What keeps believers from falling away?
One thing I've lately been made aware of is a lack of substance within in the modern Christian faith.
The plan of the devil has been to disconnect the Christian faith from real elements on the earth, therefore it will have no center of gravity lifted into a ethereal realm of superficial beliefs without root. In fact, one of the most common definitions of the word faith is that it does not have physical substance.
I've made an incomplete list below of several elements that have been disconnected from the Christian faith in several ways.
1. The city of Jerusalem
2. The land of Canaan
3. The Jewish people
4. Water baptism
5. Speaking in a unknown language when receiving the Holy Spirit
6. Miracles of physical healing in the body
7. Presence of Christ in communion's bread & wine
8. Christ's physical resurrection & hope for a believer's physical resurrection
9. The New Jerusalem
Because of this, Christianity has become more of an ethereal, ideological, circumstantial belief system. Without attachment to physical substances, the Christian faith is no more real than the metaphysical religions of Greek & Roman paganism, or Eastern religions such as New Age, Hinduism or Buddhism.
When asked, the average Christian is not able to explain the substance of their faith, normally veering off into solely metaphysical ideas or ethereal belief systems to explain it. Though topics of morality and spirituality are important in the Christian faith, they need to be anchored into our physical world.
A New Ager, Hindu or Islamist can easily relate to these moral or spiritual belief systems within Christianity and think that Christianity isn't so much different to what they believe. Even thinking they are worshipping the same God as a Christian.
Therefore, I intend to ask questions of different faiths.
1. Do you worship the God of Israel?
2. Did your God kill the firstborn of Egypt?
3. Did your God bring the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt?
4. Did your God split the Red Sea?
5. Did your God claim the land of Canaan as His own and declare his enduring love for Jerusalem, the City of the Great King?
6. Is your God going to return on the clouds as a warrior to take vengeance on His enemies and establish his throne in the city of Jerusalem?
The average Christian will explain their faith only dealing with topics such as the love of God or forgiveness of sin through Jesus without anchoring it to the person of Abraham, the Jewish people, the city of Jerusalem, a desolation of the earth, restoration of Israel, or the hope a physical resurrection to live on a restored earth.
This type of minimized Christian belief system has no anchor leaving converts non-attached to any real substance left weak and ready to fall away during times of trial from the enemy's temptation.
As believers we must become rooted into the real substances of physicality, history, people & places or else we're a weed shaking in the wind.
Without a continuous reading of the Bible, which is a real historical book with real historical people and places, we're going to miss the substances God has called us to be anchored into. We must be rooted in the Bible, continuously devoting ourselves to reading & understanding these stories people, and places of redemptive history and their meaning in the age to come.
This understanding & placements of faith into tangible objects will help to root us in the truth and deter us from falling away during times that our may be challenged!
Much love! Endure to the end!
