Overcoming TemptationSample

8,000 STEPS TO STUPID

Most people want to enjoy life and want a good outcome. People don’t often set a goal of being stupid. No one makes it a priority to make poor choices and fill their life with pain, shame, and regret. But if no one wants to make dumb choices, but many do, we have to ask why, and how to avoid them. Having God’s Word as our compass is where we start. Great stupidity rarely happens all at once, as we can recognize great stupidity at a distance. But small choices quickly compound, never seeming large, but together they can take us a great distance. Through small compromises, we can make a journey to the thing we said we would never do or never be.

Proverbs warns the young man not only to avoid sexual sin with the immoral woman but to stay far away from her altogether, don’t even go near her path (Proverbs 5:8). In chapter 7, there is further warning and instructions to protect the young men. But in verse 7, we find wisdom looking out the window and seeing a young man lacking in sense. At first, I wondered how wisdom glances out the window and knows that he lacks sense. I don’t think he is wearing a shirt that says, “I am with stupid,” with an arrow pointing to his own face. Verse 8 describes what wisdom saw. He was walking near her corner. The one who goes near sin is recognized as lacking sense. Verse 23 says he follows the immoral woman like an ox going to slaughter. Wisdom sees the person who keeps taking steps toward the trap as foolish.

Sampson is a great example of this. Sampson was a man called by God and gifted with supernatural strength, but he kept taking steps toward stupidity until it destroyed him. They just never seemed like big steps, so he didn’t realize the mess that he had gotten into.

Judges 14:1 (ESV) Samson went down to Timnah, and at Timnah he saw one of the daughters of the Philistines.

From his home in Zorah, this was about 4 miles or 8,000 steps. Eight thousand steps that didn’t seem to matter. Steps away from where he was supposed to be. Eight thousand small steps toward sin. Eight thousand steps to Philistine territory, where he met a Philistine girl. From there, he thought he would marry her. Even though God had warned them not to marry people who didn’t worship God. But each of these steps had left him caught up.

He married her, which quickly ended in disaster. Then we find him again in the Philistine territory with a girl, this time, a prostitute. He thought there was no effect because each choice/step wasn’t much different than the last. He then ends up with Delilah, another Philistine woman. She asks for the secret to his power. Knowing that telling her was a bad idea, he made up something. She put him to sleep, and when he awoke, what he told her had happened.

She asks again, and he gives her another fake answer, and wakes up with it done. The next time, his fake answer takes a step closer to the true secret to his power, as it involves his hair. He wakes up, and it has again been done. Then she asks again, and he tells her that his strength is from the Lord, that he has been dedicated to the Lord, and his hair has been a sign of that dedication. And that if it were ever cut, he would be as weak as any man.

After the first three times he wakes up with his words used against him, I can’t believe he was surprised, but Judges 16:20 gives us his waking thoughts: “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.” But he didn’t know that the Lord had left him.

He had been taking small steps for so long that he stopped believing it mattered. He was captured, blinded, and imprisoned.

Compromise often comes in slow, subtle steps. Each one lowers our moral ground so gradually that we don’t even realize how far we’ve fallen.

People often excuse what they do because of what it isn’t yet. But each step takes us down a path. They would never have an affair, but: it's just a work lunch with the two of them, then a work celebration, then just a lunch or dinner, they just seem to understand them, its just some minor flirting, it's just a little more often, just a little touch, a hug, a longer hug, a kiss….

It's not just with sex, it's with lies, cheating, stealing… really any sin that we thought we wouldn’t do can be arrived at with small steps that don’t seem large.

The path of compromise takes those who walk it to the destination they thought they would never go to.