Why Some Christians Shipwreck

HE WAS a senior deacon in the leading Baptist church of his city, a church renowned across the nation for its missionary zeal and "Victorious Life" conferences. He served on boards of several faith-missionary societies and was chair man of a famous summer Bible conference. His saintly wife was much used in the city as a Bible teacher. His children followed the Lord.

In the course of years his wife died. Suddenly something happened. Or had it already happened, hidden through the years? He resigned from his church, the missionary societies and the Bible conference board. He took up with a worldly, unbelieving woman. His life ended far from God.

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He was an active fundamentalist minister of an independent Bible church and had a good ministry. He was happily married to a spiritually-minded girl and had a growing family of three young children. During World War II he enlisted as a chaplain and wrote glowing reports of God's blessing.

Then one day a friend of mine found him in Berlin living with a young German girl. He was still serving with the armed forces and with his association of fundamentalist churches. Ultimately there was repentance and restoration.

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He had been active in Inter- Varsity Christian Fellowship. But a year in the flesh-pots of Europe proved too strong for him. So in sensitive had he become that he came to my home with his girl friend of the moment expecting to sleep together. He, too, by God's grace was turned back to the Lord.

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The list is endless. The apostle Paul sums up these tragedies in these words: "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world." Some turn back again to the Lord; many others apparently never do. Why?

Why is it that so many seem to begin well and then fall away? Why do so many children of Christian parents turn aside? There is the mysterious parable of the Sower, the seed, and the soil. Some seed—the Gospel—falls on rocky ground, springs up but soon withers for lack of root. Other seed falls among thorns, which eventually choke off the new growth. Only that which falls on good ground reaches full maturity.

But the parable provides no final answers. It simply tells us what happens. It suggests causes but neither a solution nor the ultimate explanation. . . .

Dependence on Environment

One reason is certainly that there is too much dependence upon a Christian environment, that of family, church, or some special Christian circle or group. Each has its own life-style, its pat tern of do's and don'ts. Each has its standards of acceptance or rejection, approval or disapproval.

We lonely people in our impersonal society are like kittens: we need a warm place for comfort and security. A person can easily profess Christ on the basis of environment, without being born again, and a young Christian can be sustained by such an environment without ever being established in Christ.

Here is a living church with an active, meaningful youth program. Not only on weekends but during the week something is happening. Lonely, lost, and insecure young people are warmly welcomed. There is a natural response to genuine friendship, interest in others and happy boy-girl friendships. There is lots to do, everyone is busy, everyone seems to be needed and appreciated.

Sooner or later it becomes apparent, although perhaps unspoken, that the key that unlocks the door to ultimate acceptance by the group is to go forward, usually at a Sunday service, to accept Christ, to confess that "I believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins and I accept Him as my Lord and Savior." Baptism and official church membership follows.

Going Through the Motions

There is nothing hypocritical or dishonest about this. All concerned are sincere. However, the great question in such a decision is the primary motive—is it group acceptance or the urgent desire for salvation from sin? Has this young person really surrendered to Christ, or simply gone through a production line of going forward, confessing faith in Christ, baptism, joining the church?

The acid test may come years later—marriage, change of locale because of a job, military service, et cetera. Once removed from the familiar, warm church environment and out in the cold—what then? If this young person—or someone older, for that matter— is nothing but an environmental Christian and does not quickly find a similar church home, if there has been no true regeneration by the Holy Spirit, the old story of "the stony ground" will be repeated.

Others, perhaps older and more mature, are sustained by the evangelical rat race, by activity often described as "service for Christ." This emphasis upon the priority of service often is the reason for the dropouts from evangelistic teams and missionary staffs. We are told, rather unbiblically, that we are "saved to serve." The good Christian is the active Christian. What we don't realize is how possible it is for a "full-time Christian worker" to be sustained and maintained by his active service rather than by Christ Himself.

Too Busy

We can ignore ourselves, our inner spiritual defeat, the emptiness and unreality of our Christian life, just so long as we are busy and "successful" in Christian service. We become too busy to think, too busy to pray, too busy to meditate on God's Word, too busy to get alone with Cod and there naked before Him to confess our spiritual poverty and need. What we end up with is the barrenness of a too-busy life.

This service syndrome is a particular danger today when so much has been reduced to slick formulas—whether for salvation, sanctification, or something else. These techniques seem to guarantee success in Christian service— as long as we are out and about, aggressive and busy. But, oh, the double tragedy of the aftermath: victims who have been given false assurance and the Christian worker who comes to his moment of truth. We read of success stories but seldom are told of the wreck age—men and women burnt out, disillusioned, out of Christian work, even out of fellowship. Frequently it must be suspected that the Christian unintentionally has chosen service for Christ in stead of Christ Himself. The strain, heat and pressure of service have withered the little rootage he had.

