(September 27, 2025) Dr Richard Winter challenges…

How to backslide?

‘What?’ you’re exclaiming, probably shocked by this title! The reality is that no Christian ever plans on backsliding, yet it happens. Stay with me, readers…

The prophet Jeremiah admitted backsliding happened many times. He wrote in Jeremiah 3:21-22 that although Israel had forgotten God, He was graciously saying ‘Return, faithless people; I will cure you of backsliding.’

The apostle Paul wrote a lot about backsliding… note his warning in Galatians 6:7GWV, ‘Make no mistake about this: You can never make a fool out of God. Whatever you plant is what you’ll harvest.’ 

Apostasy
Let’s get to the point here—

• Such activity is committing apostasy!
• ‘Backsliding’ is actually a theological term for the activity of falling away.
• It’s a process by which a convert to Christianity reverts to pre-conversion habits.
• Such lapsing into sin is when a person turns from God to pursue their own desires.
• And no Christian should do it!

Unfortunately, this falling away— backsliding— is a common topic found from cover to cover in the Bible! For example one major incident gets a lot of press in the Old Testament— Israel had just been delivered from 400 years of captivity in Egypt and Moses has led them on the start of their spiritual journey into the promised land.

God calls Moses aside and they have a mountain top conversation… a conservation which is often told as an old joke about Moses having such a bad headache over Israel that he tells God about it and God’s suggestion is ‘Oh well, Moses, take these two tablets’ (Exodus 31:18).

But seriously… the two tablets that God gave to Moses were the 10 Commandments, not 10 Suggestions!

While God was instructing Moses about the new life Israel would lead in the Promised Land the nation sort of said: ‘This is too hard for us… let’s go back to what we know. We’re very comfortable with the old Egyptian ways’ (Numbers 14:1-4, Acts 7:39).

Actions
Fast forward to 2025 today. Backsliding is when we put our thoughts and actions before God’s new life instructions that we are to live as followers of Christ. I’ve done it… we’ve all done it fully or partially! Praise God that He is the forgiving God! (Psalm 103:12; Romans 3:23-24; Colossians 3:13).

Of course not many churches will teach you how to backslide… and I know that you don’t want to, that we all don’t want to! So I’ll explain some causes of backsliding in order to help some troubled souls—

• If a Christian has no spiritual food or instructions on biblical living, or isn’t taught scripture correctly by their pastor or church, things will tend toward disorder… one can backslide!
• Now backsliding is not saying that you’re not saved— but if you don’t do anything to feed your soul, you won’t grow in your Christianity and you will stagnate.
• This is why Peter wrote ‘… make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love… (2Peter 1:5-7).
• His instruction here is to avoid backsliding by ‘Adding to our faith.’ This means not stopping at receiving salvation when you accept Jesus as Saviour… that’s just the start! You must grow in Christian maturity, adding what Peter wrote about in the scripture above.
• This means new life style actions and Peter encourages us to ‘… make every effort.’ CJB version reads ‘try your hardest’ and Message Bible encourages ‘So don’t lose a minute in building on what you’ve been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding.’

Peter added in 2Peter 3:18 that we should ‘Grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Jesus put it this way in John 1:4, ‘Abide in me and I in you.’ To put Paul’s directions of Ephesians 5:1-5 in a nutshell, every Christian is called to walk intimately with Christ in this life safe guarding himself and safeguarding others.

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had a group of young men that he was training new as officers and said to them, ‘I want you young men to always bear in mind that it is the nature of a fire to go out. You must keep it stirred up and fed, and the ashes removed.’

This is a message for today for all whose fires of devotion have gone out or are going out! You need to do something… or you’re proceeding in the wrong direction!

Acknowledgement
Paul wrote to the Philippian church: ‘Work out your own salvation, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure’ (Philippians 2:12NKJV) encouraging believers to work at living out their salvation while acknowledging God’s role in empowering them to do so. 

Salvation is between you and God— you can belong to a church and it’s a crowd, but when you stand before Jesus at judgment day it’s just you and Him! That’s why you have to work out what you are doing now! ‘Work out’ is katergazomai indicating to work fully at and accomplish!

In Philippians 3:13b-14 Paul gives his own testimony: ‘… one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me.’ As the Message version puts it, Paul is indicating ‘I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward— to Jesus.’ 

Every one of those verses is about putting Christ back into the system to fight against spiritual entropy.

• Backsliding is a word that shows up in the Old Testament 13 times, chiefly in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea. The New Testament calls it falling away.
• James refers to it as wandering from the truth (James 5:19-20). What basically happens is a person comes to Jesus and accepts Him as Saviour saying something like ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, I give my life to Him. I’m so excited, I’m so on fire.’ And then, over time, the fire never gets tended… the resources of spiritual fire doesn’t get put back into the system.
• Paul wrote to the Galatians saying, ‘I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you’ (Galatians 1:6NKJV).
• Jesus said through John in Revelation 2:4 ‘I’ve got something against you. You have left your first love.’

Backsliding is almost never a blowout, it’s almost always a slow leak. It’s gradual over time. Old habits have revived and a sense of permissiveness will creep back into life. This shouldn’t really surprise you because this is human nature.

Paul would establish a church, build up that church, then leave that church, turn it over to other people. Things would go wrong and he would have to write a letter to that church or visit it a second time.

Now, here’s the thing about backsliding… when we discover it, we’re taken by surprise. It’s like, ‘How did I get here?’ Backsliding is subtle…  gradual and incremental. But it ends up where we are thinking things that a person close to God wouldn’t think, never mind do.

