This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back for day two of week four in our study of the book of Judges. We're
looking at the life of Samson and what he has to teach us about how to stay
strong in life. Number three, the third thing we're going to learn from him is
that strong people endure emotional pressure.

Strong people endure emotional pressure. Samson could not handle emotional or
relational pressure in his life. He sought to escape it at all costs and his
failure here causes him to reveal to his first wife a riddle we're going to see
in just a moment.

We're going to see later this week it causes him to reveal to Delilah the secret
of his strength. This is a failure in his life that causes great disaster in his
life. Now let me set up what I'm going to read for you in just a moment.

Samson had seen he was walking and he'd seen a honeycomb in the carcass of a
lion and so he asked a group of fellow Israelites in chapter 14 verse 12, "Let
me tell you a riddle," Samson said to them. "If you can give me the answer
within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and
thirty sets of clothes. If you can't tell me the answer, you must give me thirty
linen garments and thirty sets of clothes.

Tell us your riddle," they said, "Let us hear it. " He replied, "Out of the
eater came something to eat, out of the strong something sweet. " For three days
they couldn't give the answer.

On the fourth day they said to Samson's wife, "Coke your husband into explaining
the riddle for us or we will burn you and your father's household to death. Did
you invite us here to steal our property? " Then Samson's wife threw herself on
him sobbing, "You hate me.

You don't really love me. You've given my people a riddle and you haven't told
me the answer. " "I haven't even explained it to my father or mother," Samson
replied, "So why should I explain it to you?

" She cried the whole seven days of the feast. So on the seventh day he finally
told her because she continued to press him. She in turn explained the riddle to
her people.

Before sunset on the seventh day, the men of the town said to him, "What is
sweeter than honey and what is stronger than a lion? " And Samson said to them,
"If you'd not plowed with my heifer, you would have not solved my riddle. " Now,
that's one of the great stories in the book of Judges and that line at the end,
"If you hadn't plowed with my heifer," is one of the great lines in all of the
Bible.

If you hadn't convinced her to tell the riddle, then you would not have known
the answer to this. But the truth of the matter is the reason she knew it is
because Samson couldn't handle the pressure. It cost him his wife, his freedom,
his strength, his sight, eventually his very life.

It's interesting as you look at the life of Samson that such a strong man could
have such a weak spirit. Physical strength can't make up for a lack of spiritual
resolve, of emotional strength. He didn't have any emotional strength in his
life.

He didn't have any spiritual resolve in his life. Now, you and I, what about us?
Well, you're going to face emotional pressure all of your life.

Pressure to please this person. Pressure to fit in with that person's plan.
Pressure to calm that person's emotions or fears.

Life will pressure you. People will pressure you. And you've got to choose how
to respond.

You can either choose with attempts to escape or a willingness to endure through
those. You can choose attempts to escape or a willingness to endure. Samson
always escaped.

What are you going to do? Now, escape can come in a lot of forms. You can choose
to escape by running from the situation or you can choose to escape by shutting
yourself off emotionally in the situation.

You see, you handle emotional pressure not by becoming emotionless, but by
having the right response. By responding to the person and not the pressure. How
do you endure the emotional pressures of life?

There's probably a hundred different ideas I could give you and there's a lot of
good books out there to read about them. How to have boundaries in life. How to
respond to those pressures of life.

But there's one answer that shines above every one of them. How do you endure
the emotional pressures of life? The one answer is this.

You live to please God and not people. As long as you live to please people,
you're going to be a person who is going to be subject to emotional pressure the
rest of your life. That's going to cause strengths to become weaknesses again
and again and again and again in life.

You're going to find yourself not doing what God asks you to do because you want
to please this person. You're going to find yourself doing what God asks you to
do but for all the wrong reasons because you want to please this person. So you,
as the saying goes, live for an audience of one.

God is the audience of one. You live to please God and not people. You and I are
learning from Sampson how to make sure that a strength does not become a
weakness.

The fourth thing he teaches us is this. Strong people stay connected to their
calling. There's this great difference between Sampson and people like Deborah
or Gideon that we've studied earlier in the book of Judges.

Sampson's life lacks a call. It lacks a sense of serving God. In fact, it's
pretty clear the only one that Sampson served was himself.

Sampson's parents were called. We saw that last week, yet it never became
personal to him. He did the tasks that God was asking him to do but not out of a
calling, not out of a relationship with God.

