📚 CLIMBING THE STAIRCASE
Adding to Your Faith, One Step at a Time
Booklet 3 of 6 • Those Who Drift
By CHUCK TRUSTY
Pastor | Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church
Psalm 107 and the four kinds of men who stopped climbing.
About This Series
Peter’s eight virtues are not a menu to pick from. They are a staircase, and every step holds the weight of the one above it. This is a study of 2 Peter 1:5–8, with Psalm 107 in the middle of it, asking what happens to a believer who stops climbing — and what happens when he cries out.
The series runs to six short booklets, released one at a time. Each one stands on its own, but they are meant to be read in order — the whole point of the book is that order matters. The full list is here.
One thing said plainly at the start: none of this is about how to be saved, or how to stay saved. A child of God cannot be lost. This is about how near to God a saved man walks while he is here.
PART TWO
What Happens When We Stop Climbing
CHAPTER 9
The Devil's Axe
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. — Psalm 107:4
Before we climb any higher, I want to take you down.
We have spent eight chapters going up a staircase. Now I want to spend ten chapters looking at what happens to a believer who quits climbing it — because Second Peter tells us what to do, and the hundred and seventh Psalm shows us what it looks like when we do not.
That Psalm is not the story of lost people. I want that understood before we take a single step. It is the story of God's own people — believers, covenant people, church people — who drifted away at different speeds and for different reasons. There are six kinds of them in that chapter, and I have preached every one, and I have been every one.
We start where the Psalm starts. With the wanderers.
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One of the first sermons I ever preached, almost forty years ago now, was called "The Devil's Axe," and the idea in it has stayed with me my whole ministry.
The devil does not bring a bulldozer into the Christian forest. He does not come in with dynamite and take down a stand of timber where everybody can see him do it. That would be noticed. That would bring people running.
He brings a hatchet.
He slips in at night and picks one tree and makes one cut. Three inches long. Not deep enough to matter. Then he leaves, and nobody ever knows he was there.
The next night he comes back and makes another. And another the night after that. He is not in a hurry. Time does not cost him anything.
He never tries to fell the tree — that would draw attention. He just works on the bark. And the bark is the lifeline; it is what carries the food from the roots up to the leaves. Cut it all the way around and the tree is finished, even though it is still standing there looking exactly like a tree.
Then one summer the leaves droop. The branches sag. And every other tree in that forest is standing there wondering what happened, because not one of them ever saw the axe.
That is how a believer is ruined. Not by one big blow. By a thousand little taps.
One ignored warning. One neglected prayer. One skipped service. One boundary scooted over just a little. One sermon treated as optional. One moment of stubbornness. Not a single one of them looks dangerous by itself.
But together they hollow a man out like a rotten log.
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Psalm 107 opens with people I have come to think about a great deal.
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.
Read the description carefully, because everything hangs on it. These people did not rebel. They did not run from God. They were not angry at Him and did not declare their independence and quit.
They wandered.
The Hebrew word is taʿah — tah-AH — and it means to stray, to drift, to lose the path, to miss the landmarks, to walk in circles. It is not the word for defiance. It is the word for losing your bearings. It is a picture of a traveler who is not running away from anything; he is simply not paying attention.
He is not choosing the wrong road. He is forgetting where the right one is.
Let me say it in one sentence, because it is the whole point of this chapter:
Wandering is not rebellion. Wandering is neglect.
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I want to give you four pictures of neglect, and every one of them comes out of the Bible, and every one of them has happened in Yell County this year.
The truck with no oil.
The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing: but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat (Proverbs 13:4). We hear "sluggard" and picture a lazy man asleep in a chair. That is not quite it. The Hebrew word carries the idea of a man who is careless — who fails to maintain what needs attention, who wants the result but avoids the responsibility.
Here is that man. He wants his truck to last. He likes that truck better than any he has ever owned. He wants it dependable.
He just never changes the oil.
Not because he hates the truck. Not because he means it harm. He is busy, and he is running from one thing to the next. And one day the engine seizes, and it was not abuse that killed it. It was neglect.
