Introduction
If you went up and down High Row in Darlington with a clipboard and a microphone asking people what their idea of a hero is, some people might talk about the armed forces, emergency workers, healthcare professionals or charity campaigners. Others might mention their parents, or prominent sports stars or performing artists or mythical figures like Spiderman.
Heroes usually inspire us, but sometimes they disappoint us when for example some sordid truth about them gets exposed.
This sermon series is called Heroes of Faith and the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, contains a long list of them. Listen to what it says there about their exploits; “They conquered kingdoms … they shut the mouths of lions, they quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; their weakness was turned to strength; and they became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again.”
And in this list, alongside the likes of Joseph and Moses and Gideon, we find Samson. Samson was the one who shut the mouths of lions and who was endued with mighty strength.
We have no physical description of Samson in the Bible, apart from his long hair. Illustrated Bibles usually imagine him looking like this.
This is an image that appeared at the top of my Google search. But if Samson was an absolute unit, like this, why do you think Delilah asked him in chapter 16, “Samson, what is the secret of your amazing strength?”
If Samson had the physique of Mr. Universe, there would be no secret. The source of his strength would be obvious. So he probably looked quite ordinary, maybe more like this.
If Samson had the physique of Mr. Universe, there would be no secret. The source of his strength would be obvious. So he probably looked quite ordinary, maybe more like this.
Because the secret of his mighty strength was not rippling biceps, or a washboard stomach, but the supernatural anointing of the Holy Spirit.
God calls flawed people, inadequate people, who may be, humanly speaking, totally unfit to serve him. I raise my hand as Exhibit One.
God delights to use you just as you are. Please, never say, “Oh, I could never do that.” You can. The Bible says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” So you certainly can. Because God loves to empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Well, let’s read the beginning of the story of Samson. This is Judges, chapter 13.
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...
[Remember what Ciaran said two weeks ago? This is the cycle that keeps repeating in the book of Judges. Israel rebels against God. So God sends enemies against them, which is painful. So the people cry out to God. So God, in his mercy, sends them a deliverer. So the land is restored to peace. But then the people forget God and fall into sin once more. And the cycle starts all over again].
...A certain man of Zorah, named Manoah, from the clan of the Danites, had a wife who was childless, unable to give birth. The angel of the Lord appeared to her and said, ‘You are barren and childless, but you are going to become pregnant and give birth to a son. Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean. You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.’
Then the woman went to her husband and told him, ‘A man of God came to me. He looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I didn’t ask him where he came from, and he didn’t tell me his name.
[And then she repeats what the angel said to her].
Then Manoah prayed to the Lord: ‘Pardon your servant, Lord. I beg you to let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us how to bring up the boy who is to be born.’ God heard Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman while she was out in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her. The woman hurried to tell her husband, ‘He’s here! The man who appeared to me the other day!’
Manoah got up and followed his wife. When he came to the man, he said, ‘Are you the man who talked to my wife?’ ‘I am,’ he said. So Manoah asked him, ‘When your words are fulfilled, what is to be the rule that governs the boy’s life and work?’The angel of the Lord answered, ‘Your wife must do all that I have told her...’
[And then the angel repeats again the instructions he gave earlier].
Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, ‘We would like you to stay until we prepare a young goat for you.’ The angel of the Lord replied, ‘Even though you detain me, I will not eat any of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, offer it to the Lord.’ (Manoah did not realise that it was the angel of the Lord.)
But Samson is not just about calling. His story, as we’ll see over the next two weeks, is all about character, which is critical if you are going to fulfil the purposes of God for your life.
Samson was filled with the Holy Spirit in an amazing and unique way. The anointing of God on that man was powerful. If Samson was around today, he’d have his own show on God TV.
But tragically, as we’ll see, Samson will never fulfil his potential. For all his Holy Spirit anointing, Samson will never have the stability or the gravitas of a real man of God and he will waste his life.
I say this with great sadness - and I’ve seen it time and time again - you can have a magnetic personality, and charisma in spades and incredible gifts; you can heal the sick and drive out demons, you can wow everybody around you with how amazingly prophetic you are.
But if you don’t display the fruit of the Spirit; love, patience, moral goodness, kindness, gentleness, self-control; if you find all that stuff boring and instead spend your whole life running after the next charismatic sensation, you will never build anything enduring in the kingdom of God.
