Introduction:
A. The story is told of a church secretary who would typically answer the phone saying, “Jesus loves you. Karen speaking. How may I help you?”
1. One day she was distracted when the phone rang, and she answered, “Karen loves you. Jesus speaking. How may I help you?”
2. There was a pause before the caller said, “Somehow I thought your voice would sound different.”
B. If you are like me, then you make a lot of mistakes in life.
1. Some of our mistakes are funny, and the best thing we can do is to laugh at ourselves.
2. Some of our mistakes are painful, and the best thing we can do is try to learn from them.
C. Someone has said, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
1. That’s what I want to try to do in our next sermon series – I want us to learn from the mistakes of biblical characters.
2. Some biblical characters are excellent examples of what to do, others are excellent examples of what not to do.
3. I’m calling the series, “Avoiding Life’s Biggest Mistakes.”
4. Hopefully this series will help us not only better know our Bibles, but also help us recognize and avoid the tempting and sinful traps with which Satan wants to catch us.
I. Samson’s Mistakes (Judges 13 – 16)
A. Today we will begin with the serious subject – Avoiding the Mistake of Sexual Immorality and the person we will use as our good, bad example is Samson.
1. We live in an age of loose morals. An age when multitudes are yielding to sexual sin, and many have given themselves over to unbridled lust and passion.
2. Immorality has become so acceptable that we have lost our ability to blush. Nothing shocks us any more.
3. Sex is used for entertainment, recreation, humor, pleasure, and even for securing business.
4. We are so exposed to sexuality that we have been desensitized and hardened to its inappropriateness.
5. And God’s perfect plan for sexuality’s meaningfulness is being lost.
B. Immorality and unbridled lust are condemned by God because of the destruction they bring.
1. Samson is a prime example of how they can destroy a person.
2. Samson became a womanizer and engaged in immorality throughout his life.
3. His two greatest weaknesses were revenge and romance.
4. In fact, his weakness for romance often led to his drive toward revenge.
5. Because of his lack of control, his life and legacy are one of the most tragic in all of Scripture.
6. His story is so legendary that most people know something of Samson and Delilah.
C. But before we get there, let’s start at the beginning of the story.
1. Israel was in a bad place at the time. Judges 13:1 tells us, “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, so the LORD delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.”
2. But then God decided to send a deliverer. His name was Samson.
3. Judges 13:2-5 reads, “A certain man of Zorah, named Manoah, from the clan of the Danites, had a wife who was sterile and remained childless. The angel of the LORD appeared to her and said, ‘You are sterile and childless, but you are going to conceive and have a son. Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean, because you will conceive and give birth to a son. No razor may be used on his head, because the boy is to be a Nazirite, set apart to God from birth, and he will begin the deliverance of Israel from the hands of the Philistines.’”
4. A Nazarite vow included no grapes, raisins, or wine, no razor, and no contact with dead bodies.
5. Most people took a Nazirite vow for a short period of time. Samson was to follow the Nazirite laws from his conception in his mother’s womb, until the day he died.
6. Manoah and his wife were overjoyed, but they were also overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising such a boy, and asked for the angel to teach them how to bring up such a boy.
7. Chapter 13 ends, “The woman gave birth to a boy and named him Samson. He grew and the LORD blessed him, and the Spirit of the LORD began to stir him while he was in Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.” (13:24-25)
D. As Chapter 14 begins, we begin to witness the mistakes that Samson made…one after another.
1. The first mistake - he went to the wrong place.
a. Look at verse 1, “Samson went down to Timnah.”
b. Timnah was in Philistine territory.
2. The second, he was looking for the wrong thing.
a. Notice the rest of verse 1, “Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a young Philistine woman.” We have to be careful about dating and marrying unbelievers.
b. He came back and told his parents, “I have seen a Philistine woman, now get her for me.”
3. The third, he rejected godly counsel.
a. His parents tried to suggest he find a more acceptable woman among his own people, but he would not have it.
b. Samson said, “Get her for me. She’s the right one for me.” (vs. 3) Literally, “She’s right in my eyes.”
c. His parents went with him to make the arrangements and on their way, Samson wandered into a vineyard (he’s not supposed to be around grapes), a lion attacked, and he killed the lion with his bare hands (he’s also not supposed to be around dead bodies).