The house with the small leak.
By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through (Ecclesiastes 10:18).
A man notices a little drip under his kitchen sink. It is not a flood. It is barely a drip. And he does not ignore it because he hates his house — he just keeps saying, "I'll get to that."
Weeks go by. Then months. And one day the cabinet floor is ruined and the subfloor is soft and the repair costs him more than he makes in a month.
He never rebelled against that house. He just did not maintain it.
The garden that gets away from you.
I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down (Proverbs 24:30-31).
I keep a big garden, so this one is close to home. A man tills the ground in the spring. He plants. He waters faithfully, and for a few weeks he is out there every evening.
Then life gets busy. He does not stop loving that garden. He just stops pulling weeds.
He never tore the wall down; he only quit repairing it. He never planted a thorn; he only quit pulling them. And the weeds come so slowly that he is the last man in the neighborhood to notice what everybody driving by has already seen.
And the one that ought to worry us most — a child left untaught.
A parent does not stop bringing a child to church because that parent hates God. A parent does not stop reading the Bible at home because rebellion has broken out in the household. They get busy. The schedule fills up. Life gets loud. And slowly, without ever deciding to, they stop planting seed in that child's life.
And one day they look up and the child is grown and has no roots, no convictions, no prayer life, no appetite for God at all — and they cannot for the life of them figure out what went wrong.
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6). And Moses said to talk of these things when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up (Deuteronomy 6:7). That is not a program. That is a daily habit of attention.
Not one of those four men rebelled. All four of them lost something.
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Now the Psalm does not just tell us that they wandered. It tells us why.
They lost sight of the landmarks.
You have to understand the world they lived in. No road signs. No streetlights. No map in the glove box, no voice telling you to turn right in half a mile. People navigated by landmarks. A pile of stones. A bend in the creek. A certain tree on a ridge. A boundary marker somebody's grandfather set.
And those landmarks did more than point the way. They marked out a man's inheritance — where his family belonged. They marked identity — whose people you were. They marked boundaries — what was yours and what was not. And they marked direction — which way was home and which way was trouble.
That is why moving a landmark was treated as theft. It was not mischief; it was stealing a man's future. Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set (Proverbs 22:28).
And the Lord said through Jeremiah, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. And the people answered Him in the same verse: We will not walk therein (Jeremiah 6:16).
Why not? Because the old paths were simple, and we do not care for simple. We prefer busy. We prefer noise. We prefer the feeling of moving fast.
They call it the rat race, and the phrase comes from laboratory rats running in a wheel — running hard, going nowhere. Get a man into a cycle of hurry and pressure and survival, and God's voice does not get silenced. It gets drowned out. The landmarks fade into a fog, and the wandering begins, and he never made a single decision to leave.
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I want to be careful here, because there is a way this turns into a lecture about the good old days, and that is not what I mean.
But I do believe something has been cut between the generations, and I believe we did it ourselves with the best of intentions.
One of the greatest mistakes a parent can make is trying to give his children everything his own parents could never afford to give him. It sounds like love. Sometimes it is love. But our grandparents' inability to keep up with the neighbors is the very thing that taught them what they taught us — contentment, gratitude, the underrated blessing of a simple life, faithfulness, and a way of aiming their worship in one direction because there was not much else pulling at it.
And now, in our prosperity, we teach our children to value possessions instead of simplicity, status instead of gratitude, comfort instead of contentment, entertainment instead of faithfulness.
And without ever intending it, we are the ones holding the hatchet.
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This is why God gives a church a watchman.
Not a ruler. Not a dictator, and certainly not a celebrity. A watchman is a man who stands on the wall and hollers when he sees something coming. That is the whole job.
He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning; his blood shall be upon him. But he that taketh warning shall deliver his soul (Ezekiel 33:4-5).
The trumpet does not save anybody. Taking the warning does.