God calls and God equips in unique ways, but his greatest desire for each one of us is to grow up into Christlike maturity.
One of the biggest puzzles in life, for me, is that God doesn’t always give the anointing of the Spirit to the most mature people.
When I get to heaven, I’m going to ask God, “Why did you sometimes give the most powerful gifting to weirdos who were unaccountable, unteachable, proud and self-exalting?” Me, me, me. I remember Jeremy Simpkins saying, “Stick an i in front of any product and it will sell better.” iPhone. iPad. id.Buzz. iPod. iMac. iPlayer.
Samson more than anyone, loves it when the world revolves around me, me, me. He’s ungrateful, self-obsessed, sexually loose and excessively violent. And yet undeniably anointed by God!
The calling of God on his life (to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines) was, in the end, fulfilled - because God is faithful. But Samson’s death, as we’ll see in two weeks’ time, is even more tragic than his life. He will crash and burn. He will die a pathetic hero, humiliated, blinded and tormented by the regrets of a wasted life. He will never master his own appetites and he will never bring himself under control.
Lanny Bassham, was gold-medallist in the Montreal Olympics in the small-bore rifle competition. And he once said this: “Our sport is controlled non-movement. We are shooting from 50 meters - over half a football field - at a bull’s eye the size of a small coin. If the angle of error at the point of the barrel is more than 0.005 of a millimetre (that is five one-thousandths), you drop into the next circle and lose a point. So we have to learn how to make everything stop. I stop my breathing. I stop my digestion by not eating for 12 hours before the competition. I train by running to keep my pulse around 60, so I have a full second between beats. You do all of this and you have the technical control. Then you have the other 80% of the problems - the mind.”
That’s the self-mastery you need to be a winner. If we’re going to avoid ending up like Samson, wasted talent, we’re going to have to put to death the flesh, embrace spiritual discipline and learn to hate the excesses that ruined Samson’s life.
Samson's parents – a few problems
In chapter 13 of Judges, we get to meet the parents, Manoah and his wife. What does the Bible say to us about these two? They seem to be an ordinary couple. They have their cares and worries like everyone else: their people are suffering under the oppression of the Philistines, a situation which has lasted 40 years already.
Moses had warned the Israelites, in Numbers 33.55, that the Philistines would be “thorns in your side”. It’s a warning that God repeats word for word in Judges 2.3.
These Philistines are a serious enemy, constantly raiding the foothills from the coastal plain; arson, kidnapping, ransacking, plundering, killing. Isaiah 2.6 speaks of their divination; it’s a people steeped in the occult. They settled on what we now call the Gaza strip, and they caused Israel constant grief.
But Manoah and his wife’s greatest grief is that they can’t have a child. For years they wait, for years they try. Years of visits to the doctor, years of praying, years of hopes, of disappointment, and finally of defeat.
I think being unable to have children is an affliction unlike any other. In my own life, my most uncontrollable sobbing has come at times of miscarriage. So I guess Manoah and his wife must have cried together, they must have yelled up at the stars at night, “Why us?” Now this couple is already past the stage where they are inconsolable. Now they are simply resigned. There’s nothing they can do. They are powerless. And it’s then that God acts.
Maybe there are some amongst us today who are waiting on God for a breakthrough. For years, you have prayed for something and… you’re still waiting. Spiritual barrenness, a brick wall at work, a family problem, a matter of the heart, a long illness, a financial worry… What if today is the day when at last God announces the breakthrough?
Even if long ago you quietly gave up believing that God hears your prayers, who knows if today isn’t the day that he has chosen to move? One of our grown-up children was estranged from us for about ten years. It’s a long story…
Some of you know the story well. Kathie and I prayed, and prayed, and had all but given up hope. Then, in a single day, everything changed. Contact was reestablished and everything was restored. Manoah and his wife are a reminder to us this morning that nothing is impossible with God.
Every time I read this story, I get the impression that Samson’s parents are a couple with problems. Reading between the lines, I think they have issues with communication and trust. For a start, we keep finding them physically apart. It’s like they find being with each other a bit of a strain.
Then in v10, when they are together, she tells the Manoah that the angel has come back, but he doesn’t really believe what she says. Why doesn’t he just take her word for it?
