📚 CLIMBING THE STAIRCASE
Adding to Your Faith, One Step at a Time
Booklet 4 of 6 • The Cost of Drift
By CHUCK TRUSTY
Pastor | Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church
The self-inflicted wound, the wobble before the wind, and wits’ end.
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.
CHAPTER 13
The Self-Inflicted Wound
Fools because of their transgression, and because of their iniquities, are afflicted. — Psalm 107:17
There is a great deal of difference between a wound somebody else gave you and a wound you gave yourself.
If a man runs into you with his car, that is his doing. You did not see it coming and you could not have stopped it. You are a victim of something somebody else did.
But have you ever burned yourself on a stove?
Not because anybody pushed you. Because you were rushing, and distracted, and thinking about six other things, and you reached across a hot burner.
That burn hurts every bit as bad as one somebody else caused. Maybe worse — because you know good and well it did not have to happen. You know that if you had just been paying attention, you would have been fine.
That is the fourth group in Psalm 107. The burn is real. The pain is real. But it was not an ambush and it was not an attack.
It was carelessness collecting what carelessness always collects.
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Now I have to tell you what God means by the word fool, because it is not what we mean by it.
When we call a man a fool, we usually mean one of two things — either he is not very bright, or he did something obviously ridiculous.
The Hebrew word here is eviyl, and it has nothing at all to do with intelligence. It means morally careless. Spiritually impulsive. Reckless. Unteachable, not because he cannot learn but because he will not.
In that culture, an eviyl was a man who knew better and did it anyway. Somebody who had been taught. Somebody who had been warned. Somebody who had been shown the right path and chose to live by impulse instead.
This is not ignorance. It is carelessness. It is not hatred of the truth. It is neglect of it.
Think about a man in a neighborhood where there have been three or four break-ins. His neighbors are locking up, setting alarms, being careful. This man knows about every one of those break-ins. He has heard all the warnings.
He just keeps forgetting to lock his door at night. Not because he wants to be robbed. Not because he does not care. He gets distracted and goes on to bed.
One night his house gets broken into.
Is he a victim? He is. Was the thief responsible? He was. Could it have been prevented? It could have.
That is the eviyl. Not a man who invited disaster. A man who was careless enough to leave the door open for it.
The fool is not ignorant. He is negligent.
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Now look at how the Psalm describes the way down, because it lays it out in order.
The first word is transgression, and in Hebrew it is a boundary word — peshaʿ — and it means to step over a line. Not to leap over it. Not to run past it. Just to step over.
You remember what Neil Armstrong said when he set foot on the moon. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
One small step. But that step was the difference between standing on the earth and standing on the moon. One step, and you are in a different world.
When a believer steps over one of God's boundaries, it looks small. It feels small. It probably is small.
Just a little compromise — what could that hurt? Just one small indulgence — nobody will ever know. Just a minor exception — preacher, you are making too much of this.
But the devil sees that step and says, "That is one small step for a sinner and one giant leap for a fool."
Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil (Proverbs 4:26-27).
God is not being harsh when He says that. He is being protective. He knows that one step leads to another one, and that stepping over the line is exactly how a habit gets started.
And let me put one more picture beside it. Suppose you came through the fellowship line, got your plate, sat down, and looked at your beans — and there was one dead fly in them.
How much of that plate would you eat?
None of it. You would set the whole thing aside, and nobody in the room would think you were being particular about it.
One dead fly ruins the whole plate. That is what one compromise does to a life that is supposed to be set apart. It does not take much. But it changes things.
Transgression is the step. Iniquity is the habit of stepping.
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That second word — iniquity — is the Hebrew word avon, and it means crookedness. Bentness. A moral twisting. It describes a life that is out of alignment.
Most of us have had a car that needed the front end aligned. You hit a pothole, or a curb, or you just put enough miles on it that things worked their way out of true.
And when a car is out of alignment, two things start happening.
First, the tires wear funny. They wear in places they should not wear, and they wear out a good deal faster than they ought to.
Second, the car pulls. Let go of the wheel for two seconds and it drifts toward the ditch. You have to fight it just to hold your lane.
Now, does that car fall apart? No. It keeps running. It will still take you to town. But it is working harder than it should, wearing out faster than it should, and pulling the whole time in a direction you do not want to go.