And we are strange about warnings. A man will go to the doctor with a pain, get the diagnosis, get the prescription, and walk out with the same pain he came in with — not because the doctor was wrong, but because the cure was more trouble than he wanted to go to. We do exactly that with God. The watchman calls out, the Word puts a heaviness on our heart, the Spirit presses a quiet unease into our conscience, and we hear it plain as day.
And then we get busy again.
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Let me close this chapter with a saying I have used my whole life, because it fits here better than anywhere.
My fault, your fault, nobody's fault — the results are the same.
If the horse runs off, if the wagon breaks down, if the cattle scatter, if the rifle jams — it does not much matter at that moment whose mistake it was. The horse is still gone.
That is the danger of wandering. It does not matter whether we drifted on purpose. It does not matter whose fault it was, or whether anybody was at fault at all. It does not matter that we never rebelled.
When we lose sight of the landmarks, we lose our way.
And wandering never stays wandering. It goes somewhere. Nobody in the history of this world has drifted and stayed in the same place, and the next chapter is where the drifting goes.
CHAPTER 10
Running on Fumes
Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. — Psalm 107:5
There is a stage between wandering and bondage that is easy to miss, and I do not want us to miss it, because it is where a great many good people are living right now.
The Psalm gives it to us in five words. Their soul fainted in them.
The Hebrew word is ʿāṭaph, and it means to collapse, to lose strength, to be poured out, to grow weak, to lose heart. It is the picture of a traveler who has walked too long without water.
This is not rebellion. This man is not pushing against God. It is not wickedness — he has not gone off the deep end. It is not even open sin. It is exhaustion.
This is the believer who still comes to church. Still believes every word of the truth. Still loves God and still wants to do right.
He is just running on fumes.
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But before the fainting, there is a step I do not want to skip, because the Psalm puts it in first.
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way.
A solitary way. Isolation.
Watch how that happens, because it is never dramatic. When a man drifts from God he does not usually decide to quit anything. He drifts from God's people, and from God's house, and from God's voice, and one day he looks around and there is nobody standing near him.
He did not get thrown out. He wandered off, and the herd kept moving.
Solomon saw it: Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom (Proverbs 18:1). A man pulls away, and then he gets tangled up in foolishness — like a fellow hunting for a radio station while the exit he needed goes by his window.
And Scripture warns about the cost of it over and over. Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is (Hebrews 10:25) — and notice that "forsaking" does not mean renouncing. It means neglecting the very thing that keeps us close to God and to each other.
Two are better than one... for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10). When you fall alone, you stay down. That is not a threat. That is just how it works.
Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend (Proverbs 27:17). And iron left by itself out behind the shed does not stay sharp. It rusts.
And then there is the one that ought to raise the hair on a man's neck. Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8).
A lion does not charge the middle of the herd. He never has. He walks the edges and watches and waits for one that has drifted a little too far from the rest.
Isolation is not just a sad condition. It is a hunting strategy.
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Wandering drains a man the way a slow leak drains a tank.
And it drains him for a reason that took me a while to see. Wandering burns energy without covering ground. A man walking in circles is working just as hard as a man walking home — harder, sometimes, because he is worried — and at the end of the day he is exactly where he started and worn out besides.
That is why the fainting comes here, right at this spot in the Psalm. Between the wandering and the chains.
The wanderer is the one who becomes the fainter. And the fainter is the one who becomes the prisoner. That is the order, and it matters. A man does not usually get taken captive while he is strong. He gets taken while he is worn down.
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So how do we know when a soul is fainting? Let me give you five signs, and I will tell you plainly that I have felt every one of them.
Worship starts to feel like a duty instead of a privilege. Not because we stopped loving God. Because we are tired.
Prayer starts to feel like a long-distance call. Not because God moved off. Because the heart is drained.
Scripture starts to feel dry — like trying to hold a handful of sand. Not because the Word lost its power. Because we lack the strength to connect it to anything.
Temptation starts to feel stronger than our devotion. Not because sin got bigger. Because we got weaker.
