A False Sense of Spirituality

Last week, we began looking into the life of Jephthah. Remember Jephthah was cast out of his his family in the land of Gilead. But when the Gileadites needed someone to lead them into battle against the Ammonites, they called on Jephthah to return home, fight for his people, and become their leader.

- If you have been around me or heard me preach for any amount of time, you probably know that I coach basketball.

o I love it, it’s fun. Challenges my thinking, and most of all I love building these relationships with these young men.

o But this past season was one of the most frustrating seasons that I’ve had.

o I can speak pretty freely. I’m sure none of them are listening.

o If they are it’s probably the first time they’ve listened to anything I’ve said.

- So I had a pretty talented team for the level of basketball we were playing.

o They started out well.

o We were winning games by 20, 30, 40 points, but we were playing sub-par competition

o I kept warning them over and over about some things in our game that would eventually come back and hurt us.

o But of course, they didn’t really listen to me because we were winning, and winning big.

o They developed this false sense of security feeling like they were unbeatable.

o Players stopped coming to practice, we started playing lazy. It was a mess

- Well, of course the time came when we played some better teams and they were exposed.

o The very same things that I had tried to warn them about were the things that ended our season prematurely.

o This team had a completely inaccurate view of themselves, and that led to their downfall.

- And as we study the rest of the Jephthah’s story, we’re going to see that Jephthah had an inaccurate view of his relationship with God, and that led to tragedy.