Then in v11 he has to ask, “Are you the one who spoke to my wife the other day?” She’s literally just told him that in v10. How to make your wife feel devalued, lesson number one; never take her seriously.
And it seems that Manoah is familiar with lesson number two as well. In v12 he asks the angel what he’s supposed to do about this son who is going to be born. And the Angel of the Lord replies, a bit frostily, that if he’d listened to his wife in the first place, he wouldn’t need to ask. “I’ve already told your wife,” he says - twice. How to make your wife feel devalued, lesson number two; check out everything she tells you with independent sources.
The evidence points to the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Manoah are not all that happy together. Marital misery so often traces its origin to small niggles like this. Frustration leads to bickering, and bickering leads to scoring points - we’ve all seen couples behave like this and it’s horrible. It’s embarrassing.
The seeds of divorce are things like misunderstandings, poor communication, buried anger, disagreement which is swept under the rug instead of being dealt with, and unforgiveness.
It’s true for couples but it’s true for all relationships. Maybe today the Holy Spirit is putting his finger on something you need to put right today. God loves to mend broken lives and strained relationships.
Samson himself – a promising start
What about Samson himself? Here’s an interesting statistic I came across once: the percentage of Americans who own a pair of running shoes and who never actually do any running. It’s 87%! That’s Samson, he’s got all the equipment, all the flashy stripes, all the right gear, but what’s the point?
In v25 it says, “The Spirit of the Lord began to stir him.”
God’s Spirit is starting to rouse him, to fire him up, to awaken passion for the mission God has for him to do. But it’s only a beginning. And the truth is that Samson loves the trainers, but he never actually runs anywhere. He gets out of the starting blocks with God but doesn’t run far because he gets distracted by something in the crowd.
I wonder if there are people here today who feel that they are at exactly the same place? There’s no medal awarded for bursting out of the block quickest. God is looking for men and women who are going to stay on track and finish the race. So let the Holy Spirit today reignite that flame, that zeal, inside you.
Some of us here have been Christians a long time. Maybe you had a powerful experience with God and you remember being spiritually ablaze, but that was ages ago, and the fire has long since cooled. Or maybe, if like Samson, you’ve only known the Spirit start to stir you… You have a spiritual gift or natural ability that you never use.
For others here, what you know God wants to do in your life has stalled. There may be reasons for that. You might be unwilling to let go of something that is inhibiting what the Spirit has started. You might be nervous about going deeper with God. You might be paralysed by feeling unworthy. Can God really use me? Yes, he can.
Still others of us are young in faith. So the Holy Spirit is stirring you now and it’s a new adventure in your life. People sometimes say, “I need more of the Holy Spirit.” Will you let Holy Spirit have more of you?
Philippians 1.6 says “I am confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
I believe God will bless and honour your next step of faith and humility to respond to him now.
Ending
In the 1970s, Paul Anderson was the strongest man in the world. In 1956, he won the Olympic gold medal for weightlifting. He only stood 5'9" tall, but he weighed over 26 stone, or 170 kilos. His massive body allowed him to lift weights his competitors couldn't even imagine.
He’s in the Guinness Book of Records for a back lift of over 2,840 kilos. It is listed as the greatest weight ever lifted by a human being.
He was also a devoted Christian who put on shows to support orphanages he ran in Georgia. He did things like lift a table holding 20 people from the audience. He also drove nails through boards with only a wrapped handkerchief protecting his palm. Then he would say: “If I, the strongest man in the world, can’t get through one day without Jesus Christ, what about you?”
As we share communion now, we do so saying, “Me either. I can’t get through one day without you, Lord. I need grace to start again. I need your forgiveness. I need to hear once again, “neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more…”
So, as we come to his table, let’s respond now in faith to the One whose strength is displayed perfectly in our weakness.
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 25 October 2026
God calls flawed people, inadequate people, who may be, humanly speaking, totally unfit to serve him. I raise my hand as Exhibit One.
God delights to use you just as you are. Please, never say, “Oh, I could never do that.” You can. The Bible says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” So you certainly can. Because God loves to empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Well, let’s read the beginning of the story of Samson. This is Judges, chapter 13.
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...
