FAILING FORWARD
SAMSON, WEEK 4
This is the final week of our series called Samson.
If you have your Bibles with you, turn to Judges, Chapter 16 (pg 174)
We are looking at one of the most frustrating characters in the Bible.
This was a guy who was given so much by God.
From birth, Samson was called by God,
set apart by God,
empowered with supernatural strength from God
God did this for a specific purpose,
Samson was supposed to help free the Israelites
from the oppressive rule of the bad guys,
the Philistines.
But even though Samson was given all of this power
and this divine calling,
he, just like so many of us
messed up, again and again and again.
We said that he was an incredibly strong man
with a dangerously weak will
and again and again broke his vows to God
chasing after the wrong women,
touching things he wasn't supposed to touch,
drinking things he wasn't supposed to drink,
and getting a really bad haircut
when he was never supposed to get his hair cut.
We also looked at his emotions
and we saw that one of his problems was,
he was emotion driven, not Spirit led.
That's a problem for a lot of us,
our emotions get out of control
and we end up letting them drive us
rather than the Spirit drive us.
Last week, we saw that
most people don't ruin their lives all at once,
how do they ruin their lives?
One step at a time.
We saw that Samson
ruined his own life, step by step by step,
and this guy who had been given so much,
just like many of us have been given so much,
He pretty much blew it all.
This week we're going to pick up the story
when he's now a prisoner
he’s been blinded,
he’s in chains, attached to a grinding wheel,
that was designed for an ox,
and he's pushing this grinding wheel in a circle
hour after hour, day after day,
as everybody's mocking him,
calling him names,
making fun of him.
You just can't get any lower
than the low point where Samson is.
That raises the question,
what do you do when you realize
you have really blown it?
What do you do, when you realize
you've wasted years of your life,
you've wasted the gifts God has given you?
You've done things that you can't undo,
you've hurt people that you love,
you're embarrassed by your actions,
and you didn't do what God created you to do.
Let me talk for a second to the men here…
we take this kind of failure very, very personally,
even more so than most women,
because men and women typically find value
in different ways.
For example, women more often find value in relationships.
They’re concerned about
"Do you like me?"
"Are we friends?"
"Can we hug?"
"Can we cry?"
"You took 72 seconds to text me back, are we still BFF's?
For most women, life is very relational.
even going to the bathroom,
is relational!
Not for guys.
If a guy wants to go to the bathroom with me,
its over,
I’m never going near him again.
And if a man does happen
to see a friend in the bathroom, that’s okay,
you’re allowed to talk;
but just do not make eye contact,
There’s an unwritten rule,
you look at the wall.
if you look at another guy in there,
you lose your man card!
And its because men are just different,
we’re not as relational.
We want to be liked
but that's not as big a deal for us.
because our primary source of value
is not relationships but accomplishments.
A man wants to know,
How do I measure up?
Did I do good?
Did we win?
Did we conquer?
Yeah, we want to be liked,
but we’d rather be respected.
In fact, in the Love and Respect Marriage series,
They bring out a really interesting point.
If you ask a woman,
would you rather be loved or respected?
she will almost always say,
if I had to choose, I’d rather be loved.
If you ask a man,
would you rather be loved or respected,
he will almost always say
I’d rather be respected.
Because for men,
it's not all about relationships.
It's not so much,
"Hey, do you like me?"
it's, "Do you respect me?"
And that means that, when we fail,
and when we lose respect,
we take it so personally
that we sometimes feel like
we will never recover from failure.
And that's why generally speaking,
A Man's Greatest Fear Is Failure
And His Greatest Pain Is Regret.
Our greatest fear is
we do not want to fail,
we want to measure up,
we want to be successful.
And when we don't live up
to our expectations or someone else's,
our greatest pain is regret.
"I wish I hadn’t done this,
I wish I had done that,
"I should have"
“Why didn't I?"
I wish I could go back and do it different,
its too late now for me.
In fact, there are many of us here, that
if we just look at the law of averages,
many of us here,
one day you’re going to face some significant regret.
Maybe one day you’ll look back at a failed marriage,
and realize it was mostly your fault,
and you could have made it work,
but you didn’t,
and you really regret it.
Or one day you’ll look back at
kids who’ve rejected you,
because you weren’t there for them,
and now you’re filled with regret.
Or this could look like,
the guy who regrets not marrying.
And years later he's like,
"I wish I’d treated her better,
I wish I hadn't been so selfish!
And now, here I am alone
and I wish I’d done things differently.
Or, it might be the guy who is so frustrated
because he's in a career that feels beneath him
and he's living paycheck to paycheck
and some of his friends are doing better
and he feels like a failure because of that.
Or, it may not be the outward failure,
sometimes it's the inward failure
that no one else sees,
that gets him.
It's the promise he made to himself
or the promise that he made to God
that, "I'll never, ever, do that again!"
