How To Be Steadfast In The Lord -Part 1 Series

I Corinthians 15:58 [King James Version]

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

This is the continuance of walking with Christ, coming into fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ through His blood and through His Spirit, and then continuing strong with Him, strong enough so that we end the race with a victory. God has a glorious plan for all of us and it requires us to be careful. By and by when we become complacent, the world and all of the opinions around us begin to encroach upon our spiritual life and we can get to a state of self-satisfaction or smugness, and that is the beginning of backsliding. We want to know how to be victorious in the race and to be champions for Jesus Christ. I trust that that is your desire; it certainly is our desire and so let's get into The Word of God and find out how we can be not moved as we go through the journey with Jesus Christ.

So if the Apostle exhorts us by the Holy Spirit "Be steadfast, be steadfast, keep on, keeping on with Christ, don't give up, persevere, be unmovable," then the first thing to look at is how does one gets moved? You see it's only helpful for us to know how to be steadfast when we understand how we can protect ourselves from falling or backsliding or being moved. In order to avoid being moved from the hope of the gospel from the Christian Life, we need to understand that complacency is a dangerous thing for our souls. Many, many people are having a wonderful time enjoying the blessings of God, and that is what God wants. God wants us to enjoy His blessings. He gives us blessings to richly enjoy. So if we have money, we have clothing, food, shelter, and extra activities, that we are privileged to indulge in, God says, "there is nothing wrong with any of those so long as you remain steadfast in me." But this is precisely where many people enjoy the blessings of God in all the countries, you have families that enjoy the blessings of God, and yet they don't pay attention to what it requires to remain steadfast with Him.

So by and by, as I mentioned at the outset, complacency comes in. That is the attitude that says," I have the Word of God, I have a church, I have fellowship, I have teaching that I listen to perhaps through the media, I have my own family celebrations and I include God in there. What is wrong with me? There is nothing wrong with me." Paul says he had not achieved it, but he is reaching forward to that prize. Certainly, he had to leave what was old behind in order to get that which God had for him. So the first thing is to understand that complacency should never come into our lives. Complacency is the poison that begins the downfall of those who have been given freely the gift of life. It's all by grace, but the grace of God must not be held in vain. So, the complacency is that smugness that makes us to have the spiritual state of satisfaction that “Lord, I don't need to pay too much attention to my walk with You because everything is guaranteed, right?” The Lord only guarantees everlasting inheritance to those who are steadfast with Him and persevere to the end. That is the truth. When this complacency comes in and I feel satisfied and self-satisfied, I look out into the field as it were of my own status in society, of my own achievements, and I feel a sense of perhaps thankfulness but also a sense of satisfaction that I have achieved something.

But it is the Christian that is ever alert to the voice of the Holy Spirit that can navigate through prosperity or seeming prosperity and still keep his soul in the right trajectory in the spiritual domain to walk straight toward the Lord Jesus, to bear the cross denying oneself and then bearing all things. Complacency leads to compromise. The downward spiral begins. Compromise is saying that I have made an agreement with something that I know is not favorable to me. In the spiritual sense, it is something that I know is dead wrong, dead set against God's Word and Will, but I begin to make a bargain, you know why? Because I have become self-satisfied that I know what I am doing and I know that I won't fall no matter what I do. It's a false sense of security. So the compromise sets in and it is essentially a concession: I concede to the enemy and all the worldly voices which come and bring pressure on me to deviate from the Word of God. It may mean this, if we have children, particularly teenage children, it may mean conceding or making a concession compromising with the moral and ethical standards God has set forth in His Word. So here comes a teenage daughter and son, they want to mingle with the world and they want to have a relationship with other members of the opposite sex and they are contemplating perhaps marriage in the future. They begin to date; they begin to live together, cohabitation. If I become complacent with my spiritual walk with God based on the pressure that I get from my teenager and perhaps other worldly people around me, I may very well begin to make a compromise and say, "well at least, my child is not doing what this person is doing - something worse. It doesn't mean that this is harmless, this is actually wrong before God, but I'm allowing this relationship because at least they are wise enough not to run off, run away from me." That is the deadly nature of compromise. That our spiritual eyesight becomes dim and we begin to bargain with the devil, bargain with society, with the worldly spirits and we start going further down. That's the danger. We start saying essentially what the Lord God forbids, what I have learned from Christ is not really practical any longer. It's not practical. The most practical thing in the universe is to obey the Lord's commandments because therein lies every good thing and all success and prosperity, now and forevermore. But the voice of compromise says God's standards are too strict, it is antiquated, and I can't live by His standards today and get by in the world.