[Remember what Ciaran said two weeks ago? This is the cycle that keeps repeating in the book of Judges. Israel rebels against God. So God sends enemies against them, which is painful. So the people cry out to God. So God, in his mercy, sends them a deliverer. So the land is restored to peace. But then the people forget God and fall into sin once more. And the cycle starts all over again].
...A certain man of Zorah, named Manoah, from the clan of the Danites, had a wife who was childless, unable to give birth. The angel of the Lord appeared to her and said, ‘You are barren and childless, but you are going to become pregnant and give birth to a son. Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean. You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.’
Then the woman went to her husband and told him, ‘A man of God came to me. He looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I didn’t ask him where he came from, and he didn’t tell me his name.
[And then she repeats what the angel said to her].
Then Manoah prayed to the Lord: ‘Pardon your servant, Lord. I beg you to let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us how to bring up the boy who is to be born.’ God heard Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman while she was out in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her. The woman hurried to tell her husband, ‘He’s here! The man who appeared to me the other day!’
Manoah got up and followed his wife. When he came to the man, he said, ‘Are you the man who talked to my wife?’ ‘I am,’ he said. So Manoah asked him, ‘When your words are fulfilled, what is to be the rule that governs the boy’s life and work?’The angel of the Lord answered, ‘Your wife must do all that I have told her...’
[And then the angel repeats again the instructions he gave earlier].
Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, ‘We would like you to stay until we prepare a young goat for you.’ The angel of the Lord replied, ‘Even though you detain me, I will not eat any of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, offer it to the Lord.’ (Manoah did not realise that it was the angel of the Lord.)
Then Manoah enquired of the angel of the Lord, ‘What is your name, so that we may honour you when your word comes true?’ He replied, ‘Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.’ Then Manoah took a young goat, together with the grain offering, and sacrificed it on a rock to the Lord.
And the Lord did an amazing thing while Manoah and his wife watched: as the flame blazed up from the altar towards heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fell with their faces to the ground. When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realised that it was the angel of the Lord. ‘We are doomed to die!’ he said to his wife. ‘We have seen God!
But his wife answered, ‘If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and grain offering from our hands, nor shown us all these things or now told us this.’ 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.
Calling and character
Samson, like Gideon and all the other Judges, was called by God for a particular mission. His precise calling was announced even before he was born. Before he had done anything at all, good or bad, God says about Samson in v5, “He will begin to deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines.”
When you read Romans 9 you see God’s sovereignty in sharp focus. It shows how God knew that he was going to send Jesus to save sinful people before he created sinful people.
In addition, it shows how God has a plan for individuals even before they are born, and it names Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Esau and Pharaoh.
God has a purpose for your life too. It was established before you were conceived. Before creation was spoken into existence, God already knew you, loved you and had a design for your life. This is what the Bible says, so pursue the Lord with all confidence, because he calls you according to his plan and purpose.
And the Lord did an amazing thing while Manoah and his wife watched: as the flame blazed up from the altar towards heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fell with their faces to the ground. When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realised that it was the angel of the Lord. ‘We are doomed to die!’ he said to his wife. ‘We have seen God!
But his wife answered, ‘If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and grain offering from our hands, nor shown us all these things or now told us this.’ 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.
Calling and character
Samson, like Gideon and all the other Judges, was called by God for a particular mission. His precise calling was announced even before he was born. Before he had done anything at all, good or bad, God says about Samson in v5, “He will begin to deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines.”
When you read Romans 9 you see God’s sovereignty in sharp focus. It shows how God knew that he was going to send Jesus to save sinful people before he created sinful people.
In addition, it shows how God has a plan for individuals even before they are born, and it names Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Esau and Pharaoh.
God has a purpose for your life too. It was established before you were conceived. Before creation was spoken into existence, God already knew you, loved you and had a design for your life. This is what the Bible says, so pursue the Lord with all confidence, because he calls you according to his plan and purpose.
But Samson is not just about calling. His story, as we’ll see over the next two weeks, is all about character, which is critical if you are going to fulfil the purposes of God for your life.
Samson was filled with the Holy Spirit in an amazing and unique way. The anointing of God on that man was powerful. If Samson was around today, he’d have his own show on God TV.
But tragically, as we’ll see, Samson will never fulfil his potential. For all his Holy Spirit anointing, Samson will never have the stability or the gravitas of a real man of God and he will waste his life.
