He is a dear brother, a faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord…. “Tychicus will tell you all the news about me. The second snapshot is in Colossians 4:7-14: He decided to follow Christ at any price. He surrendered to full-time Christian service. He is in the company of spiritual giants. And so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke, my fellow workers.”ĭemas is a “fellow worker” with the apostle Paul. “Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends you greetings. God gives us three snapshots of Demas, three points on a graph, which show him drifting rapidly downward from “fellow worker with Paul” to apostate. Hanging On To Favorites Sins (Ephesians 4:27).ĭEMAS IS THE PARAMOUNT BIBLICAL EXAMPLE OF DRIFTING. Blindness To Relative Values Versus Actual Spiritual Status (Like Laodicea In Revelation 13).ĥ. Inattention To Divine Warnings (Proverbs 29:1 And 1 Kings 13:20-24).Ĥ. Riches In This World (Psalms 73:3-9, And Proverb 1:32).ģ. What she kept for a little while wasn’t worth anything compared to what she could’ve had in Jesus Christ forever.Ģ. an awful lot of money.” She paused and then said, “I don’t want to burn my book.” She put it in her purse, looked MacArthur in the eye, and said, “I guess that I really don’t want Jesus, do I?” “But that book,” she said, “is worth a lot of money…. If you really experienced Jesus’ forgiveness and want him to be your savior, then let’s have a little party and burn the book and praise the Lord.” “Then let’s just take a match and burn it.” Then MacArthur said, “Do you have your little black book of contacts with you?” MacArthur shared with her the gospel of Jesus and she prayed to receive Christ. She’d been through the drug scene and wanted to get free. John MacArthur encountered a prostitute who said to him, “I need help. A Shallow Work At The Beginning (Mark 4:13-20 And 2 Corinthians 7:10). To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”ġ. “… It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. Hebrews 5:11-6:6 details another sobering warning: “Since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?” The writer to the Hebrews continues in the next two verses: Our society is drifting away from our godly heritage and is turning its back on God’s dealings with mankind. Moral purity, marital commitment, ministerial integrity, issues like abortion and gay marriage, and biblical fidelity are things that are up for grabs to many Christians. We are finding less sharp edges and increasingly more rounded corners. Into many of our lives, seldom do we hear the watchword, “Thus says the Lord….” Now we hear, “let’s be reasonable.” This generation, like no other, is characterized by people who are rewriting the standards. The same thing can happen to us in the spiritual realm. I started listening again to the things that she was talking about, insignificant things, like where to go to get oxygen when there isn’t any. I grew up on airplanes! I looked around the cabin and everyone was ignoring her. On my next flight I decided I’d better listen when the flight attendant gave instructions. “That’s correct, but if it happens you won’t have that much time to decide.” She approached me from behind: “Okay dad,” she said with dripping scar chasm, “ if the oxygen masks come out, whose do you put on first?” I knew the answer to that but I had to think for a moment. Unfortunately Bronwyn was all full of vim and vigor and before I realized it we were up and running again. The flight attendant told us to sit down. We were playing chase all around the cabin. Believe it or not, only five people were on the American Airlines flight. My three-three year-old daughter, Bronwyn, and I were flying late one Saturday night from Dallas to Tucson. “We must pay more careful attention to what we’ve heard so that we do not drift away.” Please give me some advice on how to arrest the drifting. I am beginning to see compromise and some drifting away from some of the beliefs and values that I hold dear. The truth is, I am afraid for myself, too. Most of the Christians I know, myself included, feel like our country is drifting further away from God’s principles at an ever increasing, accelerating pace runaway sin and mockery of the things of God.
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