'Til Death Do Us Part

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Williams takes no text for this Friday-night conference sermon at North Little Rock; he gives only the title — "'Til Death Do Us Part" — and aims it at one audience: young people raised in the church who have thought about walking away, whom he asks to give God one more service. His subject is covenant, and his case study is Samson. Manoah's wife received a son under terms announced before his birth (Judges 13:7): a Nazarite from the womb until the day of his death — no strong drink, no razor, nothing unclean. The Nazarite vow of Numbers 6 was ordinarily voluntary and temporary, a season a person chose and then closed by shaving the head and burning the hair as an offering. Samson's was neither chosen by him nor temporary; it was lifelong. Yet Williams can find no place where Samson himself ever accepted the terms — no "I will" — and so Samson handled a sacred covenant casually: casually killing lions, casually scooping honey from a carcass his vow forbade him to touch, casually carrying gates, casually walking into Delilah's bedroom. Against him stands Samuel, whose mother Hannah made the same kind of vow (1 Samuel 1:11), brought the boy to the priest, and came back year after year with a little coat (1 Samuel 2) — until the day the boy was old enough that the covenant had to become his own choice to put on.

That transfer is the sermon's heart, and Williams makes it personal: his own parents prayed nine years for children and dedicated them to God, and no parent, he says, prays that dedication over a baby so the child can end up lost. A calling, he argues, is God's choice; being a used vessel is yours. What ruins a generation is not a weak calling but a casual approach to a holy thing — casual fasting with secret compromises, casual garments before a holy God, covenants made at camp altars and dropped on college campuses. Holiness, in the old formula he revives, is not optional decoration on the calling; without it no man shall see the Lord.

Near the close he brings a young boy (summary omits minor's name) before the congregation as a living example of a chosen vessel — a child already filled with the Holy Ghost — and then turns the title into an altar: marriage language for the covenant itself. The appeal runs long and fervent, calling young people to stand where a bride stands, to second the motion of every prayer their parents prayed over them, and to vow to God with all their heart — not an open relationship, not neutrality, but a covenant kept until death.

Scripture index: Judges 13:7; Numbers 6:3; 1 Samuel 1:11; 1 Samuel 2; Judges 16.