Life Ministries

“Backslide”
 John 13:36-38 and John 18:15-18 and 25-27

   What does it mean to backslide? Webster - “To slide back; to turn away from; to go backward morally.” I want to point out just a few signs that God’s Word says are signs of a back-slidden state; 

1. First is neglect.  Hebrews 2:1-3 “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.  For since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?” Back peddling Christians are noticed by their neglect of spiritual matters. This neglect means there is a lack of interest. It is not that they are doing everything wrong; it is just that they are doing very little right. It is not doing the things necessary to get you moving forward and continually growing in your relationship with God.
    For example, when a marriage ends in divorce, it does not always mean some-one has committed adultery. It may mean the husband has been stuck in front of the television too long. The dating has stopped. The compliments have ceased. The wife has given up and stops caring about the marriage and the home. Such passive, neglect opens the door to failure.
    Some people are in bad health not because they have gone out and done things destructive to their bodies, it’s just that they have neglected to keep in good health. Some Christians begin to regress spiritually not because they have committed gross sins. But Satan has done just enough to keep them out of the Word, he has done just enough to keep them off their knees, and really all Satan has done is just enough to cause them to neglect the things of God.
2. The second warning sign we encounter is spiritual insensitivity. Hebrews 3:12-13 “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.  But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitful-ness.”
    I am sure most of us have met people with hard hearts. When people say, "I don’t care" that is an expression of the heart that is not sensitive anymore, that has become callused. How do we get a hard heart, Paul says we are duped into it by the deceitfulness of sin. But he also warns us against allowing an unbelieving heart to develop. An unbelieving heart doubts God and when we doubt God we open the door for sin and instead of turning to God, we will begin to turn away from Him. When we read of the children of Israel and their journey through the wilderness we find they were hardened because they had been duped by Satan. They began to doubt God and were lured to other gods…We need to understand, Satan is tricky and he will try to stop you from believing God and His promises and you will begin to believe the lure of sin.
3. The third is refusal. To refuse the spiritual diet that is necessary for growth. Hebrews 5:11-12 “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand.  In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!
    Melchizedek, a type of Christ’s priesthood, wanted to take them into some deeper truths but then he realized he was talking to a Sesame Street generation of believers; They were “Peter Pan” Christians; They did not understand what he was saying because they refuse to grow up.  Not because they did not have oppor-tunity, but because they had a “Lackawanna.” They basically were saying, I don’t need to know this stuff, I don’t need to understand, I don’t need to study. I don’t need to apply this to my life…They had become willfully rebellious to God.
    So how can you know if you are a milk toast Christian? Has your understand-ing of the Christian faith remained at the level where you were 5, 10, or even a year ago? Are you only able to say Jesus Loves Me this I know, or are you moving into the deeper truths about God’s Word? If you can’t answer your children’s questions about the Bible with something other than ask the Pastor or the Sunday School teacher, you are “Peter Pan” Christian!
4. The fourth is withdrawal. Hebrews 10:23-25 “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without waver-ing, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near.”
    They don’t feel like they need to be in the House of the Lord, they can do their own thing. I have heard the excuses... "I don’t need to go to church to be a Christian." This may be technically true, but, again I would resort to Dr Phil; “How’s it working for you?”   We need fellowship. We were created for fellowship. We are instructed in God’s Word to live according to all the “one anothers” and, it says we need the dynamic fellow-ship, the dynamic motivation and the dynamic inspiration that comes from the people of God. Not only do we need it, we need to give it to someone else. So those who don’t attend church are only thinking of themselves. They forgot about God and don’t care about other people. If they were looking at the church as God’s house, they would remember that God seeks our worship--   The passage in Hebrews says our job as members of the Body of Christ is to "stimulate one another to love and good deeds." Our job is not just to be blessed, our job is to be a blessing.
The last is rejection. The ones who ignore this sign will fall away from the faith, deny Christ and wind up in the rank and file of lost sinners. But when an individual gets to the point of rejection, it may be too late. How serious is it? Hebrews 10:26 states, “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. (Those who believe “once saved, always saved” have to get past this verse!) 
    Hebrews 10:29 says, “How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?” …(The unpardonable sin.)
    While there may be many forms of backsliding, the result is NEVER in our favor.  The result is separation from God…And, separation from the “abundant life” that Christ came to give.