4. The fourth, he continued the wrong relationship.
a. Verse 7 says, “Then he went down and talked with the woman, and he liked her.”
b. Evidently, he had not met her before now. He had only seen her.
c. This is the OT version of “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?”
d. Some time later, on the way to the wedding, Samson turned aside to see what had happened to the lion’s carcass, and he discovered the bees had made it into a hive for honey. He proceeded to eat some. Again exposing himself to a dead body.
5. The fifth, his pride caused him to challenge the wedding guests to a riddle.
a. If they could solve the riddle he would give them 30 sets of clothes, if they could not, then he would get 30 sets of clothes. They had until the end of the seven day feast.
b. By the 4th day, the guests were getting nervous and approached Samson’s bride, saying, “Coax your husband into explaining the riddle, or we will burn you and your father’s household to death.” (Vs. 15) These are obviously not nice people.
c. After she cried for the seven days of the feast, he finally gave in and told her the answer.
d. She immediately told the guests and they one the bet.
e. Samson was so mad he killed 30 Philistines and took their suits to pay off the bet, and left is bride standing at the altar.
f. Chapter 14 ends with the bride’s father (who is understandably embarrassed) giving her in marriage to the best man. (Sounds like something you’d see on the Jerry Springer show!)
E. When we come to Chapter 15, we see that Samson has decided he wants his wife back.
1. So rather than bringing her flowers, or chocolate, Samson gift-wraps a goat. That’s sure to win her heart!
2. When Samson discovers that she has been given to someone else in marriage, he decides he has a right to get even with the Philistines.
3. It was the time of the wheat harvest, so Samson caught 300 foxes and tied them tail-to-tail, and fastened a lit torch between them and let them go in the fields.
4. Samson single-handedly destroyed the economic base of the entire region.
5. So the Philistines went to the home of Samson’s ex-wife and burned her and her father to death.
6. Verse 8 says that Samson attacked them viciously and slaughtered many of them.
F. Later his own people turned him over to the Philistines, but Samson escaped and killed 1000 men with the jawbone of a donkey.
1. Because he was very thirsty and was out of Gatorade, he cried out to the Lord, “You have given your servant this great victory. Must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” (15:18)
2. God opened up a hollow place, and water came out of it. Then Samson drank and was revived.
3. Chapter 15 ends on a high note, “Samson led Israel for 20 years in the days of the Philistines.”
4. If Samson’s story ended here, it might be considered a tale of triumph, but it doesn’t.
G. Chapter 16 opens with an ominous sign: “One day Samson went to Gaza, where he saw a prostitute. He went in to spend the night with her.”
1. Twenty years of leading Israel, but his weakness to sexual sin is still with him.
2. Word got out that Samson was in the capital city, and the Philistines surround the house.
3. Samson somehow escapes in the middle of the night and took off the doors of the city gate and carried them to the top of a hill that faces Hebron. (They likely weighed about 700 pounds).
4. By carrying off the doors of the city gate, Samson humiliated the Philistines once again.
H. His final mistake came sometime later when he fell in love with a woman named Delilah.
1. This is the third woman (that we are aware of) that he has gotten into trouble with.
2. He had been infatuated with the woman of Timnah. He was filled with lust for the harlot in Gaza. And now, we read that he is in love with Delilah.
3. Whether Delilah loved him or not, she was offered a boat-load of money to figure out the secret to his strength, and so she took it (in today’s currency, about $15 million).
4. Perhaps she was the first woman he had ever really given his heart to and he was like putty in her hands.
5. When Delilah asks for his secret, he toys with her three times, but each time he gets closer to telling her the truth.
6. Delilah plays the “If you really loved me, you’d tell me” card, and Samson finally gives in.
7. As soon as he was sound asleep, she called in a man to hack off his hair.
8. Verse 19 says it plainly, “His strength left him.” And the last phrase of verse 20 is one of the saddest statements in the whole Bible, “But he did not know that the Lord had left him.”