And then by Thursday he does it again
and inside he feels like such a failure.
Samson's story teaches us something
that we have to
embrace, internalize, and live with.
It's the principle that
just because you failed at something
does not mean that you are a failure.
In fact, here’s the key thought for today…
A Failure Is An Event, Never A Person.
We're going to see in Samson's life,
a guy who failed
over and over and over and over again,
and when it looks like he has failed
way too often for God to ever even love him
much less use him,
we're going to watch and see that
God still uses him to accomplish His purposes
God still uses a man
that repeatedly could not get it right.
You see, in God’s eyes,
Just because you're down, you are not out.
That is good news for some of us here.
Just because you're down, you are not out.
If you failed at something, you are not a failure,
because a failure is an event never a person.
Let's watch this story unfold in Judges 16, verse 23.
Now the rulers of the Philistines (Those are the bad guys)
assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to celebrate, saying, "Our god has delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands."
Now, this place they were gathered
would have looked like a huge coliseum,
There's a big open area,
with layers of seating on top of each other.
There was a huge flat roof over the temple,
and there are 3,000 people gathered on the roof alone,
not to mention all the thousands on the main floor,
So this is a huge building.
And they're worshiping Dagon, which was their idol.
Dagon had a man’s head and a fish body.
So they worship this man-fish god.
They’re making sacrifices
and praising the man-fish god.
'Hey man-fish god,
thanks for letting us capture Samson!'
Now, by the way,
I have to say, personally,
I’m glad we don’t worship a man-fish god,
it sounds kind of strange,
you might say it sounds a little fishy.
Verse 24
When the people saw Samson, they praised their god, saying,
"Our god has delivered our enemy into our hands, the one who laid waste our land…
You remember a couple of weeks ago
we read about the 150-pair of foxes incident?
When Samson tied torches to the foxes
and burned their land,
that’s what they're talking about here,
Samson's the guy who laid waste our land…
and the one who did what else?
and multiplied our slain."
You remember the jawbone incident?
where Samson took the jawbone of a donkey
and killed a thousand Philistine warriors.
So they're saying,
'This is the guy.'
But our man-fish god eventually proved stronger,
because look at Samson now.
Verse 25:
While they were in high spirits, they shouted, "Bring out Samson to entertain us." So they called Samson out of the prison, and he performed for them.
Now, when it says he performed,
this doesn’t mean he was doing a song and dance.
It wasn’t Philistine idol happening here,
even if they were worshipping an idol.
This basically means they made him stand there,
in chains,
while they laughed at him and made fun of him.
And the truth is, this is like the ultimate low point.
A mans greatest fear is failure,
and here Samson is totally and completely shamed
in front of God's enemies,
he has failed massively.
Now, there are two possible responses to failure:
The natural response is remorse.
And this unfortunately is where a lot of people stop.
Remorse, is
I feel bad about what I did,
I shouldn't have done it,
I really regret it.
Sometimes remorse will turn inward,
I'm a bad person."
"I'm horrible, I'm no good,
I have no future,
I hate myself,
I hate my life!"
and it turns inward.
Other times, it turns outward
into kind of the
"I'm the victim and it's someone else's fault."
"This wouldn't have happened
if you hadn't or if they hadn’t...",
and "I didn't ask for this!"
and 'You know what?
It's all Delilah's fault, she stabbed me in the back!'
All I wanted to do was dedicate a love song on the radio,
and it’s all her fault.
When remorse turns outward,
we look for somebody to blame.
In fact,
Some of you men only remember one verse
from all of last week…
You remember verse 16 where it says…
'She prodded him and nagged him day after day after day, until he was [what?] tired to (what)?
Yeah, see? I knew you could memorize scripture.
However, I want to warn you, men…
that is not a good verse to quote to your wife.
I won’t say if I’m speaking from experience,
but you don’t want to bring that verse up in an argument, ever! Just trust me on this one.
In fact, there’s 2 verses in the story of Samson
that are like, a big no-no.
don't quote that verse
and don't let anyone plow with your heifer.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about
its because you missed church
when we were talking about that,
and you missed all the good jokes.
But anyway,
the first response to failure is remorse,
either inward; "I'm a loser, I'm no good,
or outward; it's someone else's fault."
But there's a way better response to failure:
and that is:
Repentance.
the natural response is remorse,
the better response is repentance.
With repentance, we start by admitting we blew it:
I own it, my fault, I goofed up,
But we don’t stop there.
It's not just, "Hey, I didn't do what God wanted,
and I’m sorry about it.
You then go another step.
I not only turn away from the wrong
but I also turn toward what’s right."
That's what repentance actually means.
Remember from last week,
most of us don't ruin their lives all at once.
How do we do it?
We do it one step at a time.
And if you're going the wrong direction,
what do you do?
