“In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back. Remember Lot’s wife.”–Luke 17:31–32
In this world of uncertainty, one thing is certain– Jesus is coming and the saints are going! That’s our “blessed hope”. That fact should affect the manner in which we live (1 John 3:1-3). As Dr. Paul Chappell said, “The Christian life is meant to be lived in only one direction—forward. Yet we are constantly tempted to look back to the world and the things that we left behind when we trusted Christ as Saviour. The danger is that if we keep looking back, sooner or later we will find a way to go back, regardless of the consequences. This is not new, because the Children of Israel faced the same danger when they left Egypt for the Promised Land. “And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned” (Hebrews 11:15). Rather than looking longingly to the past, we should keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.”
Charles Spurgeon used this metaphor of mountain climbing for our progress in the Christian life. “The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up. You have to cut every step with an ice ax. Only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress. If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still. If you begin to slip on the side of a mountain of ice, the first slip may not hurt if you can stop and slide no further. But alas, you cannot so regulate sin! When your feet begin to slide, the rate of the descent increases, and the difficulty of arresting this motion is incessantly becoming greater. It is dangerous to backslide in any degree, for we know not to what it may lead.”