That is a believer whose life is out of alignment. Still saved. Still bound for heaven. But fighting the wheel every mile of the road and wearing out in places he should not be wearing out.
A crooked life is not created in a moment. It is created by neglect.
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Then verse eighteen tells us what all of this feels like on the inside, and this is the part that ought to get our attention.
Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; and they draw near unto the gates of death.
In that culture, losing your appetite was the sign of somebody seriously ill. A healthy man wants to eat. A sick man pushes the plate away.
If you have ever sat with somebody who was really sick, you know exactly what this looks like. You bring them their favorite meal, the one they have asked for a hundred times, and they turn their head. Not because there is anything wrong with the food. Because the sickness took the desire.
That is spiritual sickness in a believer who has been living out of alignment long enough.
The Word of God is still there. The table is still set. He has simply lost his appetite for it.
Prayer feels hollow. Worship feels empty. Church feels like going through the motions. And nothing has changed about God, or about the Word — the appetite is gone because the soul is sick.
The soul losing its appetite loses the desire for Scripture, the joy of worship, the interest in prayer, the motivation to serve, and the strength to face a hard day.
Understand what that is and what it is not. That is not the death of salvation. That is the death of joy. And it did not happen all at once. It happened a step at a time, a compromise at a time, until a man who used to run toward God is now pushing the plate away.
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And look where the Psalm leaves him.
They draw near unto the gates of death.
That is as far down as the staircase goes. And notice how he got there — not in one fall, but in five quiet steps.
Carelessness — one step over the line. Compromise — the step became a habit. Affliction — the habit brought consequences. Loss of appetite — the joy drained out. And collapse — barely holding on at the gates.
Nobody planned that trip. Nobody woke up one morning and decided to be spiritually sick. It was drift, quiet and uncorrected, all the way down.
I am going to leave you at the gates for now, because that is exactly where the Psalm pauses. The fool is at the bottom, the appetite is gone, the wound is self-inflicted, and there is no strength left in him to climb back up.
But the story is not over. Verse nineteen begins with one of the most important words in the whole Bible.
Then.
And I will tell you this much before we go on. When that man finally cries out, God does not meet him at the gates with a lecture.
He meets him with medicine.
Until then, take one question home with you, and be honest with it. Is there a boundary you have been stepping over? Not a leap. Just a quiet, repeated step.
And how long has it been going on?
CHAPTER 14
The Wobble Before the Wind
A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. — James 1:8
Nobody goes straight from carelessness into a full storm in one step. There is always a season in between — a quiet, dangerous, overlooked season.
That season is what this chapter is about, and I want to give you the whole idea in one sentence before we start:
Foolishness creates instability, and instability invites the storm.
The storm does not fall on a rooted, grounded, well-built believer and knock him flat with no warning. In Psalm 107, the people who ended up storm-tossed were already unsteady before the first wave ever hit them.
The storm did not create their instability. Their instability is what made the storm so devastating.
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Some years back a family not far from here had to have their house condemned.
It was not a tornado. It was not a flood. The inspector came out and found that the foundation had been shifting and cracking for years, and nobody had noticed, because from the road everything looked fine. Fresh paint. Mowed yard. Clean windows.
But underneath, the structure had been quietly giving way — board by board, crack by crack — until the doors would not close right, the floor started to bounce in the middle, and a crack ran up the living room wall from the baseboard to the ceiling.
By the time that problem was visible, it had been growing invisibly for a long time.
And here is what got that house condemned. It was not one bad storm. It was that the house had become vulnerable to the first good wind that came along, because the structure that was supposed to hold it together had been quietly compromised.
That is the unsteady soul. Still showing up. Still in the pew. Still saying the right things. But underneath, the framework has weakened — and that soul is now vulnerable to a storm it would have walked through a year ago.
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James gives us the diagnosis in one line. He is describing a man who keeps asking God for wisdom and never acts on any of it, and he says: A double minded man is unstable in all his ways (James 1:8).
Unstable in all his ways. Not some of them.
That is what I want you to see. When a soul loses its footing, the instability does not stay in one corner of a man's life. It bleeds into everything.
