Lather, Rinse, Repeat

After a long layoff, we're going to jump back into this thing called the internet. It's relatively new so I don't know if it will last, but all the experts seem to think that the internet isn't a fad. We'll see...

We've spent the last 3 weeks looking at the life of Samson. He provides a case study of what happens when we choose the things we want over the things that God desires. The pastor issued a challenge Sunday morning when he told us that we need to be aware of who we are, why we are here and where we're going. Samson missed it. God had called him to be separate, gave him an incredible gift, and positioned him to be the instrument of Israel's deliverance. Instead, Samson chose to live a life governed by his own passions, became just like everybody else, wasted his gift and fell short of what he could have been.
There are really two big ideas that we need to take away from this. The first is that Samson started with small compromises that nobody would notice. As a Nazirite, he was supposed to never cut his hair, avoid touching dead things and not eat a grape in any form (Num 6: 1-8). When we see him in Judges 14, he is in a vineyard eating honey from a dead lion. The key is that he is alone. Nobody sees him do these things, but everyone still sees the hair. On the outside, he is every part the Nazirite but on the inside he is forfeiting the call to be set apart. He willingly chooses to act like everyone else while trying to appear like God's servant.
The second thing is how his life ends. His tenure as a judge is really a failure from our perspective. Israel is still in bondage to the Philistines, Samson is blind and imprisoned and the Spirit of the Lord has taken away his gift. Samson got exactly what he wanted - to be like everyone else. Even with all that, Judges 16:22 reveals a lot about who our God really is. "But the hair on his head began to grow again". Samson's failure was not the end of the story. Many of us have spent time in Samson's shoes (I think they were actually sandals, but you get the idea) wasting our gifts far below what God intended as we make our rounds shackled to the mill. Even then, God sees and hears us.
Let's leave behind the vineyards that we wander in, let our hair grow and be the people God has called us to be.