Go in the Strength You Have - John and Debby Wright - Global Leaders of the Vineyard Church Movement

You're listening to the Ranch Church Podcast. For more information and service times, go to ranchchurch.com. John and Debby Wright, who are stepping into the role of global leaders of the Vineyard movement, join us at the Ranch while on sabbatical in the Santa Ynez Valley with their family. Debby opens with a greeting from the worldwide Vineyard family and a picture of churches gathering in every kind of place, open-air settings like ours, centuries-old buildings, shanty towns, and countries where worship is not permitted, so that around the clock the Lord is receiving worship somewhere. John then preaches from three consecutive stories in the book of Judges, built around a question most of us have asked at one time or another. Could God really use me? He starts with his own story: a quiet, bullied, introverted boy who tested out as a perfectionist and a specialist, wired to be a jeweler, who has now spent almost 40 years in pastoral ministry. Then he walks through Judges 3, 4, and 6. Ehud was a left-handed man in a right-handed world, marked by a stigma that made him look expendable, and that same left hand is what God used to free Israel from 18 years under Moab. Jael was a woman in a man's world, not a leader and not a judge, a tent wife who knew how to drive a peg because she had done it a thousand times, and God used that ordinary skill to break 20 years of Canaanite oppression. Gideon was a timid man in a dangerous world, threshing wheat down in a winepress out of fear, calling himself the least in the weakest clan, and the Lord told him to go in the strength he had. The thread running through all three is Paul's word in 2 Corinthians 12, that God's power is made perfect in weakness. God's pattern is to choose people who cannot do what he is calling them to do in their own strength. The message closes with John and Debby leading a time of ministry, welcoming the Holy Spirit, praying for those held back by fear, setbacks, or the sense that they do not quite fit, and calling the church forward for prayer. Scriptures: Judges 3:12-30; Judges 4:1-24; Judges 5:24; Judges 6:1-16; Judges 7:7; 2 Corinthians 12:9-10