My own hand has saved me

This is a story is about God accessing our hearts and minds with his good purpose and subduing our resistance because of our ideas of who we are and what we should be doing. God does the approaching.
God wants to guide us in the true manner of responding to him in faith, and to safeguard us from the two following extremes of misunderstanding – under estimating or over estimating our part in his will and purpose in our lives.
1. GIDEON - I’m not worthy so God would not bother with me.
Judges 6:15 So he said to Him, “O my Lord, how can I save Israel? Indeed my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house.”
God had to do a lot of convincing with Gideon that it was all about God’s grace and power (Grace is a gift [charis] that works in a multitude of expressions – loving spiritual empowerment Ephesians 2:8)

2. SAUL - I’ll make the decisions about what I believe God should endorse (3rd commandment).
1Chronicles 10:14 and Saul did not inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse.

Judges 6:11 Gideon was threshing wheat in the winepress, in order to hide it from the Midianites. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!” Gideon said to Him, “O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has forsaken us and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites.”
Then the Lord turned to him and said, “Go in this might of yours (just previously proclaimed), and you shall save Israel from the hand of the Midianites. Have I not sent you?”
Judges 6:15 So he said to Him, “O my Lord, how can I save Israel? Indeed my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house.”
And the Lord said to him, “Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat the Midianites as one man.”
And THEN the Lord said to Gideon - after shrinking his army from 32,000 to 300;
Judges 7:3 “The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel claim glory for itself against Me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me. And twenty-two thousand of the people returned, and ten thousand remained. (The 10,000 was then reduced to 300)

3. DAVID understood the middle path of grace between the two deceptive extremes. David learned total trust that God knew what was right and best, and found rest and peace in his soul. Jesus is called ‘the son of David’ – the perfect example of that middle path. Acts 13:2 He will do everything I say… David did TWO BIG things – He trusted and he praised/worshipped God.
God has to be anchored somewhere in HIS BEING in the earth and it is in people who turn up as a Gideon willing to be God’s partner – Or as a Saul who is willing to become a David.

2Corinthians 4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us… 15 For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.