The Lies We Believe: Beyond Quick Fixes to Real Freedom Part 2Sample

Our beliefs about God and ourselves are often products of our past experiences. At least, that’s the experience of a man whose life was shaped by a lie about God.

Judges 6 introduces Gideon during one of Israel's darkest periods. The people had abandoned God and were suffering under Midianite oppression. Every harvest season, the Midianites would sweep in like locusts and steal all their food, forcing the Israelites to flee to caves in the mountains.

Judges 6 doesn’t show us Gideon on a threshing floor where wheat was typically processed. Instead, he’s hiding in a wine press underground, despite the lack of wind. Fear was making Gideon's job much more complicated than it needed to be.

This is what happens when a spider plagues you. Your decisions become governed by fear, and you settle for far less than God intended.

When the angel of the Lord comes to Gideon, the angel says something that must have seemed completely ironic: "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." (Judges 6:12 NIV)

To someone threshing wheat in a wine press, driven by fear and hiding from enemies, being called a "mighty warrior" probably felt like a cosmic joke! But God sees you differently than you see yourself.

However, Gideon had become cynical and couldn’t see what God wanted to show him. “If the LORD is with us, why has all this happened? And where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about? They said, ‘Hasn’t the LORD brought us out of Egypt? ’ But now the LORD has abandoned us and handed us over to Midian.” (6:13 CSB)

Gideon had a spider - the lie that God had abandoned him.

Maybe that's your spider, too. Deep down, you feel like God has abandoned you. You might never have said these words out loud, but in your heart, you believe God has left you to figure things out on your own. You think He isn't hearing your prayers or showing up the way He does for others.

The tragedy about Gideon's belief is that just a few verses earlier in Judges, God’s prophet announced the people had abandoned Him. “I rescued you from the power of Egypt and the power of all who oppressed you. I drove them out before you and gave you their land. I said to you: I am the Lord your God. Do not fear the gods of the Amorites whose land you live in. But you did not obey me.’” (Judges 6:9-10 CSB)

God was saying, "I'm not the one who left. You abandoned Me."

We often buy into the lie that God has abandoned us during difficult seasons when things don't go the way we thought they would. We create this story to make sense of our pain, even when there's evidence to the contrary.

But here's the truth: the decisions we make today write the story we'll tell tomorrow. When you're in pain, you need to be very careful about what you choose to believe about God, because that decision will shape everything that comes next.

Tomorrow, we'll explore how our enemy leverages our difficult experiences to plant these lies in our hearts.