Adrift, Not Abandoned

“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.” - D.A. Carson

I recently read about two ladies who sailed south from Hawaii in a seaworthy sailboat headed for Tahiti. A storm mauled their boat, damaging or destroying the sails, engine, and radio. Adrift on the open sea, they drank desalinized sea water, rationed their food, and hoped someone would find them.

Five months later, the weary, gaunt, and desperate ladies were rescued off the coast of Japan. Instead of traveling 2,600 miles south to Tahiti, they had drifted 4,000 miles west, in the wrong direction. Abandoning their damaged boat, they recovered, regained their strength, and returned home to Hawaii.

The winds and currents of life are powerful forces that can quickly move us where we never intended to go. While the Church at Ephesus had drifted off course, the message to them was direct yet hopeful: “You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” (Revelation 2:4-5a)

Don’t allow the currents and winds of this world to blow you off course. But if you find yourself adrift, remember the simple plan for rescue and redirection, “Remember your first love. . .repent and do the things you did at first.”