How to Backslide in 9 Easy Steps

Listed below are 9 ‘easy’ steps to backslide that pastor, author, and blogger, Tim Challies gleaned from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress. In each case he gives his short summary followed by Bunyan’s own words. So, here is how to backslide in nine easy steps:

1. Stop meditating on the gospel. “They draw off their thoughts, all that they may, from the remembrance of God, death, and judgment to come.”

2. Neglect your spiritual disciplines and stop battling sin. “Then they cast off by degrees private duties, as closet prayer, curbing their lusts, watching, sorrow for sin, and the like.”

3. Isolate yourself from Christian fellowship. “Then they shun the company of lively and warm Christians.”

4. Stop going to church. “After that, they grow cold to public duty, as hearing, reading, godly conference, and the like.”

5. Determine that Christians are hypocrites because they continue to sin. “They then begin to pick holes, as we say, in the coats of some of the godly, and that devilishly, that they may have a seeming color to throw religion (for the sake of some infirmities they have espied in them) behind their backs.”

6. Trade Christian community for distinctly unChristian company. “Then they begin to adhere to, and associate themselves with, carnal, loose, and wanton men.”

7. Pursue rebellious conversation and fellowship. “Then they give way to carnal and wanton discourses in secret; and glad are they if they can see such things in any that are counted honest, that they may the more boldly do it through their example.”

8. Allow yourself to enjoy some small, sinful pleasures. “After this they begin to play with little sins openly.”

9. Admit what you are and prepare yourself for everlasting torment. “And then, being hardened, they show themselves as they are. Thus, being launched again into the gulf of misery, unless a miracle of grace prevent it, they everlastingly perish in their own deceivings.”


Mission-Minded

Restoration Church is marked by five core values. These values describe who we are and what we do.  When you get rid of everything else these are the five essential realities that shape our community.

Mission-Minded
The church is not a building.  The church is a community of people that gather and disperse to proclaim the message that God is reconciling the world to himself in Christ.  So we do not seek comfort and prosperity, but want to engage the culture and the world at large with a mission-minded focus.


Community-Oriented

Restoration Church is marked by five core values. These values describe who we are and what we do.  When you get rid of everything else these are the five essential realities that shape our community.

Community-Oriented
The gospel creates community.  It is in this community that we experience true fellowship by combining our gifts and resources to equip, encourage, admonish, and edify one another.  In light of these truths the church is not a peripheral activity, nor is it program driven; rather, it is community-oriented people living life alongside each other.


Christ-Exalting

Restoration Church is marked by five core values. These values describe who we are and what we do.  When you get rid of everything else these are the five essential realities that shape our community.

Christ-Exalting
Our world has plenty of good teachers.  Jesus is different.  Jesus claimed not simply to be a good teacher but the Lord himself.  To show the truth of who Jesus is, we live Christ-exalting lives.  At Restoration Church we want to magnify the name of Jesus and boast only in what He has done.


Kingdom Centered Prayer

From Tim Keller:

People are used to thinking about prayer as a means to get their personal needs met. However we should understand prayer as a means to praise and adore God, to know Him, to come into his presence and be changed by Him. We need to better learn how to pray, repent and petition God as a people.

Biblically and historically, the one non-negotiable, universal ingredient in times of spiritual renewal is corporate, prevailing, intensive and kingdom-centered prayer. What is that?

  1. It is focused on God's presence and kingdom.
    Jack Miller talks about the difference between "maintenance prayer" and "frontline" prayer meetings. Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical, and totally focused on physical needs inside the church. But frontline prayer has three basic traits:

    1. a request for grace to confess sins and humble ourselves
    2. a compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church
    3. a yearning to know God, to see his face, to see his glory.

    It is most interesting to study Biblical prayer for revival, such as in Acts 4 or Exodus 33 or Nehemiah 1, where these three elements are easy to see. Notice in Acts 4, for example, that the disciples, whose lives had been threatened, did not ask for protection for themselves and their families, but only boldness to keep preaching!

  2. It is bold and specific.
    The characteristics of this kind of prayer include:

    1. Pacesetters in prayer spend time in self-examination. Without a strong understanding of grace, this can be morbid and depressing. But in the context of the gospel, it is purifying and strengthening. They "take off their ornaments" (Exod. 33:1-6). They examine selves for idols and set them aside.
    2. They then begin to make the big request–a sight of the glory of God. That includes asking: 1) for a personal experience of the glory/presence of God ("that I may know you" – Exod. 33:13); 2) for the people's experience of the glory of God (v. 15); and 3) that the world might see the glory of God through his people (v. 16). Moses asks that God's presence would be obvious to all: "What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" This is a prayer that the world be awed and amazed by a show of God's power and radiance in the church, that it would become truly the new humanity that is a sign of the future kingdom.
  3. It is prevailing, corporate.
    By this we mean simply that prayer should be constant, not sporadic and brief. Why? Are we to think that God wants to see us grovel? Why do we not simply put our request in and wait? But sporadic, brief prayer shows a lack of dependence, a self-sufficiency, and thus we have not built an altar that God can honor with his fire. We must pray without ceasing, pray long, pray hard, and we will find that the very process is bringing about that which we are asking for – to have our hard hearts melted, to tear down barriers, to have the glory of God break through.

 


Gospel-Centered

Restoration Church is marked by five core values. These values describe who we are and what we do.  When you get rid of everything else these are the five essential realities that shape our community.

Gospel-Centered
The gospel is literally the good news that God entered the brokenness of this world in the person of Jesus Christ.  Jesus, being fully God and fully man, lived a sinless life, died on our behalf, was buried and rose from the grave, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe. This good news opens our eyes to see the world the way God intended it to be.  So the gospel does not issue a straight jacket for life, but frees us from religion into a gospel-centered way of living that finds freedom from chasing the empty promises of this world


Prayer for your prayer life

Tim Challies has a helpful post on seven ways we can pray for our prayer lives. His seven points, each drawn from a particular Bible passage, are as follows:
1) Pray that your prayers would be the expressions of a humble heart (Mt. 6:5-6).
2) Pray that God would remind you that he doesn’t want or need your eloquent prayers (Rm. 8:26).
3) Pray that you would remember what the really important requests are (Mt. 6:9-13).
4) Pray that you would remember biblical examples of answered prayer (Js. 5:13-14).
5) Pray that God would give you confidence in his sovereign power (Eph. 3:20-21).
6) Pray that God would help you to persevere in your praying (Lk 18:1-8).
7) Pray that God would encourage you that he is your loving Father and will give you only what is good (Mt. 7:9-11).


Biblically Faithful

Restoration Church is marked by five core values. These values describe who we are and what we do.  When you get rid of everything else these are the five essential realities that shape our community.

Biblically Faithful
Many people think the Bible is an outdated book with a random mix of stories and morals.  We see the Bible as one story, Gods story.  This story shows how our life connects to God.  So we want to be biblically faithful in all that we do in order that we might love God with all of our hearts and minds.


No Fear

Guest speaker Eric Redmond of Reformation Alive Baptist Church in Temple Hills, MD delivers this week's sermon on Hebrews 2:14-18.

Download study guide (PDF)