And discouragement starts to run deeper than encouragement can reach. Not because anything around us changed. Because the tank is empty.
That is what it means to faint. And here is why the watchman has to holler about it: a fainting believer is not in sin yet, but he is not safe either. He has not run off the road — he is just weaving all over it, and he has been on the rumble strip for the last three miles.
Fainting is driving when you are too sleepy to keep your eyes open. Nothing has happened yet. Everything is about to.
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Now let me show you what the Psalm says the emptiness feels like on the inside, because it names it exactly.
Hungry and thirsty.
Think about pulling the plug in a bathtub. At first you cannot see a thing. The water looks the same as it did a minute ago. But it is going. And the lower it gets, the faster you notice, until there you are looking at a ring of soap on an empty tub, wondering when that happened.
That is the soul of a drifting believer. And it sounds like this:
I know something is missing, and I cannot name it.
I do not feel close to God, and I do not understand why.
My prayers feel dry. I am not sure He even hears them.
My joy is gone and I cannot get it back.
Nothing satisfies me anymore.
That is the little light on the dashboard coming on. Low soul. Refill needed.
David knew it: O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is (Psalm 63:1).
And Jeremiah tells us exactly how a man gets there, in one of the most piercing verses in the Old Testament. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13).
Two evils, and notice they go together. First we walk away from the fountain. And second — because a man has to drink something — we go chip a cistern out of the rock for ourselves. We build our own water supply. And it will not hold. It never holds. So we go back and patch it, and it leaks out again, and we are thirstier and more tired than when we started.
Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? (Isaiah 55:2).
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Emptiness is not harmless. Let me tell you what it does.
It makes us restless. Nothing satisfies, so we keep reaching for the next thing.
It makes us vulnerable. The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet (Proverbs 27:7). Read that one twice. A hungry soul will eat anything. A man who has had a good supper can walk right past something he has no business eating. A starving man cannot. That is why the devil offers bait to the empty — because empty people take it.
It makes us impatient. We want to be filled right now. And there is a whole world ready to hand us the spiritual equivalent of a sack of burgers through a window — quick, hot, gone in ten minutes, and you feel worse an hour later. A meal like your mother used to cook takes all afternoon. It is worth waiting on. But a hungry man does not want to wait.
And it makes us confused. A dry soul loses clarity. It cannot figure out how it got here.
I will tell you one way it shows up that took me years to recognize in myself. When we are running dry, we see a rose and start counting the thorns. We get a quiet moment and instead of thanking God for the blessing we are sitting in, we start figuring out how to get more of them. We see a full glass and start worrying about how to keep it full. We see a healthy child and start calculating how to keep him that way.
Listen to me. If the glass is full, thank God for filling it — and then, for goodness' sake, enjoy it while it is full. Do not rob yourself of what God gave you today by spending today trying to stretch it into tomorrow.
That is what a dry soul does. It cannot enjoy anything, because it is too busy trying to secure everything.
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Now the kindest thing I know about all of this, and it is the reason I wanted this chapter in the book at all.
Emptiness is not God's anger. Emptiness is God's mercy.
Think about it. Why should a wandering believer feel anything at all? Why should he not drift on, comfortable and entertained, never once bothered? That would be the worst thing that could happen to him.
But he is not comfortable. He is hungry. And that hunger is God saying:
Come back. You are running dry. You cannot make it without Me.
Emptiness is the warning that comes before the collapse. It is the invitation that arrives before the trouble.
And the way out has not moved. Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses. And three verses later: For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness (Psalm 107:9).
He fills the hungry soul. That is what He does. That is what He has always done.
There is only one thing He will not do, and it is the reason some of us stay empty for years with the fountain running right beside us.
He will not fill a bowl that is turned upside down.
So turn it over. Do it now, before weakness becomes the doorway to what comes next — because what comes next in this Psalm is chains.
CHAPTER 11
The Prison You Don't Know You're In
Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron; Because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned the counsel of the most High. — Psalm 107:10-11
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "I believe today I will ruin my life."
