The Secret Of Weakness Is Compromise

 In Joshua you have the great leaders who maintained things according to God while they lived.

When they died, when Joshua died, and Caleb died, then the period of the Judges came in.

You have a much lower, lesser standard of holding things for God.

The apostles held things for God while they lived.

When they went, well, things went, and it has only been, and is only now, that here and there God raises up some ministry that recovers something for God, and it passes and God raises up something else, and it passes.

Another thing is that when the people did fail at any given point to do what the Lord needed, and to go on all the way with God...began to make compromise, to lower their standard, to accept things that God never intended to be accepted, to allow things to remain or come in... from that time onwards the Lord never cleared out the enemy altogether.

He said, "Because you have not obeyed My word in destroying all these nations, they shall remain and be thorns in your sides forever", so that you never have through this whole period a complete clearing out,

But He left these things to remain; firstly, on one hand, as a testimony to the unfaithfulness of His people as a whole, and on the other hand, as a test of the faithfulness of the people in particular.

Their presence was a declaration that as a whole, God's people had been unfaithful.

Their presence, on the other hand, was to be a test as to how many of the Lord's people in particular would be found faithful.

So you have Gideon with three hundred out of thirty-two thousand.

The rest are not going all the way, and God in a Judges era secures His great victories not by a whole compromising people, but by some who will go all the way with Him.

Are we in conditions like that today?

I do not think there is any doubt about it. The whole background as it is today spiritually, betokens weakness through compromise.

It is a day of small things, and strength where there is a willingness to go all the way with the Lord.

The secret of weakness is compromise, and the secret of power is utter abandonment to the will of God. 

That is summing up Judges in a few words. We said it follows Joshua and that is the key. 

~T. Austin Sparks~