Sadly it is common to see Christians drift away from God and suffer greatly as a result. And it’s common for people attribute their downfall to troubles and trials that, according to them, left them in a weakened state. But that’s pointing the finger in the wrong place. Their downfall is a problem of the heart, not the hardships. After a storm sweeps through we often see a tree blown over and we attribute it to the strength of the wind. However, if you look closer you will often discover that insects had entered, damaged and weakened the tree. Other trees weathered the same storm, but this one fell–not because of the strength of the wind but because of the unseen insects that weakened the tree.
Even so backsliding is more like a slow-leak, rather than a blowout. We don’t drop into backsliding we drift into it. It usually happens so slowly that no one sees it coming. If we would remember that backsliding starts when growth stops it would help us be better prepared. Mark it down— when we cease to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” ( 2 Pet. 3:18) we have backslid. It matters not where we are in comparison to others, when we stop growing we are going backward. There is no such thing as standing still. We are safe only so long as we are growing. When we stop we are in danger. Sin has its own built in punishment–it provides its own pain. The backslider’s own ways will be the well-spring of his misery, the source of his suffering—as opposed to the “good man” who finds satisfaction within himself.
Bruce Hurt wrote, “The danger and deceitfulness of drifting is illustrated by the story of the English explorer, William Edward Parry, who took a crew to the Arctic Ocean. They wanted to go farther north to continue their chartings, so they calculated their location by the stars and started a very difficult and treacherous march north. They walked hour upon hour, and finally, totally exhausted, they stopped. Taking their bearings again from the stars, they discovered that they were farther south than they had been when they started. They had been walking on an ice floe that was moving south faster than they were walking north. Similarly, how easy it is to be out with step with God, thinking we are walking with Him, when in fact we are moving away from Him faster than we were supposedly walking toward Him! Ouch! That is the tragedy of drifting from the truth. Will you (or I) awaken one day (“come to our senses”) to find, that all the time we have been moving imperceptibly in the wrong direction?! C H Spurgeon was right when he said that “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.”
