“I do my best to serve God, but I seem to achieve so little compared to others.”
IMPORTANT reading: SHAMGAR – JUDGES chapter 3 verse 31; 5 verses 6-9
I suspect that most of us have felt this way at some time in our Christian journey. It is so easy to become preoccupied with what others are achieving for the Lord and to become demoralised with our own apparent lack of success.
If you find yourself in this situation, I suggest that a meditation on SHAMGAR, a largely ‘unknown’ Old Testament character, will encourage you to ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself down and move forward’!
Let us meditate on the headline messages of encouragement he has left us:
DON’T BELITTLE YOURSELF
- when we are first introduced to SHAMGAR, we discover that he is a Gentile, whose name comes from a Canaanite god of war
- he is a farmer / ploughman; yet, the grace of God gave him a place among His people that he did not merit
- it is not the vessel, but what God puts into it that counts
DON’T BECOME DISTRACTED BY ADVERSE CIRCUMSTANCES
- SHAMGAR lived in challenging times of desolation, deviation, desertion, declension, defeatism and distress – chapter 5 verses 6-9
- however, he continued to serve the Lord
- adverse circumstances were never intended to drive us away from God but to bring Him near to us
- in the 1st century, persecution did not halt the spread of the gospel but led to its expansion!
DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF WHAT GOD COUNTS AS SUCCESS
- we might well question what were the 600 Philistines slain by SHAMGAR, compared to the achievements of the other great leaders, e.g. Gideon, Samson, Caleb?
- far from ‘writing him off’, God left him a great accolade in the Bible: ‘and he also (just like the other great leaders) delivered Israel’
- his exploits will never be forgotten!
SHAMGAR teaches us that we must be prepared to do for God what we can, with what we have it and God will both honour it! A largely unknown man, with a despised ox goad, achieved great things for God.
To be continued