Where God Finds You

Israel was living through hard years. Each harvest, the Midianites came and destroyed the crops before Israel could gather them. In the town of Ophrah, the angel of the LORD came and sat under an oak, while a man named Gideon "threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites." A winepress was a pit cut into the rock, and he was down there because raiders could see an open threshing floor from far off. Then the angel greeted him: "The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour."

Nothing in that scene fits the title, and three verses later Gideon says so: "behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house." God does not take back the greeting, and He does not explain it. He simply says it again in another way: "Surely I will be with thee." God was not describing the frightened man in the pit. He was describing the man He was going to make.

God does this often. Abram was ninety-nine, and Sarah had never had a child, when God renamed him Abraham, "a father of many nations." Jesus named Simon Cephas, "which is by interpretation, A stone," on the day they first met, long before Simon denied Him beside the fire in the high priest's courtyard. Jacob was renamed Israel on the night he wrestled until daybreak with his hip out of joint, refusing to let go until he was blessed. Put these together and you see a pattern. God calls people by what they will become, and what they become is His work in them.

So here is an invitation. Most of us keep a blunt private description of ourselves that we never say out loud. You are welcome to bring yours to God and hear what He calls you instead. You are also free to keep arguing Him down to your own opinion of yourself. Gideon tried that. God answered him by promising again to be with him, and God kept that promise.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 124 is Whatsoever He Saith (John 2:5).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna