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We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away … how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation” (Hebrews 2:1-3).

We got a new car about a year ago, and it comes with all kinds of cool safety features.  Among them is a “drift alert” warning: if we start to drift across the center line, or across the line marking the right-side shoulder, the steering wheel gives a bit of a shudder, a warning chime rings, and we get a little picture on the dashboard display letting us know that we’re potentially headed for trouble.

In life as well as in driving, a bad thing is almost always preceded by … drifting.  Few of us wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “Today I’m going to choose to do some things that will increase the misery index for myself and those around me.”  But have you ever found yourself “suddenly” in a high misery index life?  You know: your doctor’s been telling you for years that you need to lose some weight, get your blood pressure under control, quit smoking, and so on.  Or you’ve known for a while you’ve been overspending, or friends have been trying to persuade you that that relationship really is kind of toxic for you … You didn’t always get there “suddenly”; often, you drifted.

You’re not a mechanical object like a car, but you do have a kind of “spiritual dashboard” that does have a kind of “drift alert warning system.”  What sort of things does your spiritual drift alert system monitor, and what kinds of “warning chimes” does it use?

First, your emotions.  Our emotions don’t tell us much about God, but they do tell us a lot about us.  So hair-trigger anger, unreasonable sadness, constant anxiety, listless apathy – or smug self-satisfaction, glee over the sorrows of others or deriving comfort from food or shopping – are the kinds of signals that tell us know that we have been drifting away from daily, deepening intimacy with God.

And our habits, those daily patterns that set the trajectory for our days, our lives.  There is far more to following Jesus than reading our Bibles regularly, but if we have grown neglectful towards regularly attending to the voice of the Lord in Scripture, we’re drifting.  Similarly with prayer: there are many, many ways to pray, but if we increasingly ignore prayer, we’ll start to drift.  And honest fellowship with other believers, the kind of open friendship in which we really share what’s going on in our hearts, souls and minds – if we aren’t connecting with other believers in these ways, we will also find ourselves drifting from God.

Drifting is a matter of relationship more than rules.  What God is after is you, not merely you staying in your lane.  So as we continue to listen together as we move together towards Easter, let’s help each other make sure that we are paying more careful attention to what we are hearing, so that we don’t drift away.  

The right time to address my drifting is right now!

Let’s pray about this.  Let’s begin with some honest self-assessment before God: where do you sense you may be drifting away from deeply knowing and loving God?  Where has it become more a matter of keeping religious rules than deepening intimacy with the God who is Love?

If you sense you’ve been drifting in some way, what do you need God to do for you, in you?  And how can you practically be receptive to the help God offers you?  Pray about that now.

Churches can drift, too.  We drift into complacency, apathy, anger at the world, or indifference to the needs of our neighbors.  Pray for our church, for its leaders and for us all, that God would sharpen our alertness to any “drift tendencies” and “drift warnings” the Spirit is sending our way.