How to Avoid Backsliding

The word backsliding, as I am sure you know, really just simply means to slide back.
And the image that immediately comes to my mind is that of a person climbing a steep hill
and losing his footing and then sliding backwards head over heels.
And to backslide is to lose the territory that you had previously gained.
And so spiritually and theologically speaking, backsliding means relapsing or falling back
into error or sin.
And interestingly enough, it is particularly the growing Christian who is very susceptible
to backsliding.
And the reason being that the growing Christian is of course on a journey, on a journey from
the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, a journey in the words of James from
a lifestyle that is governed by wisdom from below into a lifestyle of wisdom that is
from above.
And whenever you're on that journey, whenever you've turned your back on the world
in its wisdom and you are seeking to embrace God's ways and God's wisdom, James tells
us there is a twofold challenge that we commonly encounter on that journey.
The first is to live out what in Christ we already are.
If this morning you're in Christ, you've given your life to him, you've repented of your
sin, then from a biblical perspective you have become a citizen of God's kingdom.
That is to say you're already there in Christ, doesn't mean you fully live it, doesn't
mean that you love God above all and that you love your neighbor the way that you love
yourself, but it means that you've made a commitment to living there.
Your citizenship in biblical language is in heaven.
And so the challenge for the Christian life is not to try to be something other than what
we are, it is to live out what already we are.
And I find it fascinating talking to Paul and Suzanne before the service, I asked them,
here you have two twins, how do they compare?
And already each of them has his own personality and the one is louder than the other.
You will have noticed quickly.
And we don't want to settle the lad with that reputation for the rest of his life, but
part of growing up is an unfolding of what you are.
And part of growing up in Christ is an unfolding what in Christ we already are.
That's the first challenge, which is why James goes on to say, who is wise and understanding
among you, let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from
wisdom.
If you have truly repented, you know that God is God and you are the creature of his hand,
then it is impossible for that wisdom not to show up in how you do life.
You're going to be a man and a woman of prayer.
You're going to be a man or a woman who bows before God's authority and you're going
to learn to live the way that God wants you to live.
And the Christian life is a journey then of growing up into the fullness of who Christ
is and who it is that we are in Him.
But there's a second challenge, says James, and that is not to slide back where we came
from.
Just because in Christ we are over here and all the riches of God are ours by faith in
Him doesn't mean that we automatically live that way.
The Bible and Christian history is filled with people having put their hand to the plough,
have looked back and have lost their inheritance.
Think of the people of Israel and the wilderness.
Think of Judas Iscariot and the New Testament, one of the disciples of Jesus, who ultimately
betrayed Him.
Think of Demis, one of Paul's companions who, at least for a period of time, for sook
him because he fell in love, says Paul, with his present world.
Think of all the people you know.
Think of all the people who in this church at one point have made profession of faith,
some of which are nowhere to be found today.
You see, the scriptures talk constantly about the danger of backsliding.
That's why James goes on to say in the verses 14 and 15, "But if you harbor bitter envy
and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth."
Such wisdom does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual of the devil.
I believe that in those two verses, particularly that first one, James gives us a fourfold
recipe to avoid backsliding or to put it the other way around conditions that if we allow
them to penetrate into our hearts and into our lives, we'll guarantee that we slide back
from when we came. Let me quickly point them out to you and then we're going to walk
through them one at a time.
The first is bitter envy. The second is selfish ambition. The third is boasting and the fourth
is deny the truth. As I said, let's look at each of them and we'll begin this morning
by looking at harboring bitter envy. Now, the word envy in the dictionary is defined as
a feeling of discontent at seeing someone else's position of superiority. Envy typically
has three emotions that are associated with it. The first is unhappiness. You know how
it goes? Somebody has something that you don't have. You compare your life with their life
and immediately you become unhappy. It's a fact of life that happiness in this present
world is not at all related primarily to what people have or what they don't have. Some
of the richest people are the most unhappy. Some of the poorest people are the happiest.
It's primarily a function of relationship, a function of what other people around you
have. And if you see people having something that you don't have and that you want, then
unhappiness is the result. Allow that to settle in your soul. And the next stage is that
of resentment. Somebody's got money to buy a new car. You don't. And resentment begins
to rise up in you. You're struggling to pay your bills. You can hardly meet your monthly
rent. Somebody you know has got time effort and money to go south for a mid-winter vacation.
And it's hard not to feel resentment. Your house is falling apart at the seams. Somebody
else moves out of their house into an even bigger one. And the stories go on and on and
on. And resentment has a way of creeping forward in our hearts. Somebody else gets honored.
