Will we be Sober Saints or Drunk Disciples?

 

Samson, the Awakened, Drunken Warrior & The necessity of Spirit-Filled Youth

 Psalm 78:65: “Suddenly the Lord was up on his feet like someone roused from deep sleep, shouting like a drunken warrior.”

"A drunken warrior...what a strange picture chosen to describe the Lord. 

For many it’s too scandalous a comparison, fraught with dangerous excess and license. What is a drunken warrior but a man or woman overcome with an unreasonable sense of ability, power and courage. Their minds are flooded with superhuman thoughts that lead daring and often dubious acts.   

The drunken gentleman is the great defender of a woman’s honor against a thousand men. The overly inebriated, can take blows that would fell a sober man. The drink inflamed are able to let loose, strike out and mobilize a mob of intoxicated dreamers and doers. To the tipsy, an adventure is always afoot, a battle to fight, a monster to slay, a lover to win. 

They are predictable in their unpredictableness, wild in their witness, 

The normal desires and longings of life that are most often hid in the cellar of respectability are unlocked.

 

 

How dangerous is a soul loosed from slumber? 

A heart and hand ignited and empowered by other worldly drive, ambition and vision from a celestial drink of fire.

 

How the world could be turned upside down by heads and minds aflame and tongues loosed to utter the majesties, mysteries and possibilities of eternity!

 

We have little room for Samson's today and that’s one of the reasons our churches are hemorrhaging youth and young adults. 

Our sanctuaries have become safe places, our altars have little fire, our mission is mundane and manageable. 

Our thermostats are perpetually set at comfort billing levels. 

We avoid the edge and the view past the guardrails. 

We have tailored all our religious life to duty and obey every prohibiting sign and encourage the proliferation of more. 

Our churches have become the moaning and mumbling nursing homes of death...instead of the bloody, screaming birthing floors of life.

This is the hour for Samson's to awaken, for our youth to be stirred by the Spirit of God. It is only through the youthful gusts of upward flame that certain wonderful heights are achieved and soul stretching vistas seen.

There is a time for Samuel's reign but they must come after the chaotic and courageous seasons of lion slayers, fire starters, honey gorgers, love pursuers, riddle makers and pillar shakers...the fruitfulness of adult life is only seeded by the tilled ground of the bare-knuckle life of youth! 

“The prophet and seer Zechariah said: Then the Lord will appear over them, and his arrow will go forth like lightning; the Lord God will sound the trumpet and will march forth in the whirlwinds of the south.

The Lord of hosts will protect them,

and they shall devour, and tread down the sling stones, and they shall drink and roar as if drunk with wine, and be full like a bowl, drenched like the corners of the altar. 

On that day the Lord their God will save them, as the flock of his people; for like the jewels of a crown

they shall shine on his land. For how great is his goodness, and how great his beauty! Grain shall make the young men flourish, and new wine the young women.”

- Zechariah 9:14-17 :

In the first sermon recorded at the birth of the early church it had to contain an explanation about the apparent confusing drunk-like behavior of the Spirit baptized believers. 

The Apostle Peter had to explain: “These people are not drunk, as some of you are assuming. Nine o'clock in the morning is much too early for that.” (Acts 2:15)

The Apostle Paul had to give boundaries to the Corinthian believers on how to “hold their Spirit” in their meetings due to the “Divine madness” that they could devolve into if not controlled:

“So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind?” (1 Corinthians 14:23) 

Are such warnings and apologetics needed today in most of our churches? 

Has anyone been told to “calm down” or been counseled that their meetings are starting to look and sound like Keggers? Not too often from my experience. 

Most Christian hedonists are closet drinkers, they have to hide their addiction. They’re ashamed of just how much they drink on the goodness and glory of God. 

Ephesians 18-20 isn’t a religious downer but a glorious invitation to a greater high, a fresher joy and a deeper drink: “Don’t drink too much wine. That cheapens your life. Drink the Spirit of God, huge draughts of him.”

Let’s be honest the wild men and women have been quarantined to the basement, along with a growing group of other Christian misfits in this secularizing age. 

The church loves to memorialize her romantics, we honor what has died but vilify what is trying to live. 

We swoon on glory stories of the past but shun the path such tales point towards. We want the wine without the work, the buzz without the drinking. 

The church is in the grip of religious teetotalers who quote the prophets but silence the mouth’s prophesying. We have a form of godliness but we deny the power (2Timothy 3:5). 

Our pulpits are built on the “persuasive words of wisdom” but our services lack the “demonstration and power of the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:4). 

We are Samsons shorn.

The church is supposed to be known by its wild love for God and one-another. Not cold, formalized, ritualistic love but a fervent love or as the Aramaic bible translations puts it: “a severe love” (1Peter 4:8). 

Jesus just called the love he wanted as “HOT”! (Revelations 3:16).

It’s sometimes too costly to admit our emptiness, to confess our widowhood. Like Samson we think we can do everything we always did but without the wild locks of the Spirit. 

We gravitate towards a religious experience that resembles John the Baptist, full of self-denial, fasting’s and sermons…but we have little room or tolerance for a feasting messiah that makes gallons and gallons of wine as signs. 

We want to turn the wine of God back into the water of human wisdom and reason. We fear the uncontrollable, so we soak the altars of our gatherings in buckets and buckets of drenching forgettable churchianity.

But thankfully the fire of God’s passion and power can fall upon the sopping state of our souls and kindle afresh the love that once burned at first. 

God will have worshippers that worship Him in spirit…and in truth (John 4:24). He is greater than our hearts (1 John 3:20). 

The Divine Lover knows how to knock upon the door of our locked hearts and His voice beckons us in invitation to dine (Rev. 3:20). He is the feast; do you still hunger and thirst?

“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” – Psalm 63:1

Let us cry out to the Spirit of God, repent of worshipping our religious scaffolding and return to the lover of our souls. Abandon the broken cisterns and seek the poured out living water.

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” -Jeremiah 2:13

Cheers, the Pentecost spout is open…now go drink God!

Pastor Eric Blauer, Jacobs Well, Spokane Wa.