Let God Be the Hero of Your Story
Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Shediac · August 16, 2026 · Heroes of the Faith series
Nathan Adams looks at Gideon in Judges 6 and 7 and Hebrews 11, a weak and uncertain man whom God used to win a great victory. When we stop trying to be the hero and take the next step of faith, God shows His strength.
More from Nathan Adams · The Heroes of the Faith series
Topics: Faith, Identity, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] So today I want to speak with you about letting God be the hero of your faith story, okay, letting God be the hero of your faith story. Now, as we heard a little bit from that testimony, there were a few things that had stood out to me because Cassidy had written it out before her baptism and there were a couple lines that just struck me. When she had come to her faith again over the last year or two, she said, I no longer had to rely on my own understanding or try to control every situation. I was choosing to stop relying on my own strength and to just start following God and letting him lead my life.
[0:45] And so these are words I think that feed directly into the message today, which is so cool. So today we're going to talk about Gideon from the Hebrews Hall of Fame. So that's what we've been going through in Hebrews, Chapter 11, some of these great people that made the cut to be mentioned as pillars of the faith, as people that were notable in the Old Testament. And I love what Gideon is famous for. Gideon is famous for being weak. I mean, normally we don't put the weak people in the Hall of Fame, right? You know, you go to the Hockey Hall of Fame, there's there's people without teeth there that took more teeth than they lost, probably, right? They're not the weak are not in that Hall of Fame.
[1:32] But here, Gideon is in this Hall of Fame. And in verse 34 of Hebrews, Chapter 11, it says that Gideon was one of the people whose weakness was turned to strength. OK, so this is Gideon's listed. And what more can I say? He says in verse 32, I don't have time to tell you about Gideon, Berwick, Sampson, Jeff, David, Samuel and the prophets. So Gideon is the first one listed. And he said, let me tell you about this guy. He was weak, but his weakness was turned to strength. So Gideon was one of the judges in the Old Testament. So just to give you the storyline, you've got Abraham.
[2:19] God calls him going to make a great nation of you. His descendants multiply. They end up going to Egypt during the time of famine and become slaves. Moses leads them out into the promised land. Joshua helps them and take it over from some very evil people who love to sacrifice their children to false gods. And and as and as God has showed us exactly who I'm not to Abraham. So after they took over, though, the Israelites began to get on again, off again with God. Now, one of the things about reading the Old Testament, you can read about how they're on again and off again. And you can go, how stupid can these people be? And then you review your own life history. You go about that dumb, because human nature is very inconstant.
[3:07] We have trouble maintaining our faith. So the people of Israel have begun to look around too much at the world and begun to compromise their faith in God and mix it with other religions. And so God allowed them to fall into the hands of some enemies they had already defeated, the Midianites and Amalekites. And these people came in from the desert regions with their camels and they just covered the land. The people of Israel were so defeated that they were hiding in little caves and stuff like that, trying to get away. All their crops are being consumed by these raiders that would come in and they were in desperate straits. And so God appears to Gideon at one point and says mighty warrior. And that was hilarious because Gideon was hiding in a cave, basically, you know, and getting out of the way.
[3:59] And the Lord said to Gideon, this is in Judges chapter six, verse 14. The Lord turned to him and said, I want you to go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you? Pardon me, my Lord, Gideon replied. But how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest clan in the tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least in my family. Have you ever felt inadequate? Inadequacy will sneak up on you all the time. There is a message saying you're not good enough, smart enough, worthy enough. Nobody loves you.
[4:45] Your life's going in the wrong direction. Why don't you give up now? The sooner that we identify those voices as coming from our enemy, Satan, the better we are. But Gideon had a deep set, a deep seated sense of inadequacy, of weakness. And it and he says, you know, like there's 12 tribes in Israel. I'm part of Manasseh, which isn't bad, but my subsection, my clan, it's a tiny clan. I have no influence. We're not the leaders of the tribe. And in my family, I'm almost a black sheep. No one follows me. Why do you want me? And so this led to a second thing as God's talking to Gideon.
[5:31] Gideon is super uncertain. God says, I want you to do this. And Gideon goes, okay, sure, no problem. Can you just prove to me that it's you talking to me and not just my own weirdness in my brain taking over here? I'm going to lay out a fleece. I want you to, I want the fleece to be dry in the morning, but I want the ground to be wet. God does it great. And then Gideon goes, ah, one more time. God, can we just try that again? Let's have dry ground and wet fleece. Make sure nothing happened, you know, like does it. Hey, we've done both combinations. He comes back a third time. This guy is super uncertain. I don't know if you're identifying though with Gideon yet though. How many times have you been like, God, I just don't know which way to go here.
[6:22] What's the next step? Like, are you sure? Is it your voice I'm hearing? I mean, being manipulated by my own ambitions or insecurities or someone else, someone else wants me to do. You know, how do I know it's you? This Turkey tests God three times and somehow still gets into the hall of faith. The second thing about, the third thing about Gideon is that he's completely overmatched. So in judges, chapter seven, verse 12, it says the camels of the, the, of the Midianites, their camels could no more be counted than the sand on the seashore.
