How is it going?<\/p>\n
I’m not writing to judge you. I’m writing to plead with you, that you repent, something we all need to do daily.<\/p>\n
Only in your case it may be that it is long overdue. Such a plea is not the plea of a judgemental onlooker, but a loving friend who with an element of fatherly sorrow watching a son or daughter gradually slipping away from enjoyment in spiritual things, undoing yourself, spoiling yourself, maybe ignorantly or maybe, wilfully.<\/p>\n
It is painful<\/i>\u00a0to watch.<\/p>\n
Why are you doing this?<\/p>\n
Why are you making the choices you are making? Why is it that so<\/i> many<\/i> young believers, truly, gloriously saved, soon take a path that leads away from God, His Word and His people?<\/p>\n
Perhaps it is because they quietly resent God allowing difficult things to happen in their lives. They feel no loyalty to God because they feel He is not being loyal to them. Perhaps some think by making the choices they have they can in some way get back at God or at least show Him that it is His fault. Then He will reverse their circumstances and then get back on track again. When you think of it in these terms, it’s not dissimilar to blackmail?<\/p>\n
Is that why you have wandered?<\/p>\n
No? Well, maybe it is because you think you know better than God. You are forgetting or resisting to remember that God knows better in every case. You accept the circumstance of your life but instead of obeying His Word you obey your own wisdom, your own plan of events, your own way out. You will fix things.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps, you think you are even doing Gods Will and perhaps that is partly true – some of the things you are doing are right – and you have silenced your conscience to the things that are wrong, for the time being. You will see if things work out as you intend and all being well they will. You haven’t really considered the fact that they might not. They shouldn’t – you know what you’re doing, right?<\/p>\n
These are all completely understandable positions to take if we believe what Jeremiah wrote, “The heart [is] deceitful above all [things], and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).<\/p>\n
But – they make no sense in the light of the Gospel. Which is the strange thing. Under the message of the Gospel, you threw off the notion that you knew better than God, recognising that what He had to say about your sin was true. You did not reject the truth of the gospel because of the difficult circumstances of your life but rather embraced it knowing that it provided the only hope of ultimate release. You did not accept some of the truth and not all of it, but in total humility accepted completely the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You knew you could not fix things, only Christ could do that. You repented and placed faith in Christ alone.<\/p>\n
That was then, this is now. What happened?<\/p>\n
You do know of course, that Gods Word is brimming to the full of cases of ‘been-there-done-that’? Really. This is why it is so painful to watch you doing what you are doing. You have a whole slew of people’s lives that stack up against the choices that you are making shouting ‘don’t make the same mistakes we made!!’<\/p>\n
People drinking at broken cisterns. People trusting in their own strength. People putting other things first. People either deliberately or ignorantly making there own way in life. People who had known salvation but did not live in the good of it.<\/p>\n
The nation of Israel is an epic case in point. Redeemed from Egypt they faced circumstances which they viewed as unfavourable and despite knowing the power of God in the most remarkable way they chose to trust in the deceit their hearts served them. They chose to play to the music of their flesh.<\/p>\n
There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is the way of death. So it was for Israel, so it will be for you.<\/p>\n
Of course you will never stop being saved – but you have already chosen to live as if you never were. As if God’s ways didn’t matter. And so in your relationship with Him, you are all but dead.<\/p>\n
Wandering believer – it will not end well.<\/p>\n
God loves you, He incarnated Himself, died and rose again for you. He knows what you face, He suffered too remember. He knows that people around you are flawed, He was surrounded by flawed people too remember? He knows that the Fathers will is tough, He reeled away from it too, remember? But – he never wandered. He never pointed to anything in his environment and said – because of that, because of them, because of this – I’m going to do it my way.
\nIt is time to get back into The Word, back into Gods love, back into Gods people. Life is too short to waste it in self-pity. Too short to waste it in misplaced distractions.<\/p>\n
Sing with the hymn writer:<\/p>\n
O to grace how great a debtor, Daily I\u2019m constrained to be! Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee.<\/p>\n
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love; Here\u2019s my heart, O take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above.<\/p>\n
Hebrews 12:1-6<\/p>\n
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”\u00a0It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,\u00a0and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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