YOUR Start Doesn't Decide YOUR END Rebroadcast | Pastor Sean Pinder

YOU did not choose YOUR start. The family, the background, the label that got attached to YOU before YOU could do anything about it — YOU inherited it. And somewhere along the way, YOU may have accepted the verdict other people handed YOU: that because of where YOU came from, there are certain things YOU will never be, certain doors that will never open. Judges 11 was written to tear that verdict up.

There was a man marked from birth by something he had no part in choosing.

Because of the circumstances of his beginning, he was treated as less-than, and eventually his own family drove him out — pushed him away, cut him off, told him in effect that he did not belong and had no future among them. He was disqualified in everyone's eyes for something that was never his fault. By every measure, his start had decided his end.

Here is what most people miss.

The very people who threw him out came back. A crisis rose up that they could not handle, and they suddenly needed exactly the person they had discarded. The one they rejected turned out to be the one they could not do without. What they had held against him did not disqualify him at all — it set up one of the most stunning reversals in Scripture, where the outcast was asked to become the leader.

And then something came upon him that had nothing to do with his background.

The Spirit of God came on him, and the rejected outcast went out and won a victory that delivered an entire people. The circumstances he never chose did not stop the calling on his life. They became the backdrop that made the reversal unmistakable. Nobody could say he earned it by his pedigree, because his pedigree said the opposite. It was God who took the one written off from birth and made him a deliverer.

There is something in that arc — born into