Are You Drifting - Genesis 38 Series

We all have a problem and I want to talk about the problem today. It’s a problem that every Christian has. It’s that tendency we have to drift away from the Lord. Relationships take work. Whether it’s a marriage relationship, you might drift away with your wife or your husband. You might drift away if you don’t work at it. The same thing is true in our relationship with God. If we don’t work at it to stay up to date in that relationship then we have a tendency to drift.

I was pondering this week why do people drift away from the Lord? I think some people drift away from the Lord because they’re disappointed. Maybe disappointed in their lives. Of course that’s God’s fault, they might think. Or somehow they go back to God. So they drift away. Sometimes people are drifting because they’re disappointed in people. People who are Christians, maybe people that they live with, a husband and wife or parents, so they drift away from the Lord because they’re disappointed. I think other people drift away because they’re lazy maybe. They don’t do the work that’s necessary. Or maybe it’s because of busyness that we have in our lives. We have things going on and things happen. And so we’ve got an extra time in our work life or we’ve got extended visitors at our home or we’ve got just the busyness of sports and other activities. So we start drifting away from church. Of course that church isn’t only our only relationship with the Lord, but we stop having our Bible study or we stop praying, and then our relationship drifts. It just drifts. It's a problem. When you drift away from the Lord then bad things happen. That’s a sad thing.

We’re going to look at a passage today that’s sad because a guy drifts away. I want to walk away from this passage… This is what I did this week. I walk away from this passage and say, “Lord, help me to not drift away. I don’t want to find myself in the same kind of problems that Judah found himself in.” Genesis 38 is a paratheses for our whole study of Joseph that we’re going through. We’re studying the life of Joseph. It's a delightful study, but right in the middle we have this one chapter dedicated to Judah. An important man in the Bible. He’s going to be the line of Jesus Christ. You’ve heard of the lion of Judah. You’re going to see where that’s found today because I’m going to read that passage. But he had a line that passed through him. So I expect these great things from Judah and when I read this passage I’m disappointed because when I read it I see that he doesn’t really have a strong connection here. He’s really drifting. And when he drifts bad things happen. Just watch the bad things that take place. I hope you’ll consider your own walk with the Lord because any of us could be the Judah. Any of us could drift away in our lives.

So let me take you into the passage. Look with me at Genesis 38. It starts this way in verse 1. It says – It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

We read right off the bat Moses tells us in this passage that Judah moves away from his brothers. He separates from them. He leaves the protection of his home, so to speak, and he goes down into this area of Canaan and he finds a friend. Now this friend isn’t a believer. This friend isn’t a Jewish man. He’s a friend and he finds this friend and this guy Hirah doesn’t seem to have a good influence on him. Certainly doesn’t help him when he’s doing the wrong thing.

It just reminds me that in our lives our friends are so important. When you go off, you leave your home, you’re going off to do something else, you have choices about what kind of friends you’re going to make and what you’re going to do. You go off to university or you go off to your first job, or whatever it is, and there are people there and they live life a particular way. When they’re living life a particular way, it almost seems normal. You say okay, well that’s how I’m going to live. And then you end up not having the checks in your life and that God provides when you leave the protection of God’s household, his family, so to speak, and go off into the world.

That’s what’s going to happen to Judah. He’s just going to go on in life like the Canaanites. He’s moving down into the Canaanite territory, into the world so to speak, and he’s just going to start picking up those things and start living like other people do. What you do think is going to happen? You can probably imagine. Okay, he’s down there. He’s at this public place and he’s going to fall in love with a girl and they’re going to get married. Can’t you imagine that would happen? The woman is not even a believer, so he’s kind of abandoning his roots and he’s just living in Canaan.