Thursday, June 28, 2012

A Casual Weakness


Samson’s weakness was women, but his Achilles Heel was his hair.  Your Achilles heel is the one thing you need to protect most to ensure your spiritual strength, but the path to its rupture may be through a strategically placed weakness. 


Samson had a problem getting into trouble with the wrong kinds of women.  It followed him.  They were not his downfall per se, but one stragically placed relationship paved the way to the disclosure that would be his downfall.  Delilah pushed and prodded and needled and nosed it out of him.  Cut my Nazirite hair and I will become like any man.  What’s worse, Samson saw it coming, eyes wide open. 

What is the keystone lynchpin of your spiritual strength?  Is it your faith?  Some vow you’ve taken?  A promise you have made to yourself? 

What weakness threatens it?  Wine?  Women?  Song?  What compromise pushes and prods as it eats away at your resolve?  It may not even be some buzz, like wine (or worse).  It may not be the opposite sex.  Maybe yours is subtler: a craving for acceptance, for control.  Whatever it is, when you identify it you make it weaker.  And when you tell someone it becomes weaker still. 

Samson let a casual weakness lead to his secret strength, and so his downfall. 

God can redeem even our downfalls, as he did with Samson in the end, minus his eyes, taking out 3,000 Philistines in blood and dust. 

But why pay such a price when we don’t have to?