Backsliding is not Falling Back into Sin

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. (Revelation 3: 15, 16)

We know about Uzziah. Yet many who think they know about him only know about what happened when he died.

Yet how many know that for the most part he was a godly king?

What then happened?

We are told that he became proud. And that was his downfall because due to it he thought as the sovereign he could as well do some priestly duties.

He did not fall into immorality or other vile vices as we think of backsliding.

What am I saying?

The reality of backsliding is the cooling down of one’s passion for Christ. It is a relaxing of a believer from the rigours of his past soldenness to the causes he held very dear. It is a lethargy towards disciplines he pursued relentlessly in the past. It is a logical explanation for one’s lack of fire for the things of God. It is a looking down of people pursuing God with your past passion.

I can be doing everything right. My spiritual CV might be overflowing with all the right qualifications for ministry. My ministry output might be recognised the world over for its impact.

But my heart may have cooled off from my love for Christ and what He stands for.

I might easily explain it as maturity but the reality is that I have lost my passion for the things of God.

I am simply using the momentum I created when my heart was afire. But I have no new energy to propel me higher.

David didn’t backslide when he slept with Bathsheba.

That sin was the fruit of his backsliding.

The clearest indicator of his backsliding was staying home in the season kings went out to war. And I believe even that was a symptom as the backsliding must have started much earlier.

Yet I think Hezekiah gives us the clearest of this

Remember he was a very good and godly king.

Then he was told that the time of his death had come.

That is when we see his backslidden state, not his backsliding.

I deserve better, is what he was telling God

He was propelling his life using his past godliness and using it to bargain with God.

Grace has slipped away.

It is no wonder that we see pride consuming him once his bargain bears fruit.

Yet the clearest evidence of his backsliding can be seen in the fruit of his backslidden state.

He raised Manasseh in that state.

No where in the Bible do we see Hezekiah falling into sin.

His life went on as it had been before. Only his heart had thawed against God.

And that is what Manasseh caught since our children will catch our spirit instead of our actions and words.

Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. (Revelation 2:4)

You read that context of this verse and will not fail to see the ‘accolades’ Jesus heaped on the church in Ephesus.

They were doing everything right. They were defending the doctrine very nicely. Their outward was perfect.

But their heart had lost its fire.

And that to God was falling.

We love saying God sees the heart. Only that we do not really behave or run with that confession.

Why do I say that?

There are things we do in secret that we will be ashamed of if people knew that we do them. There are sites we visit on the net that we would be ashamed of if everybody knew we visit them. There are thoughts and attitudes we maintain and we know they are not right because nobody can access our thoughts or hearts.

Doing ministry because we must do it is an indicator of a backslidden state. Serving God because my support comes from that is also an indicator.

In short, doing all the right things is not any indicator that God is pleased with what I am doing because He sees the heart, the source and motivation of everything I do or think.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7: 21 – 23)

I had to fix those verses somewhere.

And it is because they clearly exemplify what I have been saying.

One thing I love with Paul was his motivation

For the love of Christ constraineth us; (2Corinthians 5:14a)

His passion for Christ was unfazed by nothing until he was martyred.

How backslidden are you?

New, Not Improved Creation

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2Corinthians 5:17)

I have some goats.

Incidentally, they have been opening my eyes to a lot of scripture understanding as I have been taking care of them.

I want us to look at one aspect, the difference between them and sheep. And it came alive as I was herding those few goats.

I never realised how different goats are from sheep.

Did you realise that goats do not eat grass?

You see, goats are browsers and not grazers like sheep and cows.

They therefore feed on shrubbery and eat grass when there is nothing better. And even then they prefer the flowery part of the grass when it is there.

This single fact explains so much about the goat’s behaviour.

Due to the fact that a goat samples everything it comes across to be able to get the nutrition it requires, it is very difficult for it to be constrained to a pasture or shepherd.

Goats nit-pick their food, not eat mouthfuls at any time.

They also must verify what they eat through their noses. I think it is not wrong to call them nosy.

When we were evicted from our father’s land because he was in the Mau Mau, a number of our sheep died after consuming a certain plant where we moved.

Yet I never saw the same with goats. And now that I am taking care of them can understand why.

Goats sniff everything before consuming it, however succulent it may appear.

Goats are suspicious by nature. And they know they are in the wrong always. Shout and a goat must look at you and stop whatever it is doing. It is not the same with sheep and cows which will stop only when they are moving.

Why all these stories? I know someone is wondering.

Christ did not come to make us better goats. He came to transform us from goats to sheep.

There is no way you can improve a goat to even remotely be like a sheep. They are DIFFERENT, completely different species.

A sheep simply is. A goat is aiming at something, especially something beyond its reach since that is where the most succulent fare is.