Truth, but No Life

Still others keep on in the Christian life on the basis of doctrine— Christian truth. They are orthodox, "100 percenters." They will fight for the faith, "their position" at the drop of the hat. They never realize that, important and essential though it is, truth in and of it self is not enough. In fact, truth without life can become untruth. There is little joy or peace or love about these "contenders for the faith." Frequently belligerence, bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance develop. They seem to lack that essential ingredient without which all else is in vain—the love described in 1 Corinthians 13.

I well remember him—his chief boast was that he had been through the University of Chicago without losing his faith. What a pillar in his Baptist church that leading deacon was. That pinched nose, those writhing lips, those cold relentless blue eyes, those long nervous fingers. How his family suffered under the lash of that fundamentalist tongue.

As a fairly frequent guest in that home, I was regularly sniffed over for the stench of some hidden heresy. Mealtimes were always argument and debate. One could not blow his nose without being challenged as to whether that was "in the Book."

Is such a person a caricature rather than typical? Yes. Yet it is tragically true that we can believe "the truth" and never in a saving sense believe in Christ. The sadists of the Inquisition in many cases sincerely believed essential truth as they threw their victims onto the rack or into the fire. The Pharisee who hounded Christ to the cross also sincerely believed the truth of the Old Testament. I can give my body to be burned for the truth's sake, but if I do not have that love that Paul writes of, it profits me nothing.

Others live their lives as Christians essentially upon their experience. Some are sustained by the memory of a dramatic conversion experience, when as a teenager they "made their decision." But they have not traveled beyond that point. Others are kept going on as Christians by an annual visit to a camp meeting, a deeper-life conference, or some other "shot in the arm." For others it is "the second blessing," their experience of the "baptism by the Holy Spirit" after conversion, with charismatic manifestations. For them this is the hallmark of true Christianity, that they have been healed, or have spoken in a heavenly tongue.

The list of these experiential enthusiasms is endless. But nowhere does the Bible teach us that ecstatic experiences are the basis of Christian perseverance. A person can be caught up in the enthusiasm of an experience-centered community. Under the pressure of such an environment he or she may have an induced experience, not of the Holy Spirit but rather psychological—an experience of healing, of speaking in tongues, prophecy, joyous ecstasy, even of imagined conversion, and yet never experience Christ. Such experiences often wear thin, and if that is all one has, what is left?

The secret of going on with God as a Christian is God Himself. There is no substitute for the living God. There is only one means whereby we may avoid self-deception or a wrong path in the Christian life and that, the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. Down the running centuries the source of true Christian knowledge and valid Christian experience, the enablement to persevere, has been the Spirit and the Word. It is never one without the other.

It is by means of the dual activity of the Spirit and the Word in our hearts and lives that Christ be comes a living reality and a divine force. By these means we enter into the peace of God, the joy of believing and obeying Christ, release, forgiveness, victory. By these supreme means of grace we are established in Christ and stand in Him. It is the daily operations of the Spirit and the Word in our lives that enable us to persevere to the end. Christian fellowship, Christian environment, experience and service can never, never be a substitute for God Himself.

During much of his early life, David, king-elect of Judah and Israel, was deprived of the joy and fellowship of the worship of the house of God, for he was in exile to escape the jealous wrath of King Saul. In loneliness he wrote, "One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life" (Ps. 27:4). But although this was denied him, he did not forsake God. As a fugitive with a price on his head, hounded day and night like an animal, deprived of his godly family environment and the comforts of home, he nevertheless learned to be maintained and sustained by God Himself.

No Laurels-Resting

As a youth, David had extraordinary experiences of God's super natural deliverance as in the case of his fight with Goliath the giant of Gath. But there is no record that he spent the rest of his long life trying to get his sustenance from these memories and constantly giving his testimony to long-past experiences. He also had his moments of spiritual ecstasy as he danced uncovered before the Lord, but this never became the center of his life and faith, nor did he, as far as we know, spend his time encouraging others to "enter into this blessing."

Of David it could be said with out question that he believed God's revealed truth as he had it. But his was no doctrinaire belief but rather a moral response to truth. He entered into the experience of the psalm, "Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee" (Ps. 119:11).

David also fell into very great sin and failure. Yet even in the midst of the desolation of defeat he did not quit, he did not forsake God. Rather, under conviction of sin he was driven to his God crying, "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid" (Ps. 32:5).

David, "a man after God's own heart," could sum up his life and the lives of all ongoing Christians in these words: "The Lord is the strength of my life" (Ps. 27:1).