[7:08] He just picture that like a, a horizon that's blanketed with the people on the move that have come in to raid this place. I mean, are we talking a hundred thousand people, 200,000 people? I don't know, but it's, it's huge. And, and all that Gideon can muster up for strength is maybe 40,000 people when he finally gets up the courage to call Israel to fight totally out overmatched. It's a no contest type of thing. But amazingly, God comes through and delivers Gideon and Israel. They actually win. And you're like, what? This is amazing.
[7:54] And then all Israel comes up to Gideon and says, we want to make you King. You are so great. And at that time, God had been clear. I just want to lead the people by judges. I want to be the King. And these judges are just my provisional leaders. And Gideon goes, no, no, no, no, don't make me a King. But every one of you wants to give me a little donation from the plunder. We just got from the Midianites. I wouldn't say no, you know? And so he ends up getting a bunch of gold. He makes this, a ceremonial object out of gold. And you know what starts happening? The people start praying to the ceremonial object. He made an ephod or something. And, and he starts taking his family. Remember, he was the little family, nobody. Well, he has 70 sons and starts making them like a dynasty and everything like that.
[8:41] And so Gideon, Gideon doesn't have a perfect ending. It's a little bit of a womp womp. Like he didn't lead Israel right back into idolatry, but he kind of got messed up a little bit. And from going from a guy that was totally powerless, he became like a guy that was like, hey, I'm going to start a dynasty. I'm going to do something. You know, my sons are going to do this. You know what happened? The moment he died, his family imploded. His family did not end up leading Israel. So we need to go back at this story a second time. We need to see the story more clearly, you know, because sometimes hindsight in our lives is everything. And we can use Gideon's hindsight right now and then go back and look at the story one more time.
[9:28] OK, so the first thing when we look at this story is we're saying who was actually the hero in the story? Because by the end, Gideon was acting like a king. He was acting like I'm creating strength and creating legacy and things like that. But but at the start, Gideon's weakness was an opportunity for God to show his strength. So Gideon, God's come to him, appeared to him and said, hey, mighty warrior, I want you to lead my people. Gideon's like three times put God to the test. Finally, Gideon calls the nation of Israel, the ones he can the part that he can kind of get the word out to. They get together, maybe 40,000 people against one or 200,000. I don't know what we're talking about. As many as covered like just covering the horizon.
[10:15] And God shows up to him in Judges, chapter seven, verse two, he says, Gideon, you have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands or Israel would boast against me and say my own strength has saved me. So he immediately says, Gideon, just tell anybody that feel a little bit of fear, take off. Well, half the army takes off, you know. This is OK, now we're down to 20,000 people. And then God does another cut, gets it down to like 10,000 people, 10,000 against 100 or 200,000 people. Like what are we trying to do here? And then God says, now go have your army go to the stream and have a drink.
[11:04] And basically he says all the ones that drank in a kind of a weird way. They didn't do it the normal way. Choose them. Three hundred people. And God says, now you have the right amount of strength. You got three hundred. Now I can show my glory through you and you're not going to do this on your own strength. And the thing is, is Gideon never gets to a place where he's very confident. OK, so remember, he tested God three times with the fleece. Well, before the battle. God says, Gideon, are you all right? He's like, I'm not all right. And so God says, Gideon, take one of your servants and sneak into the enemy camp and listen to what you hear.
[11:50] And so Gideon sneaks down into the enemy camp. And he can hear one of the Midianites coming out and going, I just had the worst dream ever. And basically we got wiped out. Does this mean that God's going to wipe us out? And Gideon goes, oh, my goodness, God is actually putting fear into these people's hearts right now. So then what happened is that God used this is step three. God used Gideon's lack of military expertise as an opportunity to give a brilliant strategy. So here's what happened. God said. I want to take you three hundred men, divide them up into companies of a hundred.
[12:38] So company one, two and three. I want everyone in there to have a torch. A jar to cover the torch because it's burning, but we don't want the light to come out and a trumpet. OK, now, typically a huge company of men, soldiers would have one person with a trumpet to kind of do whatever. So not only so God makes it look like there's a lot of people out there around the camp and then God times it perfectly. It says in verse 19 of chapter seven, as the guard was changing, it's the middle of the night. OK, so you got like three different watches during the night. So one of the watches is changing. So that means people that are coming out from the middle of camp to the exterior and people are coming back from the exterior towards the camp.
