Lessons From The Life Of Samson

Life Lessons: Samson

Text: Judges 13-16

Intro

Good morning Real Life… My name is Curtis and I’m the Connections Pastor here.

Before we get going I just want to give a shoot out to all who helped at VBS this past week! We had a great time learning about some sports, and about King David. We had a ton of kids and so many volunteers. I think we got a picture you all can check out… But thank you to all who served! I hear the word on the street is the gaga ball was the best sport out there…

Today we are continuing our Lesson in the Life of series where we’ve been looking at various OT characters lives and seeing what we can learn from them.

Now I’m not that old, but I am old enough to remember when these (show picture of flannel graph) were cutting edge technology when it came to telling Bible stories. These were the hight of creativity of the time.

And many of the stories that we have been looking in the series I have memories of them being played out on these boards. If you grew up in church you probably have many memories of this too…

As a kid I remember Sunday school teachers acting out all these stories of the OT. But as I got older and went to Bible college, starting studying the Bible for myself, and now working in the Church for the past 6 or so years. I’ve come to realize is those sweet old Sunday School teachers left out BIG portions of those stories. Specifically the R and X rated portions.

I’ve been told that the OT is boring… I can see how you’d say that when you read through the book of Numbers. But just thumb threw some of the stories of the OT and you will see people sinning in spectacular ways. I mean they put us to shame. Story after story of people, a lot of times God’s people, doing things that if you just mentioned at the dinner table your mom would wash your mouth out with soap.

And maybe most shocking of all is that a lot of these sins were committed by people that you grew up thinking were these good Bible heroes. And it can be disconcerting to see some of the mistakes these people have made.

What we hope to do in this series is to learn some life lessons from what each of these people what they did well and what they failed at... But what we also hope to do is to look at the real main character of each these stories, which is God. Rather than viewing Moses, Abraham, Esther, and all the others as the main characters we want to see how God is ultimately directing their story…

We aren’t looking at perfect people that got it all right. We are looking at real people, with real problems, that did some things right and did a lot of things wrong. But despite all that God still had a plan for them. And I think that’s something we can relate too, right?

Too often we look at the Bible like it’s full of perfect people… But it’s not they are normal people just like us… And that’s who God uses to tell his story… Normal people like you and me.

So that’s what we want to do with this series. We want to re-examine many of these stories that we know and see what we can learn from their lives, what life lessons they can teach us. And then we want to look at Jesus for our ultimate example.

Tension

And today we are going to look at a story found in the book of Judges and this story is warning of sorts. A cautionary tale of how not to live. But also as we look at this story we need to look at it with the lens of what God can do even with someone that will not cooperate.

So we are going to take a look today at this guy named Samson. If you want to follow along today we are going to be covering a lot of territory in the book of Judges, from Judges 13-16.

This book isn’t for the faint of heart. If these book where made into a movie it would most certainly be a strong R for obnoxious violence, crude language, and a lot of sex… Just flip through and read some of the headings on the chapters of this book and that will make you blush.

This book takes place about 1000 years before Jesus and throughout this book we see a pattern. Throughout Judges we see people start to do what is right in their own eyes. Which is often opposite of what God says is right… Maybe that sounds kind of familiar to you. But what happens in this narrative is the people do what they want for awhile but then they start suffering the consequences of their actions. So they run back to God and ask for forgiveness because things aren’t working out for them.