9. What happened next was ugly. The Philistines had been waiting for 20 years to get their revenge.
10. They gouged out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles, and set him to grinding in prison.
11. Samson’s sin led to his own mutilation, incarceration, and humiliation.
I. Samson wasn’t stupid; surely he figured out at some point what Delilah was up to.
1. But his unbridled lust and passion had gripped his heart and blinded his mind.
2. He was driven by his desire for Delilah and so nothing else really mattered.
3. He had compromised in so many ways and had lived so permissively for so long that he had lost touch with God and His commandments.
4. Why did Samson trade such possibility and privilege for such bondage? It did not happen over night. It began with small compromises that led to bigger compromises that ultimately led to his destruction.
5. If we are not careful we can make the same mistakes.
6. Now that we have looked at Samson’s mistakes, let’s talk about our method for avoiding the mistake of sexual immorality.
II. Our Method
A. If I were to describe this morning a society in which immorality was widely accepted, and the concepts of purity and chastity were ridiculed and even considered odd – would it sound familiar?
1. If I were to speak of a culture in which the institution of marriage was crumbling, prostitution was widely available, and homosexuality was accepted – would it ring a bell?
2. No, I am not speaking about 21st century America – I am describing the first century Roman Empire!
3. That was the kind of world in which the gospel first appeared.
B. It is ironic that we talk a lot about restoring First Century Christianity, and in terms of morality we find ourselves right back in a First Century world!
1. We live in the very same moral climate, and we’re struggling with identical attitudes and actions and consequences.
2. And it’s not very comforting to realize that those same attitudes eventually led to the collapse of the once-mighty Roman Empire.
3. As we look at a text from 1 Thessalonians, we must realize just what a radical message the apostle was writing to those early Gentile Christians – he was telling those believers something that to them was new and unheard of!
4. They were learning that the standards of God’s people are quite different from the standards of the world!
5. We need to understand why God gives us such a high standard, because the world teaches us something entirely different.
6. I want us to understand why God set boundaries around the expression of sexually: they are not to restrict individuals or to cheat them out of any good thing – God’s will is designed to protect His children, and to keep them from being hurt or cheated or used.
7. God is good – God’s will is good – and if he commands us to wait until marriage, and to remain true and faithful within marriage, there must be a good reason!
C. Look again at Paul’s instructions in 1 Thessalonians 4.
1. First, he says that we should be holy. “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified…” (vs. 3).
a. God’s people are to be holy – that means to be set apart, to be different, not like the world.
b. This comes first because it is the key to everything else we’ll read!
c. We are children of our Father, so we should be like him!
2. Second, Paul says that we should avoid sexual immorality. “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified; that you should avoid sexual immorality…” (vs. 3)
3. Third, Paul clarifies that. “That each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God.” (vs. 4-5).
a. What is the standard of the world? “If it feels right, do it!”
b. I cannot think of a more silly, superficial, dangerous guide in morality! That seemed to be Samson’s attitude.
c. The Bible is emphatic – we can’t always do what FEELS right – we have to be in control of our body, not allow our bodies to be in charge of us.
4. Paul then adds, “and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him.” (vs. 6)
a. Someone might ask, “Why does God give human beings certain physical drives, and then command that they be fulfilled only within marriage?”
b. Because within the boundaries of marriage people are protected – outside that framework, people inevitably end up being burned/used/wronged.
c. Although there are many ways to engage in sexual immorality, I want to briefly address the three most prominent ones that we must do our best to avoid.
d. Samson made at least two of these three mistakes.
D. First, we must avoid the mistake of engaging in sex before marriage.
1. Sexual immorality or fornication is defined as “sexual intercourse between unmarried persons.”
2. It is a sin which God forbids. The Bible says, “Do not be deceived! Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders…will inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Cor. 6:9ff)
3. Heb. 13:4 says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”
4. Many try to justify premarital sex by saying that it doesn’t hurt anyone. But we know that is a lie. Everyone is always hurt by premarital sex – whether the harm be spiritual, emotional or physical. The consequences are devastating.
5. They might say, “It’s all right because we really love each other.” True love can never be the reason for premarital sex. True love will only do what is best for the other individual, which would be to guard their body, heart and soul from harm.