[13:23] At that moment, when their own people are in motion, God says now and the three companies that have been placed around the camp smash their torches, hold these torches, smash their jars, hold the torches up, blow the trumpets and they're freaked out like they're already mentally freaked out because God's been giving them bad dreams. The people of Midian and the Malachites jump up, they see people moving, they think they're under attack. They just start fighting because, you know, people didn't have a nice uniform back in those days. Basically, if you're on this side of the field, that's your team and the other teams in the other side. Well, it was all mixed up. They thought they were people there. They killed each other basically. And then a route started. They took off and then only then did they call in the rest of Israel to help finish off these enemies and get rid of them.
[14:14] But it's a brilliant military strategy that God laid out every piece for Gideon to do. You know, Gideon never even used a sword at the start. He just blew a trumpet and held that torch up. You see, God was the hero of Gideon's story. Gideon's only role was to take the next step of faith. That's all he had to do. Take the next step of faith. And that's what it says in Hebrews 1133. It says through faith. These people and the Hall of Faith conquered kingdoms was through faith. It wasn't through their own strength. And so it was really funny at the start when basically God said to Gideon, go in the strength you have, Gideon.
[15:04] And Gideon is like, I got no strength. I'm the weak guy. I'm the weak family. And God said, exactly. Go in that. That's why I want. I want your weakness. And it was a shaky, neat faith that Gideon exhibited at every step. At no point did he start striding. He was always sure. But he kept taking the next step. And that's what actually matters is if you take the next step. You know, bravado only goes so far. But if you'll just keep taking the next step in faith. Now, that's what matters. It's a faith that needed constant reassurance. Does yours need constant reassurance? Mine does need it all the time.
[15:51] And God's not looking down on us. He certainly could. He could say, I told you once. And if it changes, I'll tell you that. It's a faith that obeyed God when the strategy hadn't been revealed. You know how hard it would have been to release those men? You have 40,000. Let's get rid of half of you. Let's get rid of half of you again. Let's get rid of 9,700 of you and leave me with 300. How hard is that? But he just kept obeying what the next step was. And this just plays into the whole nature of who God is and what a human being is, because God is famous for being strong. And you and me are famous for being weak.
[16:37] We really are. We're peons. We are ants. We are one of, what, eight billion people. I don't know, are we at nine yet? I don't know. There's a lot of people. Really, who am I? Who are you? How could we ever matter? But the solution to the faith story is to let God be the hero. It's literally just let him be the hero. Trust that it's not you. And the more you trust in him and the less you trust in yourself, the greater things will happen. There's this scripture verse that's so similar to the one that we just heard. You know, there's weakness. Must turn to strength is what Hebrews says.
[17:22] Well, there's a scripture verse in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 10, for when I am weak, then I am strong. For when I am weak, then I am strong. And this is not just a little principle that you can kind of apply on the fringes of what Christianity is. No, it's right at the core because Jesus himself, it says in 2 Corinthians 13, for just the next chapter after when I am weak, then I am strong. It says Jesus was crucified in weakness. Yet he lives by God's power. So the question I have for you this morning is very simple.
[18:09] Where have you been trying to be the hero of your story? You see, Gideon. Started to try to be the hero of the story. When he began to build the dynasty, when he began to build power, when he began to be able to put faith in the wealth that he had and the influence that he had. And it's then that the story started to fall apart. So where are you trying to be the hero of your story? Because it's at that very moment that the story can go south on you. But here's how you can give that role back to God today. You can say, I'm poor, I'm weak, I'm inadequate.
[19:00] And even though I'm doing well right now, I'm just about to trip over my own feet. I need you. I need you more than anything else. I could do nothing without you and you let God be the hero. Doesn't mean you're passive. You're still going to have to pick up the trumpet, follow the directions. Take the next step. You're going to have to ask some questions to God along the way like Gideon did. But under no circumstances are you going to become the hero. All the glory goes to God. All the power comes from God. The direction comes from God. And then let's see what God does with your life.
[19:48] I want to invite the praise and worship team to come up. The last song we're going to sing is called Firm Foundation. And it says he won't fail. It says God won't fail. I love that. And whatever it is you're going through right now, I just want you to say, God won't fail. I want you to say, okay, this is what I'm afraid of right now. This is what I'm struggling with. And you won't fail. One of the lines says, I am not held by my own strength. I'm held by your strength. And so whatever it is that we're struggling with today, let's again say, okay, God, I want to admit I'm struggling.
[20:34] You know, what happens is we get one little area of our life going in the right direction and we start to fake it like that's our life. Let's be honest and say, God, God, I can't do it without you. You be the hero in whatever I'm going through right now. Let's put our faith in him as we sing. Father God, as we're going to sing this, would you come and minister to us, whatever it is we're going through, whatever it is we're facing, whatever it is we're uncertain about. Maybe find from you the strength. It's not ours. It's your strength. Let us find it in you this morning. Let us renew our faith in you. Let us stop putting faith in ourselves and put it all in you, Lord, knowing that you love us and you care for us, knowing that you can take the weak people of this world and do extraordinary things through them when they're filled with your power.
[21:31] And so we worship you and praise you and surrender our lives to you this morning. In Jesus name, Amen.