When you feel that you've done more, you're overlooked, you're ignored. And there isn't
a one of us that has to work at feeling resentment. You don't get heard. You get overlooked.
Resentment rises up. Unhappiness yields resentment and resentment if you allow it to live in
your heart will inevitably lead despite. You come across the other guy's brand new car
in the parking lot and you have this irresistible urge to take your keys and go like this along
the paint finish. You see somebody else being honored and their name comes up in a conversation
and you cannot resist the temptation to try to assassinate their character by telling
something negative about them. Somebody else moves into a new house or buys a new car
or otherwise succeeds in places where you have not succeeded. And everything inside you
says I'm going to work against you. If it ever comes into a situation where you're
called to vote for them, you determine you're not going to vote for them. And if you're called
upon to support them in clever and in subtle ways, you sabotage the process. That's what
envy is. And the color associated with envy means the color green. Isn't it interesting
how we use colors to describe emotion? Red for anger, purple for rage, and green for envy.
And please don't ever think that even if you're a Christian, that somehow you're automatically
immune from envy. Because the more testing and the more challenging are the times, the
more you feel your pain. And you see other people's abundance, the more likely you are to
experience at the very least the twinges of envy. And the reason is very simple because
we live in a fallen world. And in a fallen world, we don't really believe that God fundamentally
cares for us or that fundamentally is going to look after us. So we're not content about
the state of life in which He has put us. We become resentful and irritable because
other people have what we do not have. And that envy is fed then by the three enemies
of our souls. It is fed first by the flesh. Because Paul in the book of Galatians lists
envy as being the works of the flesh. That is to say, the way we are in the natural
outside of the saving grace of Jesus, there is no one of us given the right kind of circumstances
who is not going to experience the twinges of envy. The less you have, the more wounded
you are, the more envy you will experience in the most unlikely and unusual settings.
Then we live in a world that feeds on envy because it's one of the powerful motivating
factors it resonates with our pain. And we surround ourselves with people who share our
pain. And now we're all throbbing together because we feel so poorly and badly done by.
And then underneath all of that is the greatest enemy of our souls, the devil himself, who
is envy personified. Remember, he wanted to be like God, got thrown out of heaven. It's
been mad at God ever since. And every place where he can find a little bit of territory,
every place where he can find even the slightest twinge of envy he'll be in there to feed it,
to feed our sense of injustice, to feed our sense of unfairness. And if he can let that
grow within our hearts, he will have gained a foothold. And that foothold will be the
first step towards backsliding and losing the intimacy of relationship with God and relationship
with other people. Now here's what we need to understand. If you've come to Christ and you've
committed yourself to Him, then you're committed yourself to living in God's kingdom. You've said
no to the world. You've died with Christ to the flesh, the world, and the devil. That doesn't
make you immune to envy, but it means that when you find envy stirring in your heart, you will
recognize it for what it is. And because you recognize it for what it is, you will take it by
the root and you will cry out to Jesus, you will repent of it, you'll take responsibility for it,
you'll nail it to the cross and you'll ask God to give you grace to put it to death. And as you do,
over a period of time, it loses its power as it gets replaced by the fruit of the Spirit,
which is a celebration of God's love. That's the way it ought to be. But now here's what happens
for a lot of us. We not only don't pull out the root, we harbor bitter envy. Now you know the word
harbor means a harbor is a safe place where you anchor boats. It's got sea walls like you can see
in that little picture. It is a place that keeps out the storm where the boats can be safely
anchored and safely protected. And what an amazing word it is because harboring envy is what a lot
of people do. Instead of recognizing it for what it is, instead of rooting it up, we protected,
we cherish it, we feed it, we surround ourselves with other people who resonate with us. And before you
know it, envy has found a home and it grows into what James calls bitter envy. And it becomes
significantly one of the first steps towards the destruction of our spiritual life.
And a good biblical example is the story of Kay and in Genesis chapter 4, you'll recall how
he and his twin brother Abel both brought offerings to God. Abel's offering was accepted. Kay and
his offering was rejected. God invited him to repent, to resist sin that was couching at the door.
But Kay and didn't, couldn't or wouldn't. And so the result is that he allowed it into his life.
And it becomes the foundation stone that ultimately leads to the murder of his brother Abel.
You want to backslide? Then hold on to that envy and harbor it. And it will grow and it will
bear fruit. Remember the the McCoy Hatfield feud that I talked about last week as an illustration?
Well, if you look closely at the history of those two families, you will discover that in part
at the root of that feud was the bitter envy of two families trying to make a living in that same
valley. Harboring bitter envy says James is where it begins and then it spreads next to harboring selfish
ambition. Now the word ambition in the dictionary is defined as eager desire for distinction,
preferment, power or force. And as I said last week, the tendency for many of us is to think of ambition
as inherently evil. And yes, there are many instances where people use ambition wrongly.
