Deborah, Barak, And Jael Series

My last question is in all this weird story, where was Jesus? If you have been here long enough, my goal is every sermon somehow should try to tie in Jesus and not in some sort of a contrived way. But if we believe that Jesus is the center of everything for us, we always have to ask that question: where is Jesus? Personally, I didn’t want to preach on this passage because Jesus is nowhere to be seen in this passage. The more I reflected on it, I thought sure he is right in the middle of the whole thing. Right smack dab in the middle. If you have been around this series since the beginning, you may recall we are calling it The Story. It is the story of the Bible, but it is actually a story about God bringing his people back home. It is a story of God redeeming his people and the redemption comes through Jesus Christ. So this story of Deborah just like many of the other stories in the Old Testament are merely just glimpses of the ultimate redemption that comes through Jesus Christ. Even though this story took place a long time ago, I think most of you can acknowledge the fact that we live in evil times. We live in a time where people are doing evil in the site of the Lord. We live in a time of chaos. You can’t help but watch TV and see the weather or whatever it is and there is something going on here. I don’t want to say what it is, but it seems like God might be up to something behind the scenes. What is going on here? In the midst of all this evil, people are still being caught into slavery. Not physical slavery but slavery related to addictions. Things like alcohol and drugs and pornography. But really enslavement of the mind. People who are so caught up in fear they can’t even get out of bed. People that are caught up in depression. People that are caught up in anxiety. They are enslaved. You have all these people out there crying out to the Lord. The Lord says I have sent you a deliverer. The person’s name is not Deborah, not Barak, not Jael. His name is Jesus Christ. Different from the deliverers back then that only lasted for about 20 or 40 years, the deliverance that comes through Jesus Christ lasts for all eternity. God is saying I am still delivering people. The story of Deborah is just a snapshot of the greater redemption that comes through Jesus Christ. God is out there saying I am out there. I am doing it. I am orchestrating you. Even though he sent Jesus Christ who is now in the form of the Holy Spirit to us, he still uses people to accomplish his deliverance. He needs us. He needs the Deborahs out there. He needs the prophets and the prophetess out there. He needs people that have the gift, not the arrogance, but the gift of prophecy that are willing to examine a situation whether in the church or in the world and say this is what I see here. Because of their credibility in the past, you begin to listen to them because you know that they are in-tune to the spite of God and they have the authority not by title but by influence and by knowing that they have spent time with Jesus. They smell like Jesus because they are so close to him. Those people are what the church needs. God is saying I have accomplished my deliverance but I need some Deborahs. I need some prophets. I need some prophetesses to rise up. But I also need some Baraks. I need those reluctant leaders. I need those people that just maybe have a little struggle with their own security but they know that they are being called to lead something. They are smart enough to figure out that they can’t do it on their own. If they don’t have that connection to God, they better seek out a man or woman that has that connection. Otherwise, they are setting themselves up for failure. God is saying I need people like that. I need people to rise up and be the Baraks. Even the Jaels. The gruesome act she did, but it wasn’t about the gruesome act. It was the fact that God had placed this woman at one place at a particular point in time in a particular season, a woman who was torn between the world and God, and when the timing was right, God gave that person an opportunity to choose which side she was on. You may be one of those people. You may be one of those people that God is setting you up to make a decision because you are riding on the fence. You don’t know whether you are in the world or with God. You have one foot in the church and one foot in the world. God may give you the opportunity to choose and hopefully you choose rightly. If you choose rightly, if you choose to be on the side of God instead of the side of Jabin or Sisera, he is going to allow you to participate in the glory and allow you to participate in the honor that he gets.