Guarding Your Heart (Judges 8:27)

And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.
—Judges 8:27

I want to encourage you to listen to the danger here—the warning here for every single one of our lives. Just to make sure you get the context, Gideon has, by God’s grace, been used at this point to bring deliverance to God’s people from the Midianites. God has given him success. Yet here in Judges 8:27, Gideon does something that goes against the word of God. He made an ephod and put it in his city in a way that led Israel into idolatry.

So, don’t miss the danger and the warning here of how success can, just like that, so quickly lead to sin. How, even after being used by God to do something or experiencing God’s grace in a powerful way, we in our sinful nature can, just like that, turn around and do that which goes totally against God’s word and lead other people into sin. Success, if we’re not careful, can lead to sin immediately and in all kinds of ways in our lives.

Judges 8:27 reminds us of our sinful weakness.

The takeaway is this: guard your heart at all times. As we read through God’s word, we see constant exhortations to guard our hearts, our minds, and our lives when things are going well, or when we experience some sort of success or blessing. So we pray, “God, help us to guard our hearts always—all day long, today, tomorrow, in every situation, and in every circumstance.”

Specifically, O God, based on this picture of Gideon in Judges 8, we pray that when you bless us, give us favor, or grant us success in certain ways, you would please help us to stay humble and close to you in those moments. We pray you’d help us to grow in humility, knowing that you are the giver of all favor, success, and blessing. And God, we pray that you would keep us from becoming confident in ourselves, or from taking the influence you give us with others and using it in ways that are not glorifying to you.

God, please help us to be holy in success, to be holy on good days—on days when, by your grace, we experience your goodness and evidence of your hand in ways far beyond what we could imagine. God, help us to honor you with humility and holiness in those moments. And in every moment, O God, in all that we do, help us to point people to you and never away from you. God, we pray that over our every interaction today. Help us to point people to you because we want them to know you, O God, to trust you, and to worship you—not the gods of this world. We pray for that.

A Prayer for the Krio Fulani People

We pray for the Krio Fulani people of Sierra Leone, for all sixty-five thousand of them. God, please, please bring them out of the worship of false gods to enjoy and experience the grace that is found in you alone, Jesus, the one true God. We pray for the spread of your love to the Krio Fulani people, that they might worship you. God, we pray that that would be the fruit of our lives: more people worshiping you because of all that you do in our lives, including all the ways you pour out your grace on us.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.