Remember Peter? He swore that he would never do what Jesus predicted he would do (Matthew 26:35). He said that ‘Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.’ And then, cock-a-doodle-doo and he ends up doing what he said he would never do.

Apathy
Let me share four ways of apathetic backsliding—
1. Misplace Your Bible
You want to backslide?

• Get rid of your Bible!
• ‘Misplace’ it!
• Don’t read it (This is akin to throwing it out the door).
• Never pick it up, except maybe on Sunday.
• Just let it ‘rot’ for weeks or months.

When Christians neglect the scriptures, they are neglecting the only source of pure, undiluted truth. It’s one thing to hear good sermons… but when you read the scriptures for yourself, you’re inwardly personally digesting the only source of pure, undiluted truth.

Neglecting personal scripture reading leads to confusion, apathy, emptiness, dryness, joylessness, indifference. It makes you vulnerable to temptation,lukewarm andfruitless!

Who wants to sign up for that? I don’t. But allow me to confess something here: When I look back on the periods of my life when I neglected the Bible, I can see a clear pattern, a growing disconnect from God. In those moments, it was as if I had put up a wall between God and myself. Praise God that He reminded me of Psalm 119:105: ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.’

If the first step to backsliding is to neglect scripture, then the first line of defence is do not neglect it. Read it… get back to it!

So let me give you three words when it comes to not neglecting the Bible and getting back to it and placing it front and centre, three words that I think might help— discipline, desire, delight.

(i) Discipline
At first, it’s a discipline… hard at first but soon it becomes your routine.
(ii) Desire
Once you stick with the discipline, you will discover it becomes a desire. You’ll have a voracious appetite for truth!
(iii) Delight
Eventually it becomes a delight— you’ll find that you can’t live without it.

2. Misalign Your Companions
Or to put it another way, get really bad friends around you. If you want to backslide, hang out with people that will hold you back spiritually and you will be sure to backslide. In 1Corinthians 15:33, Paul writes this: ‘Do not be deceived. Evil company corrupts good morals.’

Remember the saying ‘ Birds of a feather flock together.’ Sin is like a magnetic attraction… put the magnet into iron filing and bingo they all stick. If you’re going to succeed spiritually, you need a better network of friends.

I laugh a little bit here because I’m remembering my childhood…  my parents telling me this stuff all the time— ‘You need new friends… better friends.’

• Get people who support, encourage, and build you up in your faith.
• You’re making a good start when you attend a good Bible-teaching church.
• When you join a Bible study group that surround you with a smaller family of people that, week by week, can support and encourage you!

3.   Misarrange Your Priorities  
When one misarranges priorities things happen, go wrong and you wonder, why is my life so chaotic? It could be that you have priorities that are out of order.

So what do you do? Get them back… reprioritise. Now, I’m not going to tell you that you ought to make a list of 1, 2, 3, 4… whatever. What I am going to ask you to do is to think in terms of a solar system.

We know how the solar system works… planets orbit different velocities and time dimensions around the sun. If you place God as the sun in the centre of ‘your solar system’— your marriage, job, friendships, church— they will revolve around what’s most important and everything’s going to fall into order.

Usually what happens in our lives is the sun is not God, it’s us. It’s me! And my job revolves around me. And my family revolves around me… and my friendships. My this and my that! And that’s the problem.

But when God becomes the centre of your solar system you just revolve around Him, the main priority. You’ll think in terms of what does God want and it’s just natural that priorities will fall into the right order.

Sundays are a good day to spiritually orbit, circling round God. In fact, God loves you so much that He put a commandment in the Old Testament  to say ‘Take a day off because you need it. You need to refuel, you need to recharge and do nothing. So unplug, get off everything and just recharge.

4. Mismanage Your Family
This happens to be one of the great sins of so many countries— there are so many fatherless families, so many families that are left untended. Mismanage your family and you’ll make sure that, not only you, but they will have horrible lives!

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says: One generation plants the trees. The next generation gets the shade.

How are we preparing our children? When I was a first time parent this amazing revolution hit me when I held our first baby— a precious soul weighing just a few pounds, defenceless, dependent and our object of great love.

What kind of shade will our children and grandchildren have? What are we planting right now? What are we doing to protect our kids and grandkids from the disintegrating rays of the secular sun?

I discovered that a parent is a partner with God in making disciples of one’s children. Mess up the family— and sadly many parents have walked away from this responsibility — and the children have backslidden from God wanting them to always be close to  Him.

Avoidance
Okay… I’ve shared on how Christians can backslide. In closing I encourage everyone to avoid backsliding! Remember this—

• You don’t backslide from a place but from a person.
• You don’t backslide from church but from God.
• You don’t backslide from the Bible but from its author.
• You don’t backslide from Christianity but from its head… Christ.

Backsliding is always personal and because it’s personal we can turn to the person of Christ. Surrender your life afresh to Him… recommit your life to Him. When Jesus becomes the sun in your life, everything else revolves around Him.

We don’t want to backslide— we want to walk forward, we want to run the race of life. Remember Paul’s declaration to Timothy near the end of his life: ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith’ (2Timothy 4:7).

Praise God that today can be a day of forgiveness and a new direction! If we have backslidden even just a little let’s take the opportunity to come back to Christ and receive forgiveness and life blessing!

Then we can live the Christian life without regrets and finish the race of life strong!

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Dr Richard Winter pastors The Connection Church, Huntington Beach, California. Link: OnlinerConnect@gmail.com  
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