underdog. When God looked upon them, he saw the opposite problem that we would see. He did not look at them and think they didn't have enough people but that they had too many. Gideon was instructed to walk through two phases of reducing his troops. The first phase was simply to go to all who were afraid and say, "If you are afraid, go home." Imagine the disheartening and sinking feeling when all but 10,000 soldiers left. Yet 10,000 brave warriors were better than 300. Then the Lord gave Gideon the details of the second filter. He was to take the men to the water's edge and observe them while they drank. The ones who placed their faces in the water to lap it up were to be removed from the battle. This filter left this warrior with only 300 men to lead into battle against an army whose resources were seemingly innumerable. An army with sufficient skills and equipment was reduced to a conquering band of 300 warriors.

Sufficiency is one of the greatest threats to living a life of dynamic faith. When our resources are sufficient, we have just enough. When we have just enough, we are dependent upon ourselves and not the one who possesses all. Our independency gives birth to pride, and our pride yields to the confession of "Look what I did by my own strength."

Pride in our sufficiency blinds us to the dependent faith that God can and will work through us to accomplish greater things than we could ever have imagined. We need something in our lives that only when looking back we can say "look what God did through me." No matter how depleted your resources may be, how comparatively meager your skill set is, with God the minority has always been the majority.

Rob Hurtgen is a husband, father, minister and writer. Read more from him at www.robhurtgen.wordpress.com.