Seven Signs of a Drifter (Part 1)
Selected Passages
January 28, 2007
Morning Service
Introduction
When I was in high school I can remember one of the worst snow storms to hit our area. The snow was like a fine powder and didn’t seem to pack very well but it drifted well enough. The winds picked up those fine crystals of snow and blew them together into massive drifts.
The drifts became so large and so deep that the road was shut off. The snow had become so deep that nothing could get through. Before the winds died down the drifts were five to ten feet high and compacted in a small dip in the road. The snow plows couldn’t even get through. The road was closed for days, until the county brought an end loader to literally lift the snow out of the way.
The wind that created all of those drifts simply picked up that snow and carried it away from its original place. Unfortunately, this more often than not resembles our spiritual lives. We do not root ourselves deeply in the Word or a relationship with God and get blown away. Picked up from where we need to be spiritually and get deposited who knows where.
The writer of Hebrews was keenly aware of this problem in spiritual walk of believers and addressed it in the second chapter verse 1
We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. Hebrews 2:1
How do we define drifting?
Webster
a : the lateral motion of an aircraft due to air currents b : an easy moderate more or less steady flow or sweep along a spatial course c : a gradual shift in attitude, opinion, or position d : an aimless course; especially : a foregoing of any attempt at direction or control e : a deviation from a true reproduction, representation, or reading; especially : a gradual change
The Greek word for drift is pararrheuo and this is the only place in all of the New Testament that this word is used. It literally means to glide by or to be carried past. The Greeks applied this to things slipping the mind or letting knowledge escape the mind.
The writer of Hebrews communicates the fact that daily living will cause our spiritual life to slip away if we are not careful. we must pay more careful attention to what we have heard. the idea here is that we will attach our lives to the message of the gospel. This is like attaching a boat to a dock to keep it from drifting away. We need to have a daily connection with Jesus to keep our spiritual lives from drifting away.
"We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither the belief in Christ nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed, and as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by an honest argument. Do not most people simply drift away?" C. S. Lewis on Faith.
Where does drifting begin?
1.) Lack of confidence in God - we stop believing that God is all powerful or that His Word has meaning for us or that God desires something better for our lives
2.) Lack of concern for spiritual things - We simply get lazy about our spiritual walk. We lose interest in reading scripture or spending time in prayer or even attending worship. we let responsibilities slip and find ourselves spiritually adrift.
3.) Lack of commitment to the body of believers - The commitment to being part of the church is a direct result of commitment to Christ. Church attendance and commitment to Christ are directly connected. When people become inconsistent in their worship attendance they are far more likely to drift spiritually.
4.) Lack of character in everyday living - Bill Hybels asked a powerful question in a message on the character of Christians: who are you when no one else is looking? What do you hide from everyone but God? Character is smply living out what you believe. It is having integrity. integrating your faith into the way that you live. When our character and our beliefs don’t match, we begin to drift spiritually.
5.) Lack of contentment in anything - Paul wrote to the Philippians that he knew about being in need and about having plenty. he had learned to be content in any and every situation. One of the greatest problems in American Christianity is that we have lost the understanding of contentment. We are literally content with nothing and content in nothing. When we lack contentment we begin to drift.
6.) Lack of courage to face problems - Life is filled with problems. How many of you have dealt with at least one problem this week? There are times when our problems require us to have personal courage to face them down. However, we become good at avoiding our problems and never truly dealing with them. The longer you avoid your problems the easier it will be to drift spiritually.
Seven Signs of a Drifter
I. Doubt (John 20:27-29)
27 Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe." 28 Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!" 29 Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
The classic case of doubting would have to fall on the apostle Thomas. he literally would not believe in the resurrection of Jesus until he saw Him with his own eyes. Thomas had missed the first visitation of Jesus to the disciples because he was absent from the group.
The doubts that Thomas expressed may well come from a feeling of emptiness or failure. He did abandon Jesus at His darkest hour and probably felt that he missed his chance to restore the relationship.