You turn around,
and go the other direction.
That's what repentance is.
Remorse focuses on the bad,
it looks back to all of the things we did wrong.
I’m sorry I goofed up.
But repentance turns from the lower,
to that which is higher;
we turn from our lower, sinful ways,
and turn back to God's higher ways.
It's not just, "I feel bad about this",
but also
"I'm turning toward God
and I’m committing myself
to follow his ways and his purposes."
You see, all of us
are going to do some things in this life
that we can't undo.
For example there are many times
I can look back on,
when I blew my top over something,
I was so angry at a person,
and I let them know it,
but then later I realized,
I didn’t have the whole story.
If I’d checked out the facts a little more carefully,
I wouldn’t have said the things I said,
but now its too late,
I can’t go back and undo it.
there are some actions you cannot undo!
there are some words you cannot unsay!
there are emails that you cannot unsend!
Which is why I love this video.
VIDEO
We all wish it was possible to undo big mistakes,
like this guy tried to…
but you can’t.
There are some things you cannot undo!
but you can repent.
there are some things you cannot unsay!
but you can repent.
Some of you may at some point
face the horrible realization,
you can't unsleep with that person you slept with,
but you can repent.
Again, Repent does not just mean,
"I'm sorry I got caught
and I admit I shouldn't have done it,
no, that’s remorse.
I'm talking repent,
which means I turn toward God’s ways.
Because you can't undo the way you hurt someone,
you can't unlook at what you looked at,
you can’t go back in time and do
that thing you failed to do,
but you can repent!
You can repent.
And I believe that Samson came to a point in his life
where he genuinely repented.
It wasn’t just remorse, but repentance.
I believe Samson remembered at least a little bit of
who he was created to be.
He’s realizing,
I wasn't created to be entertainment for my enemies
in the temple of a man-fish god.
I was created and set apart by God
from the day I was born,
to do something significant.
To be used by God,
to do something
that will make a difference for eternity,
not just to waste my life.
I think Samson realized
what all of us in this room need to realize,
though most of the time we forget.
And it's my prayer that everyone in this room,
if you haven’t already,
will at some point realize that
you were created for a great purpose,
to do something significant.
To be used by God,
to do something that will make a difference for eternity.
And I hope that you don't let your spiritual enemy
lure you into just a remorse,
looking back,
"Oh, I wish I could have,
or I shouldn't have,
or I didn't,
I hate myself,
or it's not my fault."
I hope that instead of just remorse and regret,
you’ll come to a repentance that says,
"I'm not going to let, what I did
stop me from doing
what God wants me to do.
I'm turning away from my sin
and I'm turning toward God!
I cannot change my past."
but I can change my future.
You see,
Just because you're down, doesn’t mean you’re out.
A failure is an event, not a person.
You are not a failure,
you are who God says you are,
you are his child, his heir,
and he still has a great purpose for you.
Samson realizes this,
right at the end of his life,
in verse 25: it says,
When they stood him among the pillars,
So he's in this temple, like a coliseum
with these giant pillars that support the weight of the place.
Samson said to the servant who held his hand, "Put me where I can feel the pillars that support the temple, so that I may lean against them." Now the temple was crowded with men and women; all the rulers of the Philistines were there, and on the roof were about three thousand men and women watching Samson perform.
Then Samson prayed to the Lord, "Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more…
In other words,
'I've blown it a thousand times,
but I don't need a thousand more chances.
God, all I need from you is one more chance.
One time God, one more chance,
just find it in your mercy
to strengthen me just once more.'
Because God, I don’t want my life to end
in weakness and humiliation,
I want you to be my strength,
even if it’s just for a little while right at the end,
I want to go out in your strength God,
not in my weakness and shame.
So give me one more chance, God,
strengthen me once more.
Samson is at his lowest point;
Massive public humiliation.
Nobody respects him anymore,
nobody loves him,
Nobody believes there's anything good in this guy,
they’re all laughing and making fun of him,
but internally he has a private moment with God
just as some of you have had,
or will have again,
Samson says,
I’ve blown it God,
I can’t undo what I did
I can’t go back in time,
But I repent God, I’m turning to you for strength,
Give me Your strength, God
and this time I’ll use it for you.
I can imagine Samson’s prayer.
God, these Philistines are worshipping this man-fish idol,
they think he’s stronger than you.
they think he beat you, God,
but they’re wrong,
God, help me show them how wrong they are.
Strengthen me once more,
and I’ll use it to bring you glory and honor, this time,
they’ll see which God is really God,
they’ll see who is really strong.
And God answered that prayer with a yes.
You see, we serve a God
who never gives up on us.
Our God says that,
when a man is down,
he is not out.
he’s not done for,
he’s not history,
he’s not finished,
Our God gives us second chances,
he strengthens the weak,
he heals the sick,
he sets free the captives,
in fact he does his best work
through people who’ve blown it,
people who are weak,
people like you and me.