But ambition itself is neutral. Yielded to God, obedient to God, ambition is the drive that motivates
us to accomplish the purposes of God in our generation. Paul, who was certainly spirit-led was the
man of ambition. He says at Romans 15, verse 20, "It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel
where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation."
And in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, he challenges you and me. And he says to us,
"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own
hands just as we told you." You see, the problem comes in when you add the modifier selfish
ambition. And selfish ambition is the kind of ambition that makes me the center of my universe.
That makes me want to be famous, important, rich for whatever reasons. And that kind of selfishness,
that kind of selfish ambition, like bitter envy, has its origin in the devil, the world, and the
flesh. The devil wanted to be like God. The world is always encouraging us to be somebody to make
ourselves be counted. And the flesh doesn't need a lot of encouragement. Because when push comes to
shove outside of and apart from the grace of Jesus, it's always all about us. And you know what
is particularly disheartening sometimes is that for those who call ourselves Christian,
our selfish ambitions are sometimes hidden under the guise of serving the Lord. Have you ever
noticed how you can be engaged in the most holy of tasks and ultimately be pursuing that God's
agenda, but your own agenda. You know how you can tell? It's by how tightly you hold onto it.
If it's God's agenda, you can lay it down. If it's God's agenda, you can surrender it and
trust that the Lord will make it happen. If the anger goes down or if the sun goes down on your
anger, and if you find it necessary to fight with unholy weapons, then whatever your agenda is,
whatever your ambition is, it is at best very mixed because your own flesh has entered into it.
And sometimes the Lord has to put us through deep waters to sort out the wheat from the chaff,
the gold from the draws so that our motivation and our ambition is for God and for His kingdom
and the well-being of other people. Now please understand again that if you're in Christ,
you have died to the devil, the world, and the flesh. And so we have said goodbye to it.
And so when God points these things out to us, we're prepared to lay it aside,
but there again the danger is that we harbor it and that we make justification for it.
And before you know it, we're driven to build our own kingdoms for our own glory.
And again, Kayon's story is instructive because what does he do after he refuses to bow
before the wisdom from above? Well, he goes out and he builds himself a city. He calls it
after his son, Inok. It becomes, in the words of St. Augustine, the city of man, it becomes the
ultimate foundation stone of all the empires of the world. And you can look at any place in the
world where there is conflict and where there is pain and where there is confusion almost without
exception. Underneath it all is a selfish ambition that says, I cannot trust God to take care of me.
I cannot trust God to bring in His kingdom. I'm going to make it happen.
And the more that has been taken away from you, the more you have been robbed, the more you have lost.
And the more pain you have experienced, the deeper rooted in your heart will be the wisdom that
from below that says, if I don't look after me, nobody will. And the result I can guarantee you
will always be disorder and every evil practice. So you want to avoid backsliding. Then you
avoid harboring bitter envy. You avoid harboring selfish ambition. And then James goes on to tell us
you need to avoid boasting about it. And the word boast, of course, means to speak with excessive
pride or vanity. I love the little story of a young man had bought his first car. It was a very
sporty model. And he irritated his friends to no end because he was always bragging about the
great gas mileage that he was getting in his little car. So his friends got together and they
determined they're going to fix it a little red wagon. And so every night they snuck up to wherever
he parked his car and they poured a couple of gallons of gas into his gas tank. And this guy got
more and more amazed about the amazing mileage that he was getting out of his car. And he'd be
bragging to all his friends into everybody. And after a while his mileage was up to 90 miles per
gallon. Nobody believed him anymore. He got so frustrated because he could see it with his own
eyes. And you could imagine his let down when all of a sudden they stopped pouring gas into his
tank. And he couldn't figure out where his mileage had gone to. Poor guy was sadly traumatized.
James says, if you boast about it, you're going to be in trouble. What does the it refer to?