Carelessness is not just a moral problem. It is a structural problem. It weakens the framework that holds a life together. And when a believer lives careless long enough, four quiet things start happening.
Convictions weaken. Things that used to be absolutely settled — lines he would never have crossed — start to feel negotiable. Not because he stopped believing in right and wrong. Because carelessness dulls the edge of a conviction the way a good knife goes dull in a drawer.
Priorities shift. What used to come first starts coming second. Then third. Then it stops making the list.
Habits decay. Prayer, the Word, faithful attendance, honest confession — they do not stop. They slip. A little at a time.
And discernment dulls. That instinct that used to say something is not right here gets quieter and quieter. Not because it stopped speaking. Because he stopped listening.
And when a man no longer has anything solid under his feet, he will grab whatever is nearest when the wind starts to blow.
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Have you ever handled a gyroscope? They sell them in toy stores — a little spinning wheel inside a frame.
When that wheel is spinning fast, you can tilt it, push on it, turn it sideways — and it resists you. It fights back toward level. It has a natural pull toward balance.
But when the spin slows down, it wobbles. And in a little while it falls over.
The spiritual disciplines are the spin. Prayer. The Word. Worship. Fellowship. Obedience. That is what keeps a soul upright when something pushes on it from the outside.
When a man is spinning, you can push him and he corrects himself. When the spin has slowed, he does not fall immediately — but he has lost the ability to right himself, and it is only a matter of time.
The unsteady soul is the believer whose gyroscope has slowed down and who does not yet know how vulnerable that has made him.
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Solomon says something blunt about what this does to what a person has built. Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands (Proverbs 14:1).
Plucks it down with her own hands. Not with help. Not because of an enemy.
But understand — she is not swinging a sledgehammer. It is quieter than that.
Termites do not knock a house down in one visit. They move in, settle into the wood, and eat a little every day. You cannot hear them. You cannot see a thing from the road. The paint is still good and the gutters are still clean.
But inside the walls, the wood that is holding everything up is being hollowed out — slowly, steadily, invisibly. And one day a door frame goes crooked. A floor sags. Somebody leans on a wall and it gives a little more than it ought to.
And when a man finally gets in there to look, what appeared to be a solid house is being held up by almost nothing.
Carelessness is the termite. It does not destroy a Christian in one dramatic afternoon. It moves in quietly — in the neglected prayer, the skipped service, the compromised conviction, the exception we talked ourselves into — and it hollows out the structure a little at a time.
Watch for the signs, in yourself first. Prayer becomes irregular, then optional, then nearly absent. Scripture becomes a Sunday thing, then a special-occasion thing, then a crisis-only thing. Church becomes negotiable — I'll go when I feel like it. Fellowship becomes inconvenient. And obedience becomes situational — following God when it is comfortable and stepping around Him when it is not.
The man is still standing. But the foundation is moving under him.
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Now watch how this connects to what is coming in the Psalm.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end (Psalm 107:27).
Reeling. Staggering. No control. What does that sound like to you?
It sounds like somebody who was already unsteady before the storm ever hit.
A man who is rooted and grounded does not reel like a drunk at the first wave. The storm shakes him — certainly. The storm is hard on him — absolutely. But he does not lose all control and all direction at once.
Two trees stand side by side in the same field. Same storm. Same wind. Same rain.
One of them has deep roots. It bends hard — branches whipping, leaves flying — but the roots hold, and when the weather passes that tree is still standing.
The other tree looks just as tall and just as impressive from the road. But its roots are shallow, because it spent its whole life in soft ground with plenty of water on the surface and never had a reason to go down after any.
Same storm. That one goes over.
The storm did not decide the outcome. The roots did.
And that is what a drifting heart, a careless life, and an unsteady soul all have in common. Not that they stopped believing in God. That they stopped pressing into God. And shallow roots cannot hold in weather that deep roots would sleep through.
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Now somebody reading this is looking at his own life and thinking, if God loved me, He would not let a storm come.
I want to answer that carefully, because I believe the opposite is true.
The storm is not evidence that God has given up on an unsteady soul. The storm is evidence that He has not.
Think about a doctor who runs the tests on a routine visit and finds something serious — something that has been developing quietly for a long time with hardly any symptoms.
