Judges 8:4-9 Exhausted

 4Then Gideon and his three hundred men came to the Jordan and crossed it, exhausted yet still in pursuit. 5So Gideon said to the men of Succoth, “Please give my troops some bread, for they are exhausted, and I am still pursuing Zebah and Zalmunna, the kings of Midian.”

6But the leaders of Succoth asked, “Are the hands of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your possession, that we should give bread to your army?”

7“Very well,” Gideon replied, “when the LORD has delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into my hand, I will tear your flesh with the thorns and briers of the wilderness!”

8From there he went up to Penuelb and asked the same from them, but the men of Penuel gave the same response as the men of Succoth. 9So Gideon told the men of Penuel, “When I return in triumph, I will tear down this tower!”

Exhausted 

“If you, dear brethren and sisters, will give yourselves wholly to God’s work, although you will never get tired of it, you will often get tired in it. If a man has never tired himself with working for God, I should think he never has done any work that was worth doing.” (Spurgeon)

“Let us also serve the Lord when every movement is painful, when even to think is wearisome. These men were faint. You know what it is for a soldier to be faint; it is no nonsense, no pretense, it is real fainting. Yet to go running on when you are ready to faint, to keep right on when you are ready to drop, this is very trying work; yet let us do it, brethren, by God’s grace. Some people only pray when they feel like praying; but we need most to pray when we feel that we cannot pray. If we were only to preach, - some of us, - when we felt like preaching, we should not often preach.” (Spurgeon)

“Some have said that this showed resentment and harshness, but when a man is at war, he is not in the habit of sprinkling his adversaries with rosewater. War is in itself so great an evil that there are many other evils necessarily connected with it. It seems to me that if, when Gideon was trying to deliver his own countrymen, they scoffed at him, and refused him bread for his soldiers in the day of their hunger, they deserved to be punished with great severity.” (Spurgeon)

A few years ago my wife was the Nursery Coordinator for our church. It exhausted us physically and mentally after a year because we never got a break and there wasn’t enough volunteers for both Sunday services. Every function that the church had, the nursery was required to be open. When we asked the parents for help by volunteering in the nursery, we received similar responses that Gideon received when he asked for bread.

Have you ever been doing the Lord’s work and been scoffed at when you asked for help?

Blessings