A Step Away Is a Step Down

After Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter kept his distance. Yes, Peter followed the Lord, but he followed at a distance.

And distance from the Lord in closeness and fellowship always will be at the foundation of all spiritual regression.

So, if you can’t be happy in your sin, that’s a good sign. True believers are never happy when they’re out of fellowship with God.

And if you’re out of fellowship with God, if you’ve sinned against the Lord, then you’ll be an unhappy person.

For instance, we see this in the life of David, the man after God’s own heart. He sinned big time. Then in Psalm 32, he described the way he felt: “When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat” (verses 3–4 NLT).

David had been following at a distance.

When the Devil looks for a Christian to take down, he looks for the one who’s following at a distance. He looks for the person who says, “Do we have to go to church again? Didn’t we do that last week? Read the Bible? Really? Again?”

Children of God hunger for these things. Compromisers on the other hand, only do them out of duty. And if no one is encouraging them to do these things, then they don’t do them.

If you’re following the Lord at a distance, you will end up in the miserable no-man’s-land of compromise. And in that dismal place you will have too much of the Lord to be happy in the world, and too much of the world to be happy in the Lord.

Don’t be that person.