10.13.19- The Humiliation of the Proud

Use the following thoughts and questions to have a spiritual conversation as a family. Don’t emphasize having the right answer, but focus on spending time discussing the Word as a family.

Scripture 

Judges 14:1-3,8-9; 16:4-5,16-17,21-22,26-30

Session Summary 

In the previous session, we saw how God uses unexpected people and circumstances to accomplish His purposes. God wins victories for His people despite our great weaknesses, both physically and spiritually. But how does God work with those who seem to have their lives put together: the successful, strong, and spiritual? In this session, we will look to Samson, a man who appeared to be able to succeed on his own by relying on his own cleverness and strength. But we will see that while he may have appeared to have all the puzzle pieces of life in the right arrangement, he forgot to look at the picture on the box. He forgot whose image he was supposed to follow. We will see that often we aren’t much different. Our strong personalities and abilities to muscle through life lead us to forget who we depend on too. But as we’ll see with Samson, God humbles the proud—and that is a gift of grace.

Conversation Questions 

• In what wrong things have you put confidence in, instead of Christ?
• When have you seen pride lead to danger for you or someone else?
• In what ways can we encourage one another to walk in strength that God supplies and not our own?
• Are there any Samson-like people in your life who you need to humbly love and share the power of the gospel with?

Family Challenge 

As we see in the life of Samson, temptation to sin and turn away from God is present in everyday circumstances. As a family, discuss this quote by C. S. Lewis about the nature of temptation, encouraging one another that humility, not pride, is an essential virtue every Christian should be cultivating: “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.”