Now let me just say a couple things about strength and calling. Number one, your
strength is not your calling. Just because you're strong in an area does not
mean that you are called to do that certain thing.

You might be strong in singing. It doesn't mean you are called to be a singer.
God may have a different purpose for your life.

You might be the greatest singer who is called to work with finances in people's
lives that has ever been born. You see, when you confuse these, then you get
messed up in life. If you think that your strength is your calling, then you're
listening to your strength and not to the Lord.

No, you listen to the Lord. What is he asking you to do? And by the way, he ends
up actually using our strength in whatever calling he has in our lives.

If you're that singer who's called to help people with their finances, then
you're going to sing some song that helps them with their finances at some
point. No doubt about that. But your strength is not your calling.

God will use your strength in your calling. And the second thing about strength
and calling is this. God's call is the foundation of your real strength.

It's not your abilities that's the foundation. We often make that mistake. No,
it's God's call that's the foundation of your real strength.

And here was Sampson's failure. He made his physical strength the foundation of
his calling. Why do you do the things that you do?

Why do you serve God like you do? Because some person said you might be good at
it? Because you thought you were good at it?

Or because you know that that's what God's asking you to do, that's what he's
chosen you to do. Now, when it comes to calling, it's discovered in life. It's
not usually immediately revealed.

Sometimes it is. Rarely it is. There are examples of that in the Bible, examples
of that in people's lives today.

But usually it's discovered over time. It's worth discovering. What is God
calling you to do right now?

If you don't know the answer to that, as I say that, then take some time to
discover that because that's where your real strength in life is going to come
from. A fifth thing that we learned from Sampson about making sure that strength
does not become a weakness in our lives is this. Strong people depend on others.

Strong people depend on other people. Sampson had this great purpose that had
been given to him by God to deliver Israel from the Philistines. But he lacked
support.

No one else joined him in his purpose. In fact, this was so dramatic that his
own people actually worked against him rather than with him because he was doing
it alone. In chapter 15, verse 9, the Philistines went up and camped in Judah,
spreading out near Lehi.

The people of Judah asked, "Why have you come to fight us? " "We've come to take
Sampson prisoner," they answered, "to do to him as he did to us. " Then 3,000
men from Judah went down to the cave in the Rock of Etom and said to Sampson,
"Don't you realize that the Philistines are rulers over us?

What have you done to us? " And he answered, "I merely did to them what they did
to me. " And they said to him, "We've come to tie you up and hand you over to
the Philistines.

" Sampson said, "Swear to me that you won't kill me yourselves. " So here's his
own people fighting against him. Sampson's own people wanted to hand him over to
the enemy because he didn't fight with them.

They ended up fighting against him. And there's some lessons for life, by the
way, in that. There's some lessons for your job.

There's some lessons for your ministry. If you don't fight with people, they're
going to end up fighting against you. And Sampson uses this as an opportunity
for victory, but he was fighting alone.

Gideon was able to gather an army. Deborah was able to gather an army. 3,000
people show up here just to take Sampson prisoner, but he always fights alone.

Now it was not Sampson's whole problem, but it certainly was a great part of his
problem that he tried to do it by himself. You are not meant to be strong apart
from a support system. God made us to live in relationship to other people.

And as followers of Jesus, that support system is the church. You need the
church to be strong. It's the place where your weaknesses find support and where
your strength finds expression.

So you choose your relationships as if your life depended on it, because your
life does depend on it. The people you surround yourself with determine the kind
of life that you're going to live. As we pray today, just in prayer, I want to
go back over these things that Sampson has taught us.

Would you pray with me? And just say, Father, I want to be the kind of person
that doesn't cave into emotional pressure. I want to be the kind of person that
has strength to do what you want.

And so right now, Lord, I say, I want to live the kind of life that pleases you
and not others. Help me learn to live that kind of life. And Father, I want to
stay connected to my calling.

I want to hear it and then I want to stay connected to it. I don't want to live
out my ideas for my life. You got better ideas because you made me and you know
things I don't know.

So show me your calling. What am I supposed to be doing right now? What do you
want me doing right now?

And help me to stay connected to that calling. And then Lord, release me from
this prison of trying to live life on my own. Show me the other people you've
put in my life to lean on, to depend on, so that we together can serve you in a
better way than we ever could alone.

I ask, Lord, that you help me to have the humility to make these choices in my
life. And I ask it in Jesus's name. Amen.

Well, join us tomorrow. We're going to learn together from the most famous story
of Samson's life.