DRIFTING

The Pastor’s Page

Drifting – It sounds so peaceful doesn’t it? There are many times in life we wish we could do exactly that, drift along with the current leaving the exertion and stress of paddling behind.

My personal mental image is one of a totally stress-free environment, if only for a short while. Nothing to battle. No fights. No conquering or being conquered.

It implies an absence of deadlines. The current may be slow, but speed is not of importance. The current will carry us in the direction and at the speed it feels like. No decisions hang over our head.
However, not all of life is meant to be “drifted” through. Oh, certainly there are times when it would be fine, if only for a little while. However, drifting also implies a lack of purpose, a wandering through life without direction, the absence of anything of importance going on in one’s life at that moment.

D. A. Carson talks about it like this, “People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."

Yes, there are things in life that never seem to be downstream from where we are. They can only be had through intense effort and much grace. Now that I think about it, much more grace on God’s part than effort on ours! We are tired of the struggle, but it is our spiritual lives which suffer the most when we decide it would be so easy to just drift for a bit.

I won’t claim that my hand is always on the plow and ready for work. I won’t lie to you and say that the rising of the sun raises my spirits as well and moves me to open the word every day, rejoicing in what my Lord has in store for me. No, but I will tell you that I have seen what happens when you don’t aggressively pursue spirituality and have been closer than I would care to be to that drifting destination. Remember, drifting with the world only increases the distance one has to paddle to get back to where you REALLY want to be.

Pastor Craig