A GRADUAL FALL.... TEXT: GALATIANS 4:12-20 KEY VERSE: “Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me.” (Galatians 4:15). A foolish old farmer, so the story goes, concluded one day that the oat he had fed his mule for years was simply costing him too much. So he hatched a plan: he mixed a little sawdust with the feed, and then a little more the next day, and even more the next, each time reducing the amount of oats in the mix. The mule didn’t seem to notice the gradual change, so the farmer thought things were fine and kept decreasing the proportion of oats. But weeks later, on the day he finally fed the poor beast nothing but sawdust, the mule finished the meal and fell over dead. A silly tale, perhaps, but it serves as a parable of the backslider - the Christian who slips farther and farther away from God through unrepented sin or neglect. Like the foolish farmer, the Galatian Christians acted in the opposite manner. In the beginning, they were on fire for Jesus, full of gratitude for His salvation. They treated Paul, the apostle like he was an angel of God. But the moment they traded their faith for a rule-keeping system of legalism, they squandered the hard-won gift of grace that Jesus obtained on the Cross. Paul lamented over their fall. He warned them in our text that the false teachers in Galatia were zealous, but not for good. They were zealous to win people to themselves, and to their way of thinking. The backsliding of most Christians always take a gradual process. They gradually decline spiritually, then find themselves in trouble and wonder how it happened. They leave their first love (Revelation 2:4) and start living for the flesh (Galatians 3:1-3). That is why our Lord admonished us to watch and pray (Matthew 26:41). When we least expect it, the germ of sin can enter the system. THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: The enemy specializes in throwing water on our fire.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 15:32:19 +0000