Place food on the ground and a goat will eat very little and trample the rest. Place the same in a place they can barely reach and they will eat it to the last bit without wastage

A goat is always looking for better pasture, never content with what it has. A goat is restless. However much it has eaten, it will behave as if it is starved if it sees something resembling food.

To a sheep, a shepherd is the guide since sheep trust him. To the goat, the shepherd is the limiter.

You take that to the spiritual and you realise what Christ came to do.

Adamic nature is goatish. New life in Christ is sheepish.

Salvation is therefore the transformation from one nature to another, not improvement of the goatish nature to make it sheepish.

And this explains some things people complain about.

Like why do ministers kids become children of Belial? Why do missionary kids hate mission work?

You see, growing among sheep may make a goat behave like a sheep and think that it is a sheep.

Once you remove them from the environment, their true nature manifests and they will start behaving who they are.

A minister’s kid is as goatish as the kid raised in a brothel. It is the environment that constrains him from releasing that goatish nature.

It means that a minister’s child must encounter Christ just as the one in the brothel for them to become sheep, God’s sheep.

The reason we hear of ministers behaving badly is many times because they did not give Christ their nature to transform. They may have subscribed to some dogmas and of course entered into an environment that made them think they were sheep.

Then they saw an exposed thigh or breast and their goatish nature exploded. Then they saw an opportunity for easy cash and their goatish nature exploded.

Growing and living with sheep is no insurance against goatishness.

Only Christ’s transformational salvation can. And it does so by replacing the goatish nature with a sheepish one.

This makes it possible for the former goat to be content with following the shepherd and listening to Him. It makes it possible for the former rebel to relax in the provision of the Shepherd.

Let me give an application.

A goat reads the Bible to look for excuses to do what they want.

When you hear a believer asking where in the Bible polygamy or smoking is condemned, please know that you are dealing with a goat since a goat is never satisfied with boundaries.

The drive for better prospects, greener pastures, greater and bigger things is many times an indicator for a goat. Discontent is the driving force in goats whereas rest is the preserve of sheep.

Goats fear the rod. It will jump over any obstacle to escape punishment.

Incidentally it is not only punishment. Hold a stick and a goat will run away.

If you hear someone who got saved some time ago saying that they got saved to escape hell, I think it is a clear indicator that their goatish nature still reigns. They came to escape hell but didn’t take the nature that escape required.

It is the same with the person who is sexually pure because they are scared of the consequences or are honest for fear of being caught.

The reality is that their good is really a cover for their goatish nature. Or it is their argument of being sheep.

A sheep does not fear the rod since it follows the shepherd.

Look at our preaching.

Give so that this or the other happens or does not happen.

That is fare for goats.

Sheep will give out of their love and trust in their shepherd. They do not give to attract a reward or avoid punishment.

Or those people who attend and get involved in church so that they can get a church burial or access church goodies. These are goats and the ones who preach such nonsense are also goats.

Heaven and hell, real as they are, are not the primary reasons Christ calls us to Himself.

God did not create man to escape hell.

He created man to have fellowship with Him.

It is the goatish nature activated by the fall that brought heaven and hell in the picture. But it did not make them the focus of God’s redemptive agenda.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. (Revelation 21:3)

Keeping up with the joneses is also the evidence of a goat nature.

Give goats each their own pasture and they will all be running at each other’s pile. It will bite here and run off to bite at the other pile the whole day.

Tether a goat and the grass will be eaten at the extremities since a goat thinks that what is unreachable is better than what is easily available.

We will look at other aspects of this topic.

Are you a sheep or goat?

 

Saltless Salt

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. (Matthew 5:13)

There is a contextual element in revelation.

We will many times fail to understand scriptures because we seek to interpret in our context, leaving many gaps in our understanding.

The verse above has bothered me for as long as I have read or heard it taught.

How does salt lose its saltiness?

I have never even heard of a situation where salt can lose its savour.

You see, we are in the age of refined salt. Even for those who encounter unprocessed, it is from the sea and so is almost pure.

A pastor the other day in preaching gave me the context of the verse. And this solved my life long dilemma of sorts.

People far from the sea in the past had no easy way to get salt.

Let me get us closer home.

Heard of salt pans?

These are places where the soil is very salty. Animals wild and domestic will flock there to lick that saltiness.

But people do not lick salt. They prepare and preserve food with it.

What did they do to get salt from that salty ground?

They would take chunks of the same and soak it in water. Then they would strain it probably by some cloth and the water coming out would be salty for their use.

They would repeat the same whenever they needed salt.

But eventually the saltiness would disappear as the salt would be exhausted.

That is the context of our verse.

It thus means that salt does not lose its saltiness through a chemical reaction like exposure to the elements.

Salt loses its saltiness by being used.

In short salt loses its savour through overuse.

