The Today on Truth for Life weekend, we begin a series titled More Jars of Clay, where we'll see how God often uses unlikely people in unexpected ways to accomplish his purposes.

And today, Alastair Begg introduces us to the story of Gideon,

a weak and fearful and yet obedient servant, whom God used to deliver his oppressed and impoverished

people.

I'd like to do what has been my brief, and that is to open the scriptures with you, and I invite you to turn with me to the book of judges and to chapter six.

And I can't take time to read all the way through all of it, but perhaps I'll just turn you to verse 34 of Judges 6, which reads,

Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon, and he blew a trumpet. And in chapter 7 and in verse

2, the Lord said to Gideon, you have too many men for me to deliver Midian into their hands.

In order that Israel may not boast against me, that her own strength has saved her.

The great danger that presents itself in preaching out of Old Testament narrative is the danger

of a dreadful kind of devotional preaching. I don't mean that all devotional preaching

but there is a dreadful kind of devotional preaching. The kind of sermon title out of a

great chunk of Old Testament narrative, which would run something like

Gideon blew his trumpet, why don't you blow yours?

And the key to this kind of preaching is that you read the Bible, you close the Bible,

and you never refer to the Bible again.

Or dealing with the locusts in your life.

Or squeezing the fleece.

Now, it's only funny because you preach some of these and you're... And you're annoyed that I mention them.

So we remind ourselves that if we're going to preach effectively from the Bible, we must always be men under control.

First, that we would obviously be under the control of the direction of the Holy Spirit,

but then that we would be under the control of the text itself. And if there are only three things

...