Doubt seems to spring from our own feelings of insecurity. Far too often in life our insecurities will sabotage our relationship with Christ. Doubt flows out of inability to fully integrate our faith with daily living. Daily life slowly grinds away at our faith and leaves us feeling lost. Doubt will lead us in a downward spiral away from the right relationship that we need to have with Christ.
Notice what Jesus says to Thomas in verse 27: stop doubting and believe. That sounds like good advice. Jesus calls Thomas and us to a serious choice, to live in doubts or live in faith. Our life is determined by what we focus on. if we focus on doubts we will continue to drift. If we focus on our faith we will continue to draw closer to the Lord.
Jesus proclaims a blessing upon those who believe, without seeing Him. With faith we must remember that believing is seeing. Doubt does not have to drive us farther from God. Doubt can either help us draw closer to Christ by pursuing a deeper relationship with Him or it can cause us to drift further away.
II. Depravity (Titus 3:3-5)
TIT 3:3 At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. 4 But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,
Mark Twain said this about depravity: We are all like the moon, we have a dark side we don’t want anybody to see.
There is a lot of truth in that statement. Our depravity flows out of our human nature. Our nature that drives us to sin.
1. Our human nature is evil
We don’t want to think of ourselves as being evil or having the capability to be evil. We reserve the word evil for people like Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler. All of us were more than a little evil before we came to Christ. We literally were living in a lifestyle of disobedience. We lived in total disregard for what God wanted for our lives.
Paul says that we were foolish - living thoughtless lives. We acted before we put our brain into gear. We acted in senseless ways. How many of you have ever done anything and then realized what you did made no sense? Senseless living leads us to disregard God’s Word and thus ignore Him.
We were disobedient, living outside of the will of God for our lives. We lived in blatant rejection of God. We openly rebelled against God by living for our desires and passions.
• The desire for more and more things
• The desire to have power - simply having control
• The desire to fill our emptiness with drugs, alcohol, sex or anything else that we could find
The simple fact is that instead of having freedom we were enslaved to our sinfulness. We were bound to it like an anchor holding us back from God.
2. Jesus sets us free
Jesus came to offer us freedom from the bondage of sin. Not because we were worthy of it but because of His great kindness. Jesus revealed the depth of His kindness by coming to this world and dying on the cross. Jesus came out of a desire to meet our needs. The deepest need of any person’s life is to be set free from sin. We need to be saved. We need salvation.
Jesus laid His love on the line for us. He literally gave His all before we ever really knew Him. The truth is that He knew us and knew our need before we ever thought about Him. He stepped into our nature and defeated it forever.
Being good is never going to be good enough. You can never be good enough to live up to God’s standard. This is why Jesus came to die in your place. Salvation is not based on anything that you do. It is based on what Jesus has already done. This makes Christianity unique in the world. Religion tells us what we need to do to achieve a place in the afterlife. Christianity is about a relationship with God through what Jesus has already done.
Conclusion
There was an old farmer who was tired of the expense of feeding his mule oats. Over the years those oats had cost him a great deal of money and he had enough. So he devised a plan to cut the cost of the mule’s feed by adding just a little sawdust to the oats as a filler. Slowly the farmer added more sawdust to the mix to see if the mule would notice. Gradually there was more and more sawdust and less and less oats.
The farmer continued to decrease the proportion of oats until all that was left in the feed was sawdust. The mule ate the feed of sawdust and then fell over dead. The farmer had robbed the mule of any kind of nutrients and caused the animal to starve to death.
This is how we often treat our spiritual lives. We gradually take in less and less spiritual food and settle for sawdust. In the end, we drift into a spiritual life that is filled with sawdust. In the end, we die spiritually.
Has there ever been a time in your life, when you were more dedicated to Christ? Has there ever been a time when you were closer to Jesus than you are right now? Have you ever been more surrendered in your life than you are at this moment? Has there ever been a time that you were more committed to living for Christ than you are right now?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are in the process of drifting. Correct the problem here and now because the longer you wait the more you will drift.
