Home plate sliders

One of the guys at our men's meeting talked about believers who by their behavior despise the rich and glorious entrance into heaven (2 Pet1:11) available to them if they would "make every effort to supplement faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with steadfastness, steadfastness with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love." (2 Pet 1:5-7). He described them with a baseball analogy of one who rushes to the home plate and slides in, there is all this dust and no one can tell whether or not they are safe. In my sermon from 2 Pet (http://www.ccmiddleriver.org/mp3/2014/11/2014-11-16.mp3) I gave an analogy of finishing a race. There is the victorious 'Kodak moment' finish - hands raised in victory, smiles and all. And then there is the 'barely made it' finish - head hanging, almost walking run with the desperate look that says, "Please tell me it is over?" I run and have experienced both those finishes and many in between. The second comes from races I was essentially unprepared for so they whipped me in every way.

I find that many sliders are either raised in Christian homes, have been believers for a long time (but are sedentary in the church), or were saved very early in life. To my shame, I tend to identify with sliders. In a discussion with another believer years ago, he said it this way, "The Lord called me from my sin and I knew it was terrible. Now that I am born again I do not want to see or hear the things I used to do before I knew the Lord. I raised my children in the knowledge of the Lord and it seems they try to see how close to the edge they can walk without falling into all those things I ran from years ago."

With another believer I had the following conversation after I told him how I was born again, "I was born again later in life and my wife not long after me. I envy guys like you, you do not carry the terrible memories, the bad relationships, and scars of a life without Christ. Our son has grown up in the church and he desires to walk close to the things we left. It is as if he wants to experience for himself the horrors I try so hard to save him from."

The 'joke' in my family is that I never had a rebellious stage, according to them I always walked the straight and narrow. In retrospect, even in my attempts at rebellion, I was restrained by the Holy Spirit. I laugh (now) at how I sought to be "a little bad" and how I felt so convicted and violated when my college roommate smoked pot while I sat in the window to breathe the fresh air. The downside is I have carried a tonne of 'little' sins all this way all these years and boy they are stubborn!

Firstly, this is not to make excuses. Sliding is the unfortunate side effect of naiveté to the wreckful effects of sin. It is borne of the silliness that causes children to disregard the advice of parents and elders so that we can, 'make our own mistakes.' I figure when we came to faith we knew something was wrong and so we clung to the Lord and that should be enough, that should be brilliant! Rather our flesh always reminds us that we did not 'live.' Instead of freedom in Christ, we found a fence. I strive every day not to be lukewarm, to serve so that when I see the Lord he would not say to me, "I never knew you." But in this flesh, I am a slider among many things. I pray often that the Lord would save me from myself and foster in me a single-minded, non-compromising love for Him.