Nobody says, "I want to wreck my marriage." Nobody says, "I want to lose my testimony." Nobody says, "I think I will fall into something I cannot get out of."
And yet men do. Good men. Saved men. Men who love the Lord.
So how does it happen?
Psalm 107 answers that, and the answer is not what most of us expect. It happens one ignored warning at a time.
One sermon we did not take seriously. One boundary we decided it would be all right to step across. One landmark we thought could be scooted over just a little. One trumpet from the wall that we tuned out because we were busy.
And after a while we are prisoners, and we cannot tell you how we got there.
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Look at the three groups so far, because the Psalm is stacking them for a reason.
The wanderers did not know they were drifting.
The fainters did not understand they were drifting.
And the prisoners did not believe they were drifting.
That third one is the most dangerous condition in the whole chapter, and we will come back to it.
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Now walk through what the Psalm actually says about these people, because every phrase is doing work.
"Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death."
That is not physical darkness. It is a spiritual fog. No clarity — a man is looking at his life through a haze. No direction. No joy, just a kind of numbness. No vision; everything is blurry. No energy left for anything spiritual.
And here is what makes it so strange: this man is often still coming to church. Still reading a little. Still praying occasionally. He simply cannot see anymore. He is exactly who Peter described — blind, and cannot see afar off.
"The shadow of death" means deep gloom. It is the darkest place a saved soul can sit.
"Being bound in affliction and iron."
Affliction is the pressure he feels. Iron is the part he cannot break.
These are not chains on the wrists. These are chains on the heart. And they sound like this: I can't break this habit. I can't get the victory. I can't get out of this rut. Stuck, trapped, and not able to get himself free.
"Because they rebelled against the words of God."
Now this is the phrase that surprised me when I studied it, and it changes the whole chapter.
The Hebrew word is marah, and it does not mean violent rebellion. It means to resist. To push away. To turn the shoulder — the way a man shrugs when somebody tells him something he does not care to hear.
This is not hatred. This is neglect. It is not a fist in God's face. It is a shrug.
It is the believer who hears the trumpet and says, "Not today. I will deal with that later."
"And contemned the counsel of the most High."
The word there means to treat lightly. They did not hate God's counsel. They just did not take it seriously. They treated the Word of God like a suggestion. Like an opinion worth considering. Like something optional.
And I will tell you the sentence that came out of that study and has stayed on me ever since:
When God's Word becomes optional, bondage becomes inevitable.
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Then look at what God does, because this is where a lot of folks misread Him.
"Therefore he brought down their heart with labour; they fell down, and there was none to help."
God let life get heavy. He allowed the weight to settle down on them until they woke up.
"Brought down their heart" means He humbled them. He let their strength run out. He let their plans fail. He let their pride collapse until they could not fix a single thing they had broken.
That looks like misery. It is mercy wearing misery's clothes.
Because look at the last line. They fell down, and there was none to help. God removed every false support the man had been leaning on — every friend who could not fix it, every plan that could not solve it, every ounce of strength he had left — and He did it for one reason.
So that the man would lean on Him.
It is a hard truth but it is a true one: we will not serve a God we do not believe we need. As long as a man is managing, he is his own god. It is only when he stops managing that the God of his salvation becomes the only God in his life.
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Now let me tell you a story on myself, because I know something about small sparks.
I worked for a while in a plant that manufactured explosives. Out in the ordinary world, a little spark is nothing at all. You would not even look up. But in a room full of gunpowder, a little spark is not a little anything. In a room full of gunpowder, a spark is sudden death.
We go through our lives assuming we are standing in an ordinary room. We assume an occasional spark will be fine.
When I was about thirteen years old, I learned better.
It was the Fourth of July, and I had been at the firecrackers all afternoon. I had been collecting the duds, tearing them open, and pouring out little trails of powder leading up to whatever I had decided needed blowing up. By evening I had a bowl of leftover firecrackers, a box of matches, and two hands stained black with gunpowder from all those duds.