I believe it refers to the envy and the selfish ambition. Now listen to me really well because
this is really important. It's one thing to fall into bitter envy. And it is one thing to fall
into selfish ambition. There isn't a one of us here who given the right kind of circumstances
in the situations cannot fall into either of those and many other scenes. It is quite another
to boast about your envy or your selfish ambition. Because you see if you boast about it,
what that illustrates is that you've confused black with white and you're already so far
down the tube that you no longer know the difference between right and wrong. And there are many
people who boast about things that in fact they ought to be ashamed of. See if you're a Christian
and you're subject to the word of God and the Holy Spirit lives in you and you find envy in your
heart and you find selfish ambition in your heart and God's Holy Spirit flushes it out or it comes
to your attention in some other way, then the very least thing you can do is have the courtesy to be
ashamed of it. And to know that it's wrong and even though you may not know how to get rid of it,
at least as God gives you grace, you're going to fight it. And that means you still know the
difference between right and wrong. But when you boast about it, you have lost the distinction
between right and wrong. And God has a hard time getting through to you because your value system
is already turned upside down. You see that's what Paul talks about at the end of the first chapter
of the book of Romans when he says, and this is after listing a whole list of behaviors that are
not acceptable in the sight of God. And he talks about Gentiles who don't know God and he says although
they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only
continue to do these very things, but they approve those who practice them. Do you understand the
distinction? I can do all kinds of things that are wrong. And as long as I know they are wrong,
at least I have a conscience that can produce correction. And there's all kinds of people,
including all kinds of us, probably no one excluded, who doesn't sometimes do wrong things
and we know that they are wrong. And that is a very good thing because it means we are still alive
in our spirits and in our hearts over against God. But when you come to the point where you not only
do those things, but you approve others who do them, then you have flipped over into another place
where your thinking has changed and you now call black white and white black and you are virtually
beyond redemption. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? When you boast about envy,
when you boast about selfish ambition, when you call it normal, then you demonstrate that you really
haven't begun to understand the rules of God's kingdom. You haven't really begun to understand
that you have died to the world and that you have been raised with Christ into newness of life.
Now let me try to illustrate that in a way that I have seen it come across sometimes in a very
crash fashion. If you've ever been to funerals where unbelievers were buried and their friends
came forward to celebrate their life, you will have noticed as I have that the tone of the
celebration is very different from that of a Christian funeral. And I want to be careful how
I put this, but I want you to understand this. I've been at funerals where friends have told stories
about the deceased past in terms of their drinking and their carousing and their other ways
of living. That were far removed from what the Bible would call decent behavior. And in most
situations, in most instances, we have the courtesy not to dwell on that and not to celebrate that
publicly because we know it is wrong and obnoxious in the sight of God. But see if your eyes haven't
been opened, if you haven't been converted, if you haven't yet come to Jesus, that kind of lifestyle
is very normal. And so you celebrate a lifestyle that God condemns and rejects. That's bolsting
in the wrong thing. And it means that you've either never come to Jesus or you're really starting
to fall away from here because you're starting to lift up something that God is hard at work
putting to death. Harbour bitter envy, harbour selfish ambition, boast about it, and then here comes
the clincher. You deny the truth. And the word "deny" means to assert the negative of it means to
not believe it. See, a very interesting thing happens when we are in Christ. We come to live in his
kingdom. And when God finds in us areas of our life that are still the old way of life, as is
true for all of us because sanctification is a lifelong journey, then God will begin to speak
into that situation to help us to put off the old and to put on the New York. And so when envy
lives within our hearts or when selfish ambition lives within our hearts, when we're bolsting about
it, then you'll often discover that by his word and through his spirit and sometimes through other
people, God speaks into our lives. I mean, haven't you ever had it? You read a scripture and you
stand condemned because you know God is speaking into your life. Haven't you ever had it? You come
into a place like this. The word of God is being expounded and you wonder who talked to the preacher
about your behavior the night before. It's like you're nailed to the wall. And haven't you ever
had it where, you know, there's an attitude in your life for a characteristic that is
displeasing to God and some brother or sister in Christ who really loves you a lot.
Speaks into your situation and says, you know, the way you relate it to your spouse,
the way you treated your children, the way that you carried on with your friends at work, the way
that you did or didn't do your work. That's not a God honoring and a God glorifying way. And God
is shining the light into your heart. And whenever that happens, we can do one or two things.
We can bend in humility and we can say, Lord, if there is any truth to what is being told
and spoken into my life, then show me because I want to repent of it and I want to get rid of it.
Doesn't automatically mean that whatever somebody else is saying is the gospel truth. They may
have their own agenda. They may have their own stuff. But James talks about showing our wisdom
in our good life by deeds done in humility. Nobody is ever beyond correction.
And if it is really your desire to love God and to serve him and to obey him,
though painful it might be to be corrected and to be spoken into, that is an act of kindness
and an act of love. The book of Proverbs says, faithful are the wounds of a brother.
That's God's provision to catch us from sliding downward and to help us to go forward.
But you know just as well as I do, that for every one person who receives correction with humility,
even in the church, there are ten other people whose guard goes up, who get offended,
who close their heart and who lash back at the person who is speaking truth into their situation.