That doctor has two choices.
He can say nothing. Send the patient home. Let him keep on living the way he has been living, feeling fine on the outside while the thing keeps growing on the inside. That is the comfortable choice, and it is comfortable for both of them.
Or he can tell the truth. He can sit that man down and say, "I need to show you something. This is serious, and we need to deal with it now, because I cannot tell you what happens if we wait."
That second conversation is hard. It might even feel unkind in the moment.
But which doctor loved that patient more?
The storm is God telling the truth. It strips away the illusions. It quiets the excuses. It clears out the distractions. And it brings a soul to the one place God has been trying to get it all along — honest, humble dependence.
Storms are merciful. They are not painless. But they are merciful.
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And here is why I am glad we stopped in this in-between season before we go on to the storm itself.
If some of this has sounded uncomfortably familiar — if your soul has been wobbling and you have known it for a while — then hear this: you are not in the storm yet. You are still in the season before it. Which means you still have a choice.
The careless man can stop being careless. The drifting heart can stop drifting. The unsteady soul can get its balance back. Before the wind rises.
We take our weather seriously in this state. When the radio goes off in the middle of the night, most of us do not roll over. We get up, we look at the radar, we know where the shelter is. We take the warning as the gift it is.
The warning is not the storm. The warning is the mercy that comes before it.
And the way back is not complicated. Return to prayer — not occasional prayer, daily honest conversation. Return to the Word — open it and read it and let it deal with where you actually are. Return to the people of God, because they are part of how He steadies a man. Return to obedience, not when it is convenient but because He is Lord. And return to wisdom — stop living by impulse and start living by order.
Pick the one that has faded the most and start there tonight.
So let me ask you one question and then let you go. Not about your circumstances. About your soul.
Is it steady right now?
If the honest answer is that you have been wobbling — then steady it now, while the water is still. Because the God who calms storms would a great deal rather calm you before the storm ever gets here.
CHAPTER 15
At Their Wits' End
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. — Psalm 107:27
The last group in Psalm 107 is different from all the others, and I want to be careful to say how.
Every other group drifted because of something they did or something they stopped doing. The wanderers stopped adding. The prisoners stopped listening. The fools stopped caring.
But this last group did not drift out of rebellion, or stubbornness, or carelessness.
They were overwhelmed. Life got bigger than they were, and the storm came.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters (Psalm 107:23).
Look at who these people are. They are not rebels. They are not runaways. They are workers. They do business in great waters — they are out there carrying responsibility, doing what has to be done, holding things together.
This is not the careless man. This is the faithful one who got hit with more than he could hold.
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Have you ever seen a truck loaded past what it was built for?
Not because the driver was irresponsible. Because the job needed two trips and he believed he could make it in one.
That truck is still running. The engine still turns. But the frame is flexing under the weight, the back tires are squatted down, the steering has gone heavy, and it is not handling the road the way it was designed to handle it.
That is the storm-tossed believer.
Still saved. Still serving. Still showing up. But carrying so much — so many responsibilities, so many burdens that belong to other people, so many things to fix and so many folks to hold together — that the soul itself has started to flex.
And when the storm hits on top of all that weight, the whole thing starts to reel.
You know who I am talking about. The believer juggling more than any one person should. The one carrying somebody else's load along with his own. The one trying to fix everybody. The one running on empty who will not stop, because who else is going to do it? The one who believes in God with his whole heart and feels too far under the water to reach Him.
They are not wicked. They are worn out. They are not rebellious. They are overloaded.
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Now look at the phrase in verse twenty-seven that I want to spend some time on. They are at their wits' end.
The Hebrew behind it means the end of wisdom. The end of strength. The end of solutions. Nothing left in the tank. Every idea has been tried and every plan has failed and there is nowhere left to turn.
We think of wits' end as the worst place a soul can be. And in one way it is.
But in another way it is the most honest place a soul can get to.
Because at wits' end, the pretending stops.
A man at his wits' end has quit telling people he is fine. He has quit telling himself he is fine. He has quit managing the situation and quit projecting and quit performing. And for the first time in a long while, what comes out of his mouth is the truth.
That is not the end of a man. That is very often the beginning of him.
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Watch the staircase go down in this passage, because the Psalm lays it out step by step.
