This appeared in a Florida newspaper a while back: “Garbage Mary,” as she was dubbed by the media (a 48 year old woman though she looked twice her age), was picked up by the police in a shopping mall in Delray Beach, Florida. She was a filthy mess – and so were her car and her two-bedroom apartment. Neighbors told of her scrounging through garbage cans in search for food, which she took back to her apartment. Police found the garbage everywhere: in the refrigerator, in the stove, in the sink, in the cabinets – even in the bathtub.
But they found other things as well. They found Mobil Oil stock worth more than $400,000. They found documents indicating she owned oil fields in Kansas, stock certificates from prominent firms, and passbooks from eight large bank accounts. Police discovered that Garbage Mary was the daughter of a well-to-do lawyer and bank director from Illinois, who had died several years earlier leaving her a tidy sum. What was the cause of her living this way? After finding her brother he told her story as a woman who had gone through two unhappy marriages which caused her in his opinion to become unhinged. She became a woman with vast resources but had fallen into a rut by which nothing excited her or motivated her to live. Garbage Mary was a millionaire, but she lived like a pauper. Great wealth was at her fingertips, but she spent her life sifting through garbage and trash. While her money collected interest, she collected garbage!
Folks, too many Christians waste their lives rummaging through the rubbish of this world instead enjoying the riches of their Father’s inheritance.
Samson was like this he had at his fingertips great resources, yet he squandered them and ended up blinded by his own passions. Samson’s failure was that he never learned “self-discipline” and the reason for that was he never learned to be “separate to the Lord”.
In the NLT Proverbs 16:32 says, “It is better to be patient than powerful; it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city.” Samson could capture a city but refused to discipline his own life and as a result he is remembered as the strongest weak man that ever lived.