Drift

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Recently, my husband went fishing by himself in a local pond. He has a routine that he follows when unloading his boat, and one step of that routine when he is alone is making sure that a line connects his boat to the trailer so that it won’t drift out of reach when he pulls the truck up to let the boat slip into water. Unfortunately for him, that day he forgot to connect the line and his boat quickly drifted away from shore. I was out of town at the time and received a picture from him of his boat sitting in the middle of the pond, a good 50 or 60 yards from shore. That’s a problem that required desperate action that required swimming—let’s just say it was fortunate for him that it was a good way from road. And there was mention of alligators . . . ‘nuff said!


Likewise, in our Christian walk, it is crucial that we stay connected to God’s Word and His leading in our lives lest we, too, drift. Hebrews 2:1 warns us “we must pay closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it” (NASB).  If we drift away, sin becomes easier to embrace, and the water just gets deeper from there. Deep dark waters are dangerous. There’s so much around us that we aren’t even aware of—spiritual battles fought in an invisible realm. In an article I read recently by John Piper, he noted that “impurity darkens the God-seeing lens of the soul.” If we drift away and sink into the waters of impurity, we lose our focus on God and His “unalterable” word, and we lose our witness, and we lose our way. And getting back is not an easy task when we are mired in the depths of sin.

Just like Greg didn’t mean to forget to connect his boat to something that would hold it in place, Christians don’t mean to slip away from our connection to God’s Word. But it happens when we are not intentional about holding tight and valuing the connection—deepening it. Not to mention that God is “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) and we who have received a “kingdom which cannot be shaken” should “show gratitude by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe” (Heb. 12:28).


God’s grace has given us much more than we deserve in Christ, “tasting death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9). The least we can do is stay connected.

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