BY MICHELLE WILLIAMS, GRACE ATTENDER & BLOGGER
“Houston, do you copy? I am off structure and drifting. Anyone? Anyone… do you copy? Please copy. Please.”
The sermon this past weekend opened with a clip from the movie, Gravity. Sandra Bullock plays a mission specialist who’s become detached from her space station and loses contact with anyone and everyone who can help her. She’s trying to maintain her composure as she tumbles and drifts through space, but she’s clearly panicked and feeling increasingly helpless as she realizes the disastrous predicament she’s found herself in.
When your faith isn’t what it used to be…
...when you’ve found yourself drifting.
You may only realize it’s happened once you start to feel that helplessness and lack of meaning creep into your life. Or perhaps you’ve made a deliberate decision to stray from your faith. Either way, you’ve lost contact with God and faded away from your connections in the church. You’re stumbling and whirling through life in such a way that breeds anxiety and desperation. A little like the astronaut hopelessly untethered and drifting away from her space station.
When you’re drifting in faith, it affects every aspect of your life—relationships, work, motivation, health, sleep and more. It spreads through your life like a spiritual sepsis, weakening your life immune system. You fall into the same sin traps over and over again.
The Bible addresses this very affliction. The book of Hebrews is a letter that calls its audience back to the pure worship of Jesus Christ. It spells out their spiritual drift in a way they cannot deny and warns them not to turn away from the living God.
In today’s terms, turning away from the living God is defined as Moral Therapeutic Deism. It’s how drifters purposefully reshape their theology, or understanding of God, to justify their drifting. They keep God at a distance and only call upon Him when they need to feel good. This is dead theology—and not worship of the living God. This is exactly what the book of Hebrews warned against.
And Hebrews doesn’t stop at this warning. The book goes on to point out that those who are drifting have become more like infants who can’t recognize the difference between wrong and right. And actually, they’ve been believers so long that they ought to be teaching and discipling others. But instead, the drifter needs to be spoon fed the basic tenets of God’s word.
The unavoidable consequence of one person’s drifting is a negative impact on that person’s entire sphere of influence. Instead of leading others to Jesus, the drifter may be skewing others’ understanding of God. The goal of this sermon series is to restore your faith and draw you back from deep space—and back into the presence of the living God.