I say this with great sadness - and I’ve seen it time and time again - you can have a magnetic personality, and charisma in spades and incredible gifts; you can heal the sick and drive out demons, you can wow everybody around you with how amazingly prophetic you are.
But if you don’t display the fruit of the Spirit; love, patience, moral goodness, kindness, gentleness, self-control; if you find all that stuff boring and instead spend your whole life running after the next charismatic sensation, you will never build anything enduring in the kingdom of God.
God calls and God equips in unique ways, but his greatest desire for each one of us is to grow up into Christlike maturity.
One of the biggest puzzles in life, for me, is that God doesn’t always give the anointing of the Spirit to the most mature people.
When I get to heaven, I’m going to ask God, “Why did you sometimes give the most powerful gifting to weirdos who were unaccountable, unteachable, proud and self-exalting?” Me, me, me. I remember Jeremy Simpkins saying, “Stick an i in front of any product and it will sell better.” iPhone. iPad. id.Buzz. iPod. iMac. iPlayer.
Samson more than anyone, loves it when the world revolves around me, me, me. He’s ungrateful, self-obsessed, sexually loose and excessively violent. And yet undeniably anointed by God!
The calling of God on his life (to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines) was, in the end, fulfilled - because God is faithful. But Samson’s death, as we’ll see in two weeks’ time, is even more tragic than his life. He will crash and burn. He will die a pathetic hero, humiliated, blinded and tormented by the regrets of a wasted life. He will never master his own appetites and he will never bring himself under control.
Lanny Bassham, was gold-medallist in the Montreal Olympics in the small-bore rifle competition. And he once said this: “Our sport is controlled non-movement. We are shooting from 50 meters - over half a football field - at a bull’s eye the size of a small coin. If the angle of error at the point of the barrel is more than 0.005 of a millimetre (that is five one-thousandths), you drop into the next circle and lose a point. So we have to learn how to make everything stop. I stop my breathing. I stop my digestion by not eating for 12 hours before the competition. I train by running to keep my pulse around 60, so I have a full second between beats. You do all of this and you have the technical control. Then you have the other 80% of the problems - the mind.”
That’s the self-mastery you need to be a winner. If we’re going to avoid ending up like Samson, wasted talent, we’re going to have to put to death the flesh, embrace spiritual discipline and learn to hate the excesses that ruined Samson’s life.
Samson's parents – a few problems
In chapter 13 of Judges, we get to meet the parents, Manoah and his wife. What does the Bible say to us about these two? They seem to be an ordinary couple. They have their cares and worries like everyone else: their people are suffering under the oppression of the Philistines, a situation which has lasted 40 years already.
Moses had warned the Israelites, in Numbers 33.55, that the Philistines would be “thorns in your side”. It’s a warning that God repeats word for word in Judges 2.3.
These Philistines are a serious enemy, constantly raiding the foothills from the coastal plain; arson, kidnapping, ransacking, plundering, killing. Isaiah 2.6 speaks of their divination; it’s a people steeped in the occult. They settled on what we now call the Gaza strip, and they caused Israel constant grief.
But Manoah and his wife’s greatest grief is that they can’t have a child. For years they wait, for years they try. Years of visits to the doctor, years of praying, years of hopes, of disappointment, and finally of defeat.
I think being unable to have children is an affliction unlike any other. In my own life, my most uncontrollable sobbing has come at times of miscarriage. So I guess Manoah and his wife must have cried together, they must have yelled up at the stars at night, “Why us?” Now this couple is already past the stage where they are inconsolable. Now they are simply resigned. There’s nothing they can do. They are powerless. And it’s then that God acts.
Maybe there are some amongst us today who are waiting on God for a breakthrough. For years, you have prayed for something and… you’re still waiting. Spiritual barrenness, a brick wall at work, a family problem, a matter of the heart, a long illness, a financial worry… What if today is the day when at last God announces the breakthrough?
Even if long ago you quietly gave up believing that God hears your prayers, who knows if today isn’t the day that he has chosen to move? One of our grown-up children was estranged from us for about ten years. It’s a long story…
Some of you know the story well. Kathie and I prayed, and prayed, and had all but given up hope. Then, in a single day, everything changed. Contact was reestablished and everything was restored. Manoah and his wife are a reminder to us this morning that nothing is impossible with God.
