The Dangers Of Christian Drifting Series

1. The Reality of Christian Drifting:

a. Drifting can be seen in many Biblical characters…

How many here remember Abraham’s nephew, Lot? When a conflict arose between his servants and Abraham’s servants, Abraham gave Lot the choice… to pick where he wanted to live and the Bible tells us that he pitched his tent toward Sodom.

And we know from reading the rest of the story… First he pitched his tent toward Sodom, as we see in Gen 13, but before long he and his family were living within the walls of the city. However, by Gen 19 we find that Lot allowed the godless nature of that city to influence and envelope his family.

We can see that Samson was totally deceived and drifted in his vows to God when it came to the woman named Delilah…read Judges 16:19

What about King David? He was mesmerized by the beauty of Bathsheeba and drifted away from his walk with the Lord… (2 Samuel 11:2) for a moment’s pleasure David drifted away from God into the troubled and dangerous waters of sin…

Do you remember what Peter said to Jesus? Matt 26:34;75…Peter said he would NEVER deny Him, and even if all others left, he would never leave Him… even if it meant death for him. Peter vowed that he was not going to forsake Jesus. But we know that in a terrifying moment of fear, Peter failed Jesus. We find that when persecution came, Peter not only ran away, but actually denied Jesus 3 times…

We read all thru Scripture and find many stalwarts of the faith who have their own moments of drifting away from their walk with God! I am here to tell ALL of you here this morning that any believer drifting away from their walk with God is not something unheard of!

In fact, it is a real event that happens much more than many of us want to believe. There are many believers who fall prey to ‘drifting’ on a daily basis! So just like ‘spiritual drifting’ was real for the biblical icons like Peter, King David, and Samson in Bible times, we can know that it is just as real today…and because of this…

b. The possibility of drifting is something all Christians must guard against…

We must all guard against drifting away from the safety of God’s Word and teachings. I simply do NOT believe that a true believer, one who has truly been changed by God… intentionally drifts away from his or her walk with God…

But yet, Satan is so sneaky and he creeps up on us in our weakest moments and before we know it, we are drifting! And the sad fact is that many times we will continue to “drift” because we either are too wrapped up in ourselves OR we simply refuse to believe that what we are doing is “drifting us away” from God…

But why do we drift, I want us to take a look at…

2. The Reason for Christian Drifting:

a. Neglect comes from distraction or ‘drifting’ on our part…

We can see from the writer of Hebrew that he diagnoses the cause of ‘spiritual drifting’ as neglect on the part of the believer.

The believers he was writing to were neglecting the salvation experience in Christ and because of this neglect they were drifting away from Christ…