I was walking down the driveway lighting the last of them, and about halfway through that bowl a spark off one of those matches caught the dust on my hands.
My hands were on fire.
I had been making a little noise all afternoon. I made considerably more noise in the next four seconds.
And that is exactly how bondage works. You think you are just playing. You think you are just having a little fun. You think you have got a handle on it.
But when a man's life is covered in spiritual gunpowder, it does not take much of a spark.
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So here is where the third group leaves us, and I am going to leave you here on purpose, the way the Psalm does.
Bondage does not begin with rebellion. It begins with a shrug.
It begins quietly — but it does not end quietly. It begins with a whisper and it ends with a holler. It begins with a spark and it ends with a fire.
But hear me before you close this chapter, because I will not leave a soul sitting in the dark.
God never leaves His people in the dark. Not one of these groups is left without a way home. And the very next verse in that Psalm — verse thirteen — is the verse the whole chapter turns on:
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses.
We are going to spend a whole chapter on that cry before we are done, because it is the most important sentence in Psalm 107 and one of the most important in the Bible.
But first we have to meet the man who hears all of this and does not respond to any of it. He is the most dangerous man in the chapter, and he is next.
CHAPTER 12
Don't Replace the Fuse
To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. — Hebrews 3:7-8
If you have ever walked through an Arkansas field in the fall, you know what it is to walk through deep dead leaves.
You hear things rustling under there as you go. Most of the time you tell yourself it is a lizard, or a squirrel, or just the wind moving things around.
Sometimes it is not.
Copperheads love dead leaves. They are the exact color of the ground. You do not see one until you are standing on top of him. And the most dangerous thing about a copperhead is not the venom. It is that you do not know he is there until it is too late.
That is the man I want to talk about in this chapter.
Between the prisoners and the fools in Psalm 107, there is a heart the text does not name but the whole passage assumes. I call him the drifting heart, and I believe he is in more danger than anybody else in the chapter — not because his sin is worse, but because he does not think he needs any help.
We do not fear what we do not see. We do not change what we will not admit. And we do not cry out when we do not believe we are in trouble.
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Now, when most folks hear the word backslider, they picture something dramatic. A man packs his bags, walks out of the church, and goes off to live wild.
That happens. But that is not what we are talking about.
The drifting heart is quieter than that. Slower. More polite. He still shows up. Still sings. Still knows all the right words and can still say them in the right places.
But something on the inside has changed. The heart has started to resist. Not loudly. Not angrily. Just... unresponsively.
My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him (Hebrews 12:5).
Think about a leaf on water. Drop a leaf into a still pond and it stays right where you put it. But drop that same leaf into a current — even a slow, gentle current — and it is going to move. You might not notice anything for the first few minutes. Come back an hour later and that leaf is nowhere near where you set it down.
The current is real life. Busyness. Hurt feelings. A prayer that did not get answered the way we wanted. A small offense we never dealt with. And if that current is not resisted, the heart moves.
Drift is always invisible until it is undeniable.
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Now I have to say something about correction, because this is where the whole chapter turns.
When God let those prisoners sit in the dark, it was not because He was angry with them. It was not punishment for the sake of punishment. It was not God turning His back.
It was God getting them to the cry.
Think of a father who builds a fence around his front yard. He does not build it to trap his children. He builds it because the road out front has traffic on it that would kill a boy in an instant. That fence is not a prison. That fence is love with a boundary line on it.
A little child who does not understand traffic might push on that fence. Might resent it. Might decide his daddy does not want him to have any fun.
But the daddy built it because he loves the child more than the child has the equipment to understand yet.
For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth (Hebrews 12:6).
So the question is never whether God will send correction. He will. The question is what our heart does when it arrives.
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And here is the hinge of the whole thing. I want you to see it, because it explains why two people can sit in the same service, under the same sermon, and walk out completely differently.
Put a pat of butter and a raw egg in the same skillet. Same stove. Same heat. Same amount of time.
The butter melts. The egg hardens.