Every time I read this story, I get the impression that Samson’s parents are a couple with problems. Reading between the lines, I think they have issues with communication and trust. For a start, we keep finding them physically apart. It’s like they find being with each other a bit of a strain.
Then in v10, when they are together, she tells the Manoah that the angel has come back, but he doesn’t really believe what she says. Why doesn’t he just take her word for it?
Then in v11 he has to ask, “Are you the one who spoke to my wife the other day?” She’s literally just told him that in v10. How to make your wife feel devalued, lesson number one; never take her seriously.
And it seems that Manoah is familiar with lesson number two as well. In v12 he asks the angel what he’s supposed to do about this son who is going to be born. And the Angel of the Lord replies, a bit frostily, that if he’d listened to his wife in the first place, he wouldn’t need to ask. “I’ve already told your wife,” he says - twice. How to make your wife feel devalued, lesson number two; check out everything she tells you with independent sources.
The evidence points to the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Manoah are not all that happy together. Marital misery so often traces its origin to small niggles like this. Frustration leads to bickering, and bickering leads to scoring points - we’ve all seen couples behave like this and it’s horrible. It’s embarrassing.
The seeds of divorce are things like misunderstandings, poor communication, buried anger, disagreement which is swept under the rug instead of being dealt with, and unforgiveness.
It’s true for couples but it’s true for all relationships. Maybe today the Holy Spirit is putting his finger on something you need to put right today. God loves to mend broken lives and strained relationships.
Samson himself – a promising start
What about Samson himself? Here’s an interesting statistic I came across once: the percentage of Americans who own a pair of running shoes and who never actually do any running. It’s 87%! That’s Samson, he’s got all the equipment, all the flashy stripes, all the right gear, but what’s the point?
In v25 it says, “The Spirit of the Lord began to stir him.”
God’s Spirit is starting to rouse him, to fire him up, to awaken passion for the mission God has for him to do. But it’s only a beginning. And the truth is that Samson loves the trainers, but he never actually runs anywhere. He gets out of the starting blocks with God but doesn’t run far because he gets distracted by something in the crowd.
I wonder if there are people here today who feel that they are at exactly the same place? There’s no medal awarded for bursting out of the block quickest. God is looking for men and women who are going to stay on track and finish the race. So let the Holy Spirit today reignite that flame, that zeal, inside you.
Some of us here have been Christians a long time. Maybe you had a powerful experience with God and you remember being spiritually ablaze, but that was ages ago, and the fire has long since cooled. Or maybe, if like Samson, you’ve only known the Spirit start to stir you… You have a spiritual gift or natural ability that you never use.
For others here, what you know God wants to do in your life has stalled. There may be reasons for that. You might be unwilling to let go of something that is inhibiting what the Spirit has started. You might be nervous about going deeper with God. You might be paralysed by feeling unworthy. Can God really use me? Yes, he can.
Still others of us are young in faith. So the Holy Spirit is stirring you now and it’s a new adventure in your life. People sometimes say, “I need more of the Holy Spirit.” Will you let Holy Spirit have more of you?
Philippians 1.6 says “I am confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
I believe God will bless and honour your next step of faith and humility to respond to him now.
Ending
In the 1970s, Paul Anderson was the strongest man in the world. In 1956, he won the Olympic gold medal for weightlifting. He only stood 5'9" tall, but he weighed over 26 stone, or 170 kilos. His massive body allowed him to lift weights his competitors couldn't even imagine.
He’s in the Guinness Book of Records for a back lift of over 2,840 kilos. It is listed as the greatest weight ever lifted by a human being.
He was also a devoted Christian who put on shows to support orphanages he ran in Georgia. He did things like lift a table holding 20 people from the audience. He also drove nails through boards with only a wrapped handkerchief protecting his palm. Then he would say: “If I, the strongest man in the world, can’t get through one day without Jesus Christ, what about you?”
As we share communion now, we do so saying, “Me either. I can’t get through one day without you, Lord. I need grace to start again. I need your forgiveness. I need to hear once again, “neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more…”
So, as we come to his table, let’s respond now in faith to the One whose strength is displayed perfectly in our weakness.
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 25 October 2026
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