That is what denying the truth is. It's a very dangerous spot to be because once you elevate your
own thinking and your own experience as the ultimate mark of right and wrong, you have committed
the sin of Adam and even the garden when they listen to the devil's temptation and they decided
in eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that they could be like God,
knowing good from evil. And once you begin to shut out the light that way,
Satan has made significant inroads into your life and it is downhill from there because even God
cannot get in when you have shut out the means of grace. How do we avoid backsliding?
We have to avoid allowing envy to creep into our lives. We have to avoid selfish ambition.
We must learn to hate it like we hate to plague itself. We must avoid the pride of life that
boasts about things and behaviors that God condemns. And we must have a heart that is always open
to truth. You know, there's only one thing that you need to do in order not to be deceived,
and that is love of the truth. And if you love the truth, God will always find a way to speak
into your heart and to save you from deception. In fact, it takes hard work to keep the truth out.
If you want to darken this room, you've got to work hard at keeping out the pinpricks of light
because a little light goes a long way. And when people wander in darkness,
it is always according to the Book of Romans because they have chosen by their wickedness
to suppress the truth. But there's good news. And you know what the good news is?
That no matter how far you've gone down this line, there is always hope
as long as you're still alive because God's grace is always greater than our sin.
And it doesn't matter how envious we are or have been. It doesn't matter how much ambition has
ruled our lives. It doesn't matter how boastful we have been. It doesn't even matter how much we
have sought to shut out the truth. If we will, but humble ourselves before go on, acknowledge our
condition and seek His face. God doesn't wish that any should perish, but that all should reach
repentance. And I want to end this morning, then with the rest of the story
about the Hatfield McCoy feud. We talked about that last week. Two families
across the Tug River, West Virginia, and Kentucky. They fought each other over a period of 12 years.
Many dead, the feud finally ended in 1990 or 1991 with a hanging of one of the people responsible
for the murder of Alephair McCoy. As the story goes on, it is very interesting that the principles
of the feud, the Valencia Hatfield and Randall McCoy both survived the feud. If you read the
history, you would discover that Randall McCoy in many ways was the better man. The better man,
because he had a very keen sense of justice and he depended on the legal system
to try to solve the conflicts of his life and when the legal system let him down in his estimation,
he was a broken and a ruined man. He lost a lot. He lost five sons in the conflict. He lost,
I believe, two daughters. And he spent the remaining years of his life ferrying across one of the
rivers in that neighborhood. And history has it that he often wandered the streets of Pikeville,
complaining and telling everybody who would listen about the terrible injustices that had
been unto him, especially cursing the name of Hatfield and he died a bitter and a broken man
in 1914. Hatfield, in the other hand, enjoyed a certain post-fued fame. His business in fact
prospered significantly and so did his reputation. But the feud had not left him unscathed and he
struggled with a legacy of what all had happened and so it was that in 1911, devil and see Hatfield.
By any description, a wicked and a boastful man repented of his scene, gave his life to Jesus and
was baptized by the reverent Dyke Garrett. I believe a preacher uncle of his in the waters of
Island Creek. He died in 1921 in a state of grace and ad peace. But there's more to the story
because of course the families continued to multiply and in the late 1990s they began having
family reunions together and in June of 2003 they gathered together and 60 of them assigned their
signature to an official document of truce and here is what it said. We ask God's grace and love
that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families
to form a family of freedom in America where sin abounds, grace abounds, much more.
And I leave you this morning with a closing words from the book of James the fifth chapter
where James says, "My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone bring him
back." Remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death
and cover a multitude of sins to God. Be glory. Stand with me if you will for prayer.
Father, we hear how a story like the Hatfield McCoy feud ended and how Randolph was the better man
but died in bitter brokenness and devolency, experience forgiveness and grace and Lord,
we have a hard time not saying to ourselves it's not fair. But then when we look at the pages of
scripture, we discover that consistently life does not seem fair. Cayenne was the first born,
perhaps even the better man, certainly the stronger and yet you rejected him
and you favored Abel. And we see again and again, Lord, that that which you mark and that which you
take note of is not what looks good by worldly wisdom but a humble and a contrite heart that
knows how to confess its need of here. And Lord, if truth be known, we're grateful for that
because if we were to be measured by your perfect standard, we'd all fall short and experience
your rejection and we're so incredibly grateful for your amazing grace. Help us to receive that
for ourselves. Help us to understand that no matter where we've been, what we've done or how
deeply we have fallen, you will always take a seat. It will come to you in repentance and in faith.
Stir that within our hearts. Help us to experience your goodness. And then, Lord,
help us to radiate and broadcast and share that with all the world around us because it's what
makes your heart glad. And we will be careful to give you glory in Jesus' name. Amen.