That is what Christ was talking about. And that is what I want us to look at.

We do not lose our saltiness by sinning since sinning simply indicates that we really were not salt in the first place. We do not have the right makeup to be salt.

And this because salt is not something we display but something whose sweetness or impact we experience.

We lose our saltiness by stretching our saltiness without replenishing the same.

You see, we are not naturally salt. God through Christ has given us that nature.

And since that is not a chemical change, we must continually be connected to our source to continue being salt.

Though in salvation we become new creation, it is a creation that must be feeding on the source to remain new.

That is why Christ talked about us being branches of the vine that is Him.

We must be feeding on Him for us to effectively feed others

In short, we must be getting our saltiness from Him.

We lose our saltiness when we are more interested in releasing the salt we have than accessing the salt we receive from Christ since we will be strained saltless.

It is when we are drained of our saltiness that our proclivity to sin gains the ground.

In simple terms, it is when we continue ministering without the increase of our expansion of the closet that we gradually lose our saltiness.

Then we become like salt without its savour as Jesus said.

Then we become useless to the kingdom, totally useless.

Do not be shocked when you see these verses as you will always see when I teach.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7: 22, 23)

I dare say that they ministered without releasing adequate salt, probably because their level of salt intake was overtaken by the level of their salt output. They therefore gave until they had no salt left.

Then sadly, due to the accolades or rewards their new ‘saltiness’ continued attracting, they did not think it mattered whether they were connected to the source

They therefore continued to thrive without the source of their salt, eventually giving out a completely different savour.

God does not expect us to create salt. He does not expect us to produce salt from ourselves.

He simply wants us to allow Him to saturate His salt in us so that we can produce it when we are squeezed or strained[GM1] .

Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another. (Mark 9:50)

 

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 [GM1] 

It is Radical or It is not Obedience

And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you. (Judges 2: 2, 3)

Have you realised that just about enough and almost enough is not enough?

Do you realise that any command from God has to be carried out to its conclusion or it is not obedience?

That is what I want us to look at today.

Why must it have to be extreme to be acceptable?

A small slip has the capacity to water down the almost complete obedience.

Israel was commanded to clear Canaan of her inhabitants as a condition to their settling in the land.

But it was not so straightforward to them.

You see, some had superior weapons (iron chariots) while others were in fortified abodes.

What was wrong with slowly weakening them before dealing with them? I am sure many opined thus.

They were therefore unable (unwilling?) to go the whole hog as far as dispossessing the occupiers of the Promised Land was concerned.

What then happens?

The abhorred will neighbour the blessed. To the rebellious (supposedly with their heart at the right place) start fetching water with the condemned from the same wells. They start sharing the same bushes for wood. They start sharing the same grazing fields with their animals.

Of course they will start talking since they are social beings.

This will then lead to them sharing more than things.

They will share in culture. They will share in language. They will share in relationships and marriage. Ultimately, they will share in worship.

This will result in the blessed being condemned as a result of those associations.

That comes out clearly when we read the book of Judges.

All because of an innocent oversight, a little slip.

Or was it?

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit. But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them. (Numbers 33: 51 – 56)

The command was clear, very clear.

Arguing about the implementation of the same was the problem. Explaining the reluctance or difficulty of ‘literal’ obedience was the reason the Canaanite was left, albeit in small numbers.

But that was as against the commandment as would have been had they completely ignored the commandment.

Would there be a difference between drinking a sip of poison and swallowing a whole jug of the same?

That is how God sees it.

There are no different levels of obedience. It is complete or it is disobedience.

The world has tried to make us dread the word radical. Yet in the sphere of obedience that is the only obedience God recognises.

And I have explained why partial obedience is so intolerable to God because He sees where it all heads to.

The consequences of partial obedience are probably more destructive that outright disobedience.

Do you realise that there was grace for Manasseh and none for Saul, for example?

Manasseh was lost, completely so. But Saul was on the borderline and not ‘exactly’ disobedient.

Don’t you realise he waited, and he killed the Amalekites? Are there no marks for trying?

With God there aren’t.

What am I aiming at?

Do we debate and rationalise what the Bible says? Do we look for explanations when we are looking to be on the right side of the Good Book?

Do we treat God’s commandments as suggestions as even some modern Bibles have been translated to say?

Do we trust God so completely that we will walk on our heads if He says so?

Caleb walked for forty years with the rebellious Israelites, but his case was different because his response to the spying mission was as radical as God required.

No wonder forty-five years later he was as strong as he had been after spying while all his peers had been dead and buried long before then. He could even ask for permission, not support, to tackle the giants that were the reason for the forty years punishment.

I hope you get me.

As usual I will place these verses I always quote.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7: 21 – 23)

I hope you realise that they are not going to hell for not doing. They are going because they did not do exactly what they had been commanded.