By
Shelby G. Floyd
Good morning! God is great! A-men. It is a beautiful day, and it is good to be back among my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. We had a great vacation in Florida. It was in the 70’s and 80’s most of the time. It is wonderful to get away and rebuild our energies and rest up a little bit. It is great to be back, and I am ready to go to work! I appreciate Mitch taking care of things while I have been away, and I do the same for him when he is away on vacation. Also I appreciate Larry teaching the Bible class and I understand he has done an excellent job.
And now I am ready to present to you the word of God. Our lesson today is from Judges the 4th and 5th chapters of the Old Testament. Larry read our text in Judges 4:4-11. I could have given our lesson today different titles. We could have called our lesson, “Deborah the Cheerleader!” Or we could have entitled it, “Two Men Went to Jail.” But to keep it simple, we shall simply call it “Deborah, Barak, and Sisera.”
Now the book of Judges is about God’s people serving the Lord, obeying his word for 20, 30, or 40 
years and living in peace and security. And then they would fall away by worshipping idols and committing all sorts of sin. Then God would turn them over to the ungodly nations of the Canaanite people who would punish them and make them slaves. And then they would cry out again for God to help them. They could not throw off these people who had put them into bondage. Then God who loved his people would raise up a deliverer who would set them free again. God called these deliverers Judges! This was a continuous cycle during this period. Before Deborah there were Judges named Othniel, Ehud, and Shamgar. The last judge before Deborah was Shamgar. The Bible doesn’t say much about Shamgar, but what it says is enough: “… Shamgar son of a Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistines with an ox goad. He too saved Israel” (Judges 3:31). What a man! He killed six hundred men with an ox goad! I would not want to mess with a man like him. Continue reading “DEBORAH AND BARAK: THE SIN OF NEUTRALITY”