The Compromise of the Cut

I’ve been spending far less time on social media these days, and although I am not a medical doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health expert, or really an expert on much of anything, my advice is, I would encourage you to do the same. It has been incredibly refreshing and, honestly, so much more peaceful than I realized it could be. There is something about removing some of the constant noise that gives you room to actually hear yourself think again, and maybe more importantly, gives you room to hear God.

What I’ve found in stepping away from some of that, and having life slowed down on me a little bit here for a while, is that I’m reading a lot more, writing a lot more, my blog posts on here have taken a small uptick, and I’ve even started writing a personal page over on Substack. But more than any of that, it has allowed me to settle in a little more, not only reading my Bible, but truly taking time to consume the Bible, studying it with more depth and more frequency, and in more places throughout Scripture than simply looking for a message, a lesson, a series, a devotion, or whatever else I might need to prepare at the moment.

One of the things that stood out to me recently was rereading the story of Samson, and there was a detail that caught my attention in a way it apparently never had before. It had always been there, so it's not like somebody slipped a revised edition into my Bible while I wasn't looking, but something about it landed differently this time, and maybe the better word is that the insight was heightened. Delilah was not actually the one who cut Samson's hair. Some of you may have realized that a long time ago and are thinking, okay, so what's the big deal? And honestly, I'm not sure there is necessarily a big deal in that particular insight by itself, but I do think there is something worth learning from it.

I have yet to find an element of Scripture that isn't useful in some way, shape, form, or fashion, even when I read something that seems absolutely ludicrous to me and I can't immediately figure out what I'm supposed to do with it. I promise you, if someone somewhere at some time needs it, and maybe even I will need it at some point in my life, it is there for a reason. Scripture has a way of doing that, sitting there for years and years until suddenly something you've read a hundred times seems to have a little more weight than it did the last time you read it.

What started standing out to me in the story of Samson was not simply who cut his hair, but how much familiarity and comfort with the things that are determined to pull us away from our relationship with God can become incredibly dangerous. Delilah was a weakness for Samson, but before we start playing the blame game, this wasn't Delilah's fault. This was Samson's. At the end of the day, you and I are responsible for our own relationship with the Lord, and Scripture makes that pretty clear over and over and over again. This isn't a story about evil Delilah coming along and deceiving poor Samson the great, this is a story about Samson allowing something of this world that he desired to become more important than his relationship with God.

And when it's phrased that way, I think all of our ears should perk up a little bit, shouldn't they? Because I think most of us can go somewhere pretty quickly in our own minds when we hear that. There are areas of comfort, areas of desire, areas of weakness, where what we want doesn't always line up with what we know Scripture says. Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's our job or our career, maybe it's our striving to be successful, our desire to be comfortable, our need for control, our pursuit of recognition, or maybe it really is some area of sexual desire or immorality that we know doesn't belong where we've allowed it to live. Whatever it is, most of us probably know our weak spots better than we care to admit, and while they may not have started out as something we were comfortable with, at some point we become familiar enough with them that familiarity starts feeling a whole lot like permission.

And maybe the most disturbing part of all of it is how easily and how willingly we can justify those areas once we've gotten comfortable with them. Sometimes we play dumb about it, sometimes we tiptoe around it, sometimes we change the subject when it gets too close to us, sometimes we sweep it under the rug and hope nobody notices, and sometimes we go all the way to bending Scripture itself until it says what we want it to say instead of allowing it to say what it actually says. We can become remarkably creative when it comes to explaining why the thing we know is a problem isn't really a problem for us.

That's where I think Samson's story gets a little uncomfortable for all of us, because it becomes really easy to read Judges 16 and point at Samson and think, “What in the world were you doing?” while completely missing the fact that we do the same thing in our own lives, just with different names attached to it. We can know something isn't good for us and still keep going back to it, we can know something is creating distance between us and God and still make room for it, and we can recognize a weakness without ever actually being willing to surrender that weakness to the Lord.

Yes, I think we all have a form of Delilah in our lives, maybe even several of them, some more obvious than others, some we've recognized and some we haven't, but they are there. The danger isn't simply that something exists that can tempt us, the danger is how comfortable we become sitting next to it, talking to it, entertaining it, making room for it, and eventually allowing it to become familiar enough that we stop recognizing the distance it is creating between us and God.

And that's probably the part of this that I want us to think about, not who our Delilah is, because this isn't an invitation to start identifying everybody else's weaknesses while conveniently overlooking our own. The better question is, what have I become comfortable with that God has asked me to surrender? What have I allowed to live in a place of influence in my life that has slowly become more important to me than obedience? What is the thing I keep explaining away, defending, minimizing, or redefining because I don't really want to give it up?

Romans 3:23 is one of those verses that should humble every one of us, because Paul doesn't leave much room for the blame game when he says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All means all. It means the person sitting beside you, the person standing in the pulpit, the person who looks like they have everything together, and the person who is barely holding things together, we all have places where we fall short.

But here's the good news of the Gospel, and this is where I never want us to miss the point. The answer isn't simply to identify our Delilah and try harder to become better people. The answer is Jesus. The answer is surrender. The answer is recognizing that we cannot save ourselves, we cannot sanctify ourselves, and we cannot overcome every weakness in our own strength. We bring those things into the light, we confess them, we surrender them, and we allow the grace of God to do what our excuses never could.

Maybe the question for us today isn't whether there is a "Delilah" in our lives, because there probably is. Maybe the question is whether we've become so comfortable with the dysfunction that we've stopped recognizing what is happening. And maybe it's time, not to point fingers, not to make excuses, and not to bend Scripture until it makes us comfortable, but simply to open our hands and say, “God, this belongs to You too.” Because whatever it is that we have allowed to come between us and Him, it will never be worth what we lose by holding onto it.