Backsliding
— What’s That?
He vehemently stated in his testimonies that he would never do it.
His dad had done it to his mom, and it was awful. He would never do
it. Do what? Leave his wife and two boys for another woman. We believed
him. He was many years on the journey of faith with Christ. He had
demonstrated maturity and been elected to a responsible position in
the congregation. We believed him.
In over three decades as an elder in the church, I have learned that
regardless of people’s good intentions, only God is a guarantee.
Because people continue to be free moral agents after they come to
new life in Christ, and because people who are sincere can kick it
into neutral and coast, making them candidates for slippage, I take
strong statements of intention with a few grains of salt.
He did it too, out of the blue. It caught his wife off-guard. Wham!
The woman he ran off with was well-known in the real estate world
of our city. She was also known for her vile tongue, her heavy smoking
and her “take no prisoners” business attitude. We puzzled
over why he would choose her over his gracious, loving, Christ-redeemed
wife.
The Apostle Peter knew it could happen. He had seen good intentions
cross the centerline and head for the median all too often. He wrote:
“So think clearly and exercise self-control. … Obey God
because you are his children. Don’t slip back into your old ways
of doing evil; you didn’t know any better then. But now you must
be holy in everything you do” (1 Peter 1:13-15, NLT).
Why would he suggest that we not slip back if it were not possible
— if he had not seen it too often already? Slippage is always
possible. Slippage can lead to an erosion of trust in Christ and a
turning from the Christ of Calvary. What climate generates slippage?
First come the winds of comfort. Comfort is a most dangerous condition
for followers of Jesus. Just like we prefer shade over a scalding
sun, we prefer comfort over hardship, pain, difficulty. Jesus reminded
us that there is a narrow way to our eternal reward, and not many
easily choose it.
The winds of comfort bring the low pressure systems of complacency.
Complacency leads us to stop doing the things we did early on in our
friendship with Christ. We just don’t care as much.
Our journey with God is not unlike human love relationships, in which
we stop courting one another. We stop wooing one another. Casual attitudes
toward the spiritual (wooing) disciplines lower our spiritual barometers,
and we are set up for the thunderstorms that follow.
Those thunderstorms bring flash floods of compromise. Our defense
is that our compromises were so insignificant. No one else knew about
them. How could this have happened? We only skipped worship a few
Sundays. We only missed devotional reading and prayer a few times.
We only negotiated cutting back from a tithe to 5 percent. We only
…
We find ourselves in sin and fighting to keep our heads above the
waters. The torrents of materialism, voyeurism or greed drag us along.
Waves of hypocrisy, back-stabbing and jealousy leave us gasping for
spiritual breath.
These are the climatic conditions in our American culture, a culture
that tends to produce “Americanity” — the practice
of a Christian faith that makes allowances for comfort, complacency
and compromise.
So, if we are slipping back into the old ways, what do we do? We have
to quickly make several major decisions and change our ways. Here
are three suggestions from 1 Peter 1:13-22:
Radical faith. Peter calls us to prepare our minds for action (v.
13). We are asked to roll up our sleeves, to put our minds in gear
and think clearly. We must recommit to the radical truth that without
Christ, people go to hell.
Radical love. Peter urges us to set all our hope on the grace Christ
will bring (v. 13). This call is to put all our eggs in one basket
with one lover of our souls. He also urges us to “love one another
deeply, from the heart” (v. 22). Such love implies sacrifices
on a regular basis.
Radical life. Peter calls us to make again what some consider to be
wild and crazy decisions to obey Christ in everything (v. 14), and
seek to be wholly holy (v. 15).
When we find ourselves making declarations to other believers about
our intentions to “not do what my dad did,” it may well
be that the only way to follow through on those intentions is to be
radical in our faith, love and life. I cannot remember any radical
Christians who have experienced slippage.
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