6. Another justification used is, “But we are going to be married anyhow.” This is presumptuous, naïve, and wrong. Far too many who intended to get married, don’t end up getting married.
7. And even if they do get married, they later regret that they did not wait for marriage.
E. Second, we must avoid the mistake of living together before marriage.
1 Cohabitation is now the predominate way that male-female unions are formed.
2. In 1960, only 430,000 unmarried couples were living together; by 2000, the number had soared 12-fold to 5 million!
3. 60% of Americans see nothing wrong with shacking up, including 49% of so-called born-again Christians!
4. But there are at least two things wrong with cohabitation: #1 – The Bible tells us it’s a sin; #2 – Experience tells us it is a social disaster!
5. Some try to justify living together by saying that nothing immoral is taking place, and sexually speaking, sometimes nothing is taking place, but that is rare.
a.. The couple that is living together before marriage is assumed to be sleeping together.
b. There is still the appearance of immorality, and there is also a great temptation for immorality.
c. If we really want to honor God then we will want to avoid even the appearance of evil.
6. Others justify living together by saying that it will increase the possibility of having a good marriage.
a. Studies show that just the opposite is true.
b. Marriages that are preceded by cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce.
c. Married couples that cohabitated prior to marriage have poorer communications skills.
d. Cohabitating couples are less sexually committed or trustworthy. Cohabiting men are FOUR times as likely to be unfaithful to their live-in; cohabiting women are EIGHT times as likely to be unfaithful when they are shacking up.
e. Cohabitating increases the risk of couple abuse and, if there are children, child abuse.
F. Finally, let me remind us to avoid the mistake of involvement in pornography.
1. The Barna research organization reported in February of this year, “One-quarter of adults say they have read a magazine or watched a movie or video that contained explicit sexual images in the past month (28%), while one out of every ten Americans have visited a website that showed explicit or uncensored sexual content in that same span of time (10%).. (Source: Barna Group; www.barna.org; 2/5/2007)
2. Pornography is a strong temptation for many of us, both men and women.
3. But, there is no justification for Christians to engage in any of this.
4. People might try to rationalize such behavior…”I’m not hurting anyone…I’m trying to help my marriage…I’m trying to keep myself from worse sins.”
5. It does hurt us, it doesn’t help our marriages, nor does it keep us from engaging in “worse” sins.
6. It is a sin like any other that must be addressed, and with God’s help controlled and overcome.
Conclusion:
A. My purpose in addressing these issues today is to help us be holy, as God is holy.
1. For those of us who have not get fallen into these traps and made these mistakes, then this message is a safeguard for us.
2. Decide to be pure; to save yourself for your mate. You will never regret it.
3. But it is not easy. It was about 30 years ago that I started dating, and maintaining purity was not easy.
4. Diana and I dated for one year, and then were engaged for a year and ½, and that was a long time to maintain purity, but God helped us. We continue to benefit from that blessing.
B. For others of us, we have already made many mistakes regarding sexual immorality.
1. Sexual immorality is a sin, but it’s not the unforgivable sin.
2. If a child of God has stumbled in this area, the solution is the same as outlined in the Bible for any other sin:
3. First, we must repent. We must realize we’ve wronged God, understand what we need to change, and by His grace we will change! Most of us will need some assistance and accountability.
4. Second, we accept God’s forgiveness, we make a fresh start, and don’t look back.
5. The worst thing you walk away thinking this morning is “Well, I’m hopeless, I’ve already messed up – so there’s no use trying.”
6. The most important questions for each of us today are – “Where am I right now? And where am I headed?” Not where I have been.
7. Thank God that he gives us so many chances to get it right!
C. Even Samson found a measure of comfort and mercy at the end of his life.
1. As he was suffering for his many mistakes, he turned to God and said, “O Sovereign Lord, remember me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes…let me die with the Philistines!” (Judges 16:28,30)
2. Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.
3. How amazing: a man who was beaten and blinded, humiliated by his own repeated stupidity and sinfulness, reached the bottom, turned around and discovered that God was waiting for him all the time.
4. He turned back to God and God took him back.
5. Aren’t you glad that God will do the same for me and for you?