The great waters — life becomes bigger than we are. The rising storm — the pressure increases. The tossing — up to heaven one minute and down to the depths the next, with nothing steady in between. The melting — their soul is melted because of trouble, which is the inner strength draining completely out. The staggering — balance is gone. And the wits' end — the solutions have run out.
Every step down feels like the next one may be the last.
But here is what the Psalm knows that the sailor in the middle of it does not. There is a step after wits' end. And it is the most important step in the chapter.
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Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still (Psalm 107:28-29).
There it is again. Same sentence. Same turning point. Different group, different cause, different story — and the exact same hinge.
The wanderers cried, and God answered. The prisoners cried, and God answered. The fools cried, and God answered. The storm-tossed cried, and God answered.
Not four different solutions. The same one, every time.
You would think that after reading it four times we would have it memorized. But most of us have to get all the way to our own wits' end before we will do the thing we should have done at the beginning.
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Nobody in Scripture shows us this better than Peter, and I love him for it.
Peter did not start badly. He started boldly. While eleven other men sat in the boat, Peter looked out at a man walking on the water and said, "Lord, if it be thou, bid me come."
And the Lord said, "Come."
And Peter walked on water. Not a step or two — he walked out toward Jesus, doing what no man had ever done, held up by nothing in this world except his eyes on Christ.
And then the wind got loud. And the waves got high. And Peter took his eyes off Jesus and put them on the storm.
And the moment he did, he started down.
Not because the water changed. Not because Jesus moved. Because Peter's eyes moved.
Now here is the part I love. The moment Peter began to sink, he did not try to swim. He did not try to argue his way back up on top of the water. He did not try harder.
He hollered. Three words.
Lord, save me.
And the Bible says immediately — immediately — Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him.
And what did the Lord say to him? O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? (Matthew 14:31).
Little faith. Not no faith. Little.
That is the storm-tossed believer exactly. The faith is still there. The love for God is still there. It is just buried under the weight of the water.
And one cry is all it takes to get a hand on you.
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Now watch the Psalm turn everything around, and notice that God does not stop at rescue.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven (Psalm 107:29-30).
The cry. Then the deliverance. Then the calm. Then the quiet — the noise finally stops. And then the haven.
Their desired haven. The place they set out for before any of this started.
He does not just pull them out of the water and leave them floating. He takes them home.
An old sailor said once that the most beautiful sight in the world is not the open sea. It is the harbor lights after a storm. Because harbor lights mean the tossing is over and rest is real and you made it.
That is what God offers a soul that has been out in the weather. Not just survival — arrival. Not just rescue — restoration. Not just deliverance from the waves, but safe passage all the way to the place he was headed.
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Let me say one more thing about the watchman, because this group is unique.
The other groups missed the warning out of stubbornness or carelessness. The storm-tossed miss it for a different reason. They miss it because the storm is too loud.
When a man is overwhelmed — when the wind is screaming and the water is coming over the rail — he cannot always hear a quiet voice giving him counsel. The noise drowns it out.
A lighthouse keeper does not go home when the weather turns bad. That is precisely when his work matters, because the rocks are invisible in the dark and a ship with no point of reference will drift onto them and never know until it is too late.
So he stays, and he keeps the light burning, and he trusts that a sailor looking for a light will find it.
That is what a pastor is for in a season like this. Not to calm anybody's storm — only God does that. Just to keep the light burning and keep pointing at the haven and keep saying the same thing over and over: this way. He is this way. Cry out. He hears you.
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We have walked with six kinds of drifting people now. Some drifted slowly and some suddenly. Some through neglect, some through stubbornness, some through carelessness, and this last one through sheer overload.
And every single one of them found the same God waiting on the same cry.
Wherever you are today — in the wandering, in the weariness, in the chains, in the foolishness, in the wobble, or out in the middle of the water — He is not finished with you. He has not given up. He is watching the waves. He hears the cry before it ever gets to your lips.
And He is ready, right now, to make the storm a calm and bring you home.
The storm does not get the last word in Psalm 107. God does. And His last word is always home.
⬇ Download this booklet as a printable PDF
— Pastor Chuck Trusty, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church • yes.areyousaved.net
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