Be Available. Accepting the Challenge to Confront the Enemy

192 Pages·2011·1.2 MB·English

by  Warren W. Wiersbe

BE AVAILABLE
Published by David C. Cook
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All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced
or used in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. (Public
Domain.) Scripture quotations marked are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®.
NIV
NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All
rights reserved; are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © Copyright 1960, 1995 by The
NASB
Lockman Foundation. Used by permission; and are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright
NKJV
© 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
LCCN 2010930482
ISBN 978-1-4347-0048-3
eISBN 978-0-7814-0509-6
© 1994 Warren W. Wiersbe First edition of Be Available published by Victor Books® in 1994 © Warren W.
Wiersbe, ISBN 1-56476-319-6
The Team: Karen Lee-Thorp, Amy Kiechlin, Sarah Schultz, Jack Campbell, and Karen Athen Series Cover
Design: John Hamilton Design Cover Photo: iStockphoto
Second Edition 2010
Contents
The Big Idea: An Introduction to Be Available by Ken Baugh A Word from the
Author
1. It Was the Worst of Times (Judges 1—2) 2. The Weapons of Our Warfare
(Judges 3) 3. “Two Are Better Than One, and Three Are Better Still”
(Judges 4—5) 4. God’s Man in Manasseh (Judges 6)
5. Faith Is the Victory (Judges 7)
6. Win the War, Lose the Victory (Judges 8) 7. My Kingdom Come (Judges 9)
8. Local Reject Makes Good (Judges 10—12) 9. The Light That Flickered
(Judges 13—14) 10. The Light That Failed (Judges 15—16) 11. “The Center
Cannot Hold” (Judges 17—18) 12. War and Peace (Judges 19—21)
13. Looking Back and Looking Around
(Drawing Some Lessons from the Book of Judges) Notes
The Big Idea
An Introduction to Be Available
by Ken Baugh
Back in the early 1990s, I made myself available to God to use my life in
whatever way He saw fit. At the time, I was the college pastor at a large church
in Southern California where God had impressed on my heart the desire to reach
my generation, known as Generation X, for Christ. The day I made myself
available to God, I prayed something like this: “Lord, I know You want to reach
the young adults in my generation, and I surrender myself to You toward that
end—I will be the janitor for my generation if You choose, Lord; just please use
me.” Little did I know of the life-altering changes that would occur as a result of
that simple prayer. Not long after this commitment, I was laid off from my
position at the church because of financial difficulties, and I was devastated. I
loved the church where I was serving, and I believed that this church provided
the necessary national platform that I needed to fulfill my God-given desire to
reach my generation—but God had the same plan for me, just a different place.
For the next eight months, I struggled to make enough money to take care of
my young family by working odd jobs until finally God opened a door at
McLean Bible Church in northern Virginia. Now I have to be honest with you,
my wife and I are native Southern Californians who love all that California has
to offer: sun, sand, surf, and fun! So Virginia was not a place we desired to move
to. But as I wrestled with God, He made it clear through a variety of
circumstances that He was calling us to Virginia, where I would have the
opportunity to live out my availability to reach my generation for Christ.
The early years at McLean Bible Church were difficult. I struggled to adjust
to Washington D.C. culture and to figure out how to work out God’s vision in a
church of 1,200 people that included a very small percentage of young adults.
But God knew what He was doing. I began a young-adult ministry in partnership
with the senior pastor, Lon Solomon, in October of 1994. The ministry was
called Frontline, and the vision was to reach unchurched young adults
throughout the Washington D.C. area for Christ. In the early days we had some
rough patches, but God was faithful, and after eighteen months things began to
grow and never stopped. God allowed me to pioneer what is today one of the
largest and most effective young-adult ministries in the country. At the time of
my departure in 2004, Frontline had grown to over 2,500 people with 23 staff,
and McLean Bible Church had grown as well to over 10,000. Today the church
continues to thrive, and Frontline has grown under its current leadership to three
locations and a number of universities in the area with thousands of young adults
involved.
Frontline is not my story; it is God’s story, a testimony to His grace and
faithfulness to use broken people like me to influence a new generation for
Christ. And throughout the years that I lived in Virginia, one of the things that
most intrigued me was how willing God was to use regular people to do His
work. As I reflect on the book of Judges, I believe this is the Big Idea that runs
through each amazing story: God uses ordinary people who make themselves
available to Him.
Take Gideon, for example. Gideon is just your normal, run-of-the-mill guy.
The angel of the Lord finds him “threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from
the Midianites” (Judg. 6:11 ). Why is Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress?
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That’s not the way a farmer separates the wheat from the chaff. Normally, a
farmer stands on top of a hill with his grain in a flat basket, and as he tosses the
grain up in the air, the wind blows away the light chaff and leaves the heavier
grain to fall back into the basket. As this process is repeated over and over again,
the grain remains, free from the chaff and ready to grind into flower to make
bread. But instead of finding Gideon on a hill, the angel of the Lord finds him
hiding in a winepress out of fear. No doubt he doesn’t want to draw the attention
of a Midianite patrol that might be passing by. But there’s no wind inside a
winepress, so threshing there is a pathetic endeavor.
Here we see Gideon, a simple farmer hiding out in a winepress, and yet the
Lord calls him into service. “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of
Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” (Judg. 6:14 ). God calls Gideon into
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service to deliver His people from oppression even though Gideon is afraid and
reluctant. Do you know what that means? It means that if God can use Gideon,
then God can use you. In fact, throughout the book of Judges you will see the
same variation on this theme. There are fourteen judges that God raised up over
a period of 350 years to do His work: Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon,
Tola, Jair, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon, Samson, Eli, and Samuel. Each one had
issues, each one had weaknesses, but God used them in spite of themselves
simply because they made themselves available. How about you? Do you want
God to use you to accomplish His purposes? He will; all you have to do is
surrender yourself to Him.
I really do believe that God uses ordinary people to do His work. Why does
He do this? Because then He gets the glory. Think about it. When people see
God doing things through regular people like you and me, no doubt they think:
There must be a God if they can do that. I know those people, and I know they
couldn’t do that on their own. The apostle Paul says something very similar:
Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not
many of you were wise by human standards; not many were
influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the
foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the
weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the
lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the
things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one
may boast before him. (1 Cor. 1:26–29 )
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Don’t miss Paul’s point here—God uses ordinary people to do His work so
that He receives the glory! Are you willing to be used for God’s glory? Are you
willing to surrender your life to His will? Are you ready to make yourself
available to Him?
D. L. Moody did. In 1872, Moody was talking with his friend Henry Varley,
who said,
“Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man
fully consecrated to Him.” The phrase startled. Moody made no
comment at the time but devoured Varley’s words, sucked at
them, digested, regurgitated them for days and weeks: “The
world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through a
man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.… A man!
Varley meant any man. Varley didn’t say he had to be educated,
or brilliant, or anything else. Just a man. Well, by the Holy Spirit
in me, I’ll be that man.”1
The rest is history as Dwight L. Moody, a former shoe salesman, became
one of the greatest evangelists in history. In addition, Moody founded the great
Moody Church in Chicago, Northfield School and Mount Hermon School in
Massachusetts, the Moody Bible Institute, and Moody Publishers. How did this
ordinary man accomplish so much for the kingdom of God? He simply made
himself available. I want to encourage you as you read the stories throughout the
book of Judges to follow their example and Be Available to the work of God.