You see,
Even in our failures, God can still accomplish His purposes.
What was God's purpose for Samson's life?
That he would deliver God's people
from the cruel oppression of the Philistines.
Verse 29:
Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other, Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines!" 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.
Now, Samson’s life is a tragedy,
its an example for us of what not to do,
but it’s also a powerful illustration
that even in our failures,
God can still use us.
Even when you've messed up, it's not over.
You are not what you did,
you are who God said you are.
If you're not dead, you're not done.
God will strengthen you again,
if you’ll repent, and turn towards him.
So quit living in remorse,
I shouldn't have,
I wish I hadn’t, I'm not, I'm never, I'm just a mess,
I'm never going to make anything out of my career…
Quit living in remorse,
or another way to say it, is,
Quit whining,
and instead, repent,
turn toward God,
Ask him to strengthen you again.
If you’re a follower of Christ,
you have the same Spirit in you,
that raised Christ from the dead
and God’s spirit will strengthen you again, if you ask.
You may be down, but you are not out.
You can overcome anything in God’s strength.
You can be a man or woman of God,
a blessing to this world,
a leader,
an example of what God can do in the weakest person,
God is not finished with you yet.
But let me tell you what its gonna take.
For many of us,
we need to push some pillars down.
Like Samson, It's time to push the pillars down.
So the question I have for you is,
What are the pillars in your life,
that need to come down?
And I want to get specific here.
Why?
Because there is one thing I dread.
I dread the possibility that,
people will show up here week after week,
and you’ll say,
oh, great series on Samson,
I liked that, I learned some new things,
good job Ken,
But then you’ll walk out of here and do nothing with it.
Nothing will change,
you’ll go on just the same.
So I put some blanks on your outline,
What pillars are you pushing down?
I want you to write down specifically:
What pillars are you pushing down?
And how are you going to do it?
Because I know for a fact,
there is nobody in this room, including myself,
that’s living a perfect life.
We all have areas to grow,
we all have pillars to push down,
So what pillars are you pushing down?
For some of us, it's time to push down the pillars of pride:
For others, it might be anger.
"I've been mad at the whole world
when in reality I'm mad at myself!"
What are you going to do about it?
How are you going to push it down?
What are you going to do different?
You see, you can't just say,
"I want something to be different",
and then not do anything different.
If you want a different result,
you've got to do something different.
Maybe you need to call and get counseling,
maybe you need to confess to someone,
or admit to someone "I need help!"
God has called you to do something great with your life,
to be his man or women,
to do his work and be an example,
to make a difference with your life.
Don't just wallow in remorse,
I feel so bad,
I wish I was better,
I feel guilty, poor me.
The answer isn’t remorse, its repentance.
Turn toward God.
Do something different.
and then watch
as God leads you step by step.
You may be down but you're not out.
Proverbs 24:16
For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again.
That’s talking about you.
You may have fallen seven times
or 7,000 times,
but its time to rise again and do something different.
Because God will strengthen you once more,
if you ask him.
Satan loves to make strong men weak;
but our God loves to make weak men strong!
LETS STAND FOR PRAYER
Father, I pray that Your Spirit would work deep within our hearts and that Your Spirit would do a healing work. God, no matter what we've done in the past, would you help us to see who you created us to be? Help us to see the pillars in our lives that need to come down, and then show us the next step, show us how to push those pillars down, what’s the first step we need to take. Help us not to get stuck in remorse, but to go on to repentance, to turn toward you God and follow you daily, step by step.
God, I pray that we would be different, forever different because we've been in Your presence, because Your Word has been proclaimed and because Your Spirit is here. We thank you God that in Your presence we cannot stay the same.
I pray for life transformation by the power of Christ, that we wouldn't try to be stronger in our own strength, but we would admit our weakness, and allow Your strength to be made perfect through us.
There are those of you that you feel very, very guilty for the things you've done. You look at your life and say, "I've blown it, I've messed up so many different ways. I've blown it in such a big way." Here is the good news; you are here today because God wanted you to be here, because His love is greater than your greatest sin, because God in His love for you, while we were still sinners, He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die for us. On the cross, Jesus became sin for us; He shed His blood to cover our sins. He died and He rose again so that anyone and that includes you, it doesn't matter what you've done, it doesn't matter how low you feel. It doesn't matter how far away from God you believe you are, no matter what you've done, anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
What does that mean? Your sins will be forgiven, you will be brand new.
Your old life, it's gone and everything is new.
Jesus, take my life and make me new. I step across the line, it's no longer about me, it's all about You. I give my life wholly and completely to You God. Make me new, make me Yours. Fill me with Your Spirit so I could serve you for the rest of my life. I repent, I turn to You.
In Jesus' name I pray!
