Sweetness from Strength

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 75, Sweetness from Strength.

"Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet." Judges 14:14.

This is the riddle Samson posed at a wedding feast, and behind it lies a story worth telling slowly.

Before this, Samson had faced a lion alone, on the road, and the Spirit of the LORD gave him strength to tear it apart with his bare hands. A violent, dangerous encounter, the kind that leaves a mark. But time passed, and when he came back down the same road, he found something surprising: a swarm of bees had made honey inside the carcass of that same lion. The place of threat had become a place of nourishment. Samson ate the honey, gave some to his parents, and kept the secret — a secret only he knew, because only he had seen that dead lion and that hidden honey.

And it was that secret he turned into a riddle: "out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet." No one at the feast had any way to solve it on their own. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because the mystery required revelation, not deduction. For three days they tried, and they could not.

My friend, I want you to notice this: the lion that attacked Samson, that represented danger, threat, pain — that very lion, later on, became a source of sweetness. What tried to destroy him ended up feeding him. And that is not a coincidence. That is God's pattern.

Have you had a lion like that in your life? A season that attacked, that roared, that seemed like it would devour you completely — a loss, an illness, a betrayal, a failure? I am not saying the pain was good. It wasn't. The lion was real, and the attack was real. But the God who let Samson walk back down that road is the same God who can bring you back to the place of your pain and show you honey where you only saw destruction.

This kind of transformation does not come from human effort. No strategy, no willpower on its own turns an attack into food. That is God's signature. It is He who takes what looked lost and makes grow there exactly what will nourish you — and, often, nourish other people too, through your story.

Samson's riddle could not be solved from the outside. It had to be revealed. And your own story of pain turned to sweetness will not fully make sense to someone who did not live what you lived either. But for you, who walked through the lion, the honey has a taste no one else quite understands. And that taste is what sustains your faith.

So today, do this: take a piece of paper and write down one hardship you have already walked through — it can be old, it can be recent. Then, out loud, name one concrete, real, specific good that God has already brought out of it. Don't minimize the pain. Just recognize the honey that has already appeared, even if it's small.

God is still bringing sweetness out of what looked like only destruction.

Stay close to God. Pray — then act. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.