1 We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.
It takes active effort to stay on course in the Christian life. My father loved to sail. I think if he could have lived on a sailboat he would have, and he did for short seasons. I could see the water in my Dad’s eyes, his step, his hands. He painted many pictures of the ocean and the border between ocean and land. I often thought he felt himself caught on that border. One of the many lessons I learned from him is that ships drift off course. You can set the rudder at the beginning of the journey and if you don’t change it along the way, you will not reach your destination. The wind exerts pressure on the sails that push you off course. The currents move your vessel as part of a very large moving mass. Even the largest ships get pushed by these currents. So as a result you must make constant adjustments to the course. When someone does not know how to make proper adjustments, those adjustments often end up looking like a zigzag on the map. They are sharp corrections which add time and distance to the journey. For an experienced pilot, the course looks more like a series of slow, gentle curves. The experienced pilot knows the currents and winds and adjusts for them by steering into them slightly to make up for their influence. This takes conscious effort to think about those influences and then it takes experience to know how much to steer into those forces in order to get to the destination as rapidly as possible. If we don’t pay attention to the Scriptures it is easy to drift from the truth. There are so many forces in our lives pushing us away from our destination. We can even think we are still on course when in fact we have moved far away from the path. As novice pilots we need to make constant updates to our course. We need to spend time listening to the Lord, hearing His voice and getting the latest ‘weather’ reports if we are going to arrive at our destination. This won’t happen automatically. You have to stay at the wheel, alert and ready. Are you at the wheel? Are you listening to the Weather Radio?
The Arnold Journey 