In his book, Church Awakening, Charles Swindoll recounts his boyhood summertime visits to his grandfather’s South Texas cottage, which sat about 100 yards back on a hill overlooking Carancahua Bay, a small bay which led out to the Gulf of Mexico.
One year, Charles and his grandfather measured a spot from the edge of the cliff to a few yards back and drove a stake in the ground. Each year, Charles and his grandfather would measure and note the eroding distance between the stake and edge of the cliff. Through that experience, Charles learned the principle of erosion.1
Geological erosion is not the most serious erosion we could experience; more dangerous is spiritual erosion in our lives personally. The old word we once used was “back-sliding.” I prefer to refer to it as drifting.
What seems a harmless neglect of a spiritual discipline, an unnoticeable absence from church attendance, or even a slight compromise of what we know to be true and right eventually snowballs and we find ourselves far from where we used to be, want to be, and know we should be. It all happens so subtly, so slowly that we do not realize we have drifted.
The book of Hebrews warns us:
Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. – Hebrews 2:1
So I challenge you today to take stock of your life. I opened Tuesday’s blog with Socrates’ quote: the unexamined life is not worth living. Are you brave enough to take an honest look at where you are spiritually? One simple question will help you determine if you’ve drifted: has there ever been a time in your life when you were closer to God than you are today? If the answer is “yes,” then you have drifted.
The remedy is to return to what the Hebrews writer calls “what we have heard.” We find that content in God’s Word – back to the Bible. Recovery from spiritual drift is only possible when we return to the Bible as our source of teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
Allow me to suggest some steps to recover from the drift.
- Establish a time and place where you will regularly read God’s Word. Find the time when you are most alert and the place where you will be uninterrupted.
- Employ a specific plan for reading. You might try reading the same book of the Bible everyday for one month. After reading that Bible book 30 times, you will know the content. You may choose a reading plan that will help you read a certain portion of the Bible over a specified period of time. I supplied links to two or three ideas for those in Tuesday’s blog.
- Ask questions of what you read and seek answers. Think about what the text is saying and how it applies to your life. Ask a pastor or Bible teacher about the meaning of a passage that you may not immediately understand. Foster a thirst to KNOW and DO God’s Word.
- Memorize scripture. Choose a verse a week to learn. Bible memory exercise our mind on the treadmill of Biblical truth and provides godly mental backup for idle minds.
Feel free to share in the comment section below other ways you will/can restore the drift by getting back to the Bible.
1Swindoll, Charles R. (2010-09-08). The Church Awakening: An Urgent Call for Renewal (pgs. 2-3). FaithWords. Kindle Edition.