Same heat. Two opposite results. And it is not the heat that decided it — it is the nature of the thing the heat touched.
God's correction is the heat.
A humble heart is the butter. It softens. It yields. It says, "Lord, You are right and I am wrong, and I need You."
A proud heart is the egg. It stiffens. It resists. It says, "I'm fine. Nothing is wrong here. I do not need to change a thing."
One of those moves toward God under pressure. The other moves away. And which one a man is determines the next chapter of his life.
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Let me give you one more picture, and this one has preached to me more than once.
Most of you have a breaker box in your house. When too much current is running through the wires — when something is wrong — that breaker trips. The power goes off. The lights go out. And if it happens at two in the morning it is not a bit of fun.
But that breaker did not trip to ruin your night. It tripped to keep your house from burning down around you while you slept.
If nothing had interrupted that overload, those wires would have gotten hot, and the fire would have started in a wall where nobody could see it.
The shutdown felt bad. The shutdown saved the house.
That is what God did to the prisoners. He shut them down — not to destroy them, but to keep them from destroying themselves. The darkness was not punishment. The darkness was the breaker tripping. It was God saying, stop; something is wrong; do not go any further until this is fixed.
And then they cried out, and God came running.
But here is the mistake the drifting heart makes, and it is a fatal one.
The breaker trips — and instead of fixing the wiring, he drives to the hardware store and buys a bigger fuse. One that will handle the load. One that will not trip.
Problem solved.
Except it is not solved at all. A bigger fuse does not fix anything. It only hides it. And now the wires are getting hot behind the wall and nobody in the house knows it.
The drifting heart is the believer who keeps replacing the fuse instead of fixing the wiring.
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Nobody becomes a fool overnight. Foolishness is a destination a man arrives at slowly, by ignoring a series of small warnings.
Look at the order in the Psalm: Fools because of their transgression, and because of their iniquities, are afflicted (Psalm 107:17).
Transgression is the act. Iniquity is the act that has become a habit. Affliction is what the habit finally costs.
But before there is ever a transgression, there is a drifting heart.
Let me ask you something. Are you older today than you were yesterday? Of course you are. Did you feel any different when you woke up this morning? Of course you did not. One day does not feel like anything at all.
Now stack up fifty years of those days, and the difference is undeniable.
Drift works exactly like aging. You never feel it happening. You feel it after it has already happened.
A drifting heart becomes a hardened heart. I have called, and ye refused... ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof (Proverbs 1:24-25). And a hardened heart is not always loud and angry. Sometimes it is simply indifferent — and indifference is the quietest form of rebellion there is.
A hardened heart becomes a foolish heart. And a foolish heart, in time, becomes an afflicted one.
Foolishness is nothing but drift that was never corrected. The fool is not born in a moment. He is shaped by neglect — neglect of correction, of conviction, of counsel, of the Word, of prayer, of the people of God.
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But here is the good news, and I want to make sure it is the last thing in this chapter.
Every single step of that progression can be stopped. Today. With one response.
God does not abandon one of these groups. Not the wanderers, not the fainters, not the prisoners, not even the fools. And every one of them gets out the same way.
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses.
Not when they figured out how to fix themselves. Not when they improved enough to deserve it. Not when they got cleaned up and presentable.
They cried. And God came.
You remember the prodigal. He took his inheritance to a far country and wasted every dime of it and ended up in a hog pen, and the Bible says he came to himself. He woke up to what he was. And he got up and went home smelling like a pig lot.
He did not clean up first. He did not wait until he could walk in looking respectable. He went home dirty and hungry and broken.
And his father — who had been watching that road the whole time — ran.
That is our God. He is not standing at the end of the road with His arms crossed waiting for you to prove you are worth taking back. He is watching the road. He is watching for you. And the moment you turn toward Him, He runs.
To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Do not replace the fuse. Fix the wiring. And cry out to the One who has been watching for you.
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— Pastor Chuck Trusty, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church • yes.areyousaved.net
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