Drifting

D A Carson included this paragraph in his daily readings today, focussed on Nehemiah 13. It captures an important message to all of us when we do not take our discipleship seriously:

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

Carson, D.A. (1998) For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, p. 49.