I have been involved in a women’s Bible study on Wednesday’s for many years, almost 2 decades now. I have come to love love love the ladies I study the Word with. Some have come and gone, others have come and stayed.

I started attending as a new bride, and I attended through two pregnancies, and now my girls are the Bible study babysitters. I’ve learned to feed myself the Word and not depend on someone else to feed me the Word of God.

That is a GOOD thing! A really, really good thing. It does make going through a study book written by someone else a bit difficult for me. I am also rather sensitive to learning what the Word says, and not what someone else says it says. I am sorry, or maybe I’m not, but I don’t really care what someone else says the Word says, or means.

Some authors/pastors/teachers  can give their opinion as if it was fact.  This causes me no real end of frustration. So many times I’ve read something, and my first thought was, “Where did they get their information?” followed closely with, “But the WORD doesn’t say that.”

Our Bible study group just finished up a study on the life of Gideon by Priscilla Shirer. In week one she encouraged us to find little hashtag statements, called Lessons From Gideon. We could share them on twitter, and everyone who followed those hashtags would know what we were learning from the study. I got more hashtag statements in just reading the story on my own.

So here are some of my Gideon Hashtags.

Judges 6:1-5

• The enemy comes in when we are the most fruitful. The Midianites would sweep in like locusts at harvest time. The time the Israelites were the more fruitful, they would come in and wipe them out.
• The enemy comes in and seems to us to be innumerable. The odds are always stacked against us. We can’t see any possible way to skirt the issues, problems, and the enemy is always right there in our face.
• The enemy comes in to devastate us and produce.
• The enemy comes in to bring us low.
• This often happens when we choose, willfully choose to do evil in the sight of the Lord. We know what He says, we know what His word says, but so often we decide to go our own way. Then we wonder why on earth we are in the situation we are in.
• The Lord ALWAYS responds. He still gives to us when we do evil, but it’s not always a good thing that He gives. It is always FOR our good, but sometimes it’s just painful.
• He gave them into the hands of Midian for seven years. The number of completion, a complete time.

Verses 11-27

• Our sin causes us to say to God–or His messenger–that God has abandoned us, and to believe it ourself. God has  not abandoned us–we have willfully chosen to abandon Him through our own wickedness and idolatry.
• God, at times, gives us a smaller job to do before the BIG one to boost our faith and to show HImself to be true and strong enough.
• God understands our fear.

Verses 36-7:??

• We often camp next to fear and then seem surprised when fear over takes us.
• When we gather an army to help us, camped by fear, God wants to get rid of them, so we will rely only on Him. Too often we want to be too self-sufficient and plan God right out of our issues. Even when it is something He has told us to do that has us scared to death.
• We can not be delivered by our own power, but we often want to boast about it as if we did it alone.
• We want to hang onto something , even when God says “let go”.
• We should always be prepared for battle.