You Didn’t Walk Away… You Drifted | Screwtape Letters Week 2

Patience, nephew, patience. That's Screwtape, the senior demon, C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, where he's coaching his nephew, Wormwood, how to lead one ordinary person away from God one letter at a time. Last week, his scheme was distraction, and oh boy, distraction really works, doesn't it? Anyone feel that this week? It works, but distraction is a daily chore, so this week, Screwtape offers a new strategy, a new scheme, it's even more effective, one that works all on its own once it gets started. It's called The Drift. The gentle slope, the slow fade. You miss one Sunday, and then another? Your new friends find your old beliefs charming. You pray a little shorter, a little more sporadically. Your convictions get softer, till you find yourself one day in a place you never thought you would be. The Drift is real. In fact, in The Drift, you'll still declare that you love Jesus with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you'll still believe that. Now, I don't believe anyone that's listening today is planning on walking away from God on their own. You're not planning to do that. That's what makes this letter so dangerous. When you're in The Drift, it will never feel like rebellion.

In fact, it will feel reasonable. It will feel mature. It will even feel enlightened when you're in the slow fade. It'll feel like that. Now, if you weren't here last week, the demon screw tape is fiction. Lewis made him up to prove a point, to make a point. But The Drift, however, is not fiction. It is very, very real. And it's the most common way that a faith dies is in The Drift. You see, people rarely walk away from Jesus on purpose. They drift. In the screw tape letters, letter 12, screw tape says to his nephew, murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. In other words, this is the thesis of The Drift. It doesn't matter the size of the sin or the size of the good thing, as long as it edges a person away from God. That's all that he's concerned about, The Drift. Our text for today is found in Revelation chapter two. If you want to turn in your Bible or your phone to Revelation chapter two, and you'll notice that the words in Revelation two are in red. It's because this is Jesus speaking. It's being recorded by the Apostle John on the Isle of Patmos where he meets Jesus face to face. Then Jesus gives him some letters

in chapters two and three to seven churches of Asia. We're gonna look at the first letter, the letter to the church at Ephesus. Revelation chapter two, beginning with verse one. Write to the angel of the church in Ephesus. Thus says the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know your works, your labor, and your endurance that you cannot tolerate evil people. You have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and you have found them to be liars. I know that you have persevered and endured hardships for the sake of my name, and you have not grown weary. Jesus is really building this church up, isn't he? I mean, the Ephesians says they're receiving this letter, gotta be pretty excited. Like, woo-hoo, way to go team. You know what I'm saying? But then verse four, look at verse four. But I have this against you. You have abandoned the love you had at first. You have abandoned the love you had at first. Will you say that with me? You have abandoned the love you had at first. Jesus is writing this to a church that was very busy, but they had abandoned the love they had at first. Well, let's talk about the drift. Like last week, we looked at distraction, we're gonna look at it externally,

we're gonna look at it inwardly, and we're gonna talk about why it is such a powerful weapon in spiritual warfare. Externally, when you're in the drift, the most. and stay, but the passion dies. You continue to show up, you continue to show up in church, you continue to show up in group, you continue to serve, you continue to give, but the passion to do those things begins to go away. It begins to slide downward. There's a church, look at what Jesus said in Revelation 2 too. He says, I know your works, your labor and your endurance. He knows this, but I have this against you. You've abandoned the love you had at first. Jesus is writing this to a church that's very busy, that's strategic, that's winning their world in Ephesus. They are doctrinally pure, very careful with their doctrine, and yet their heart is growing cold by the minute towards Jesus, their Savior. Here's a soul question for us today. When did you last pray with hunger, thirst, instead of habit? When did you last pray with hunger and thirst instead of just habit? Inwardly, when we're in the drift, every step feels reasonable. Every step feels reasonable. In the drift, the drift always has an alibi. You were tired. It was a busy season. The friends were fun. It always has an alibi. No one step in the drift feels like a decision. There's a church in Galatia that the Apostle Paul writes to in Galatians 3.3, and they're experiencing this drift also. Listen to what Paul says to them. Are you so foolish after beginning by the Spirit? Are you now finishing by the flesh? This is a church who began by the Spirit. They've surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ. They're in love with Jesus Christ. They're filled with the Holy Spirit. They're serving. They're doing all these things, but now they're beginning to drift, and in their drift, they're adding to the gospel message. It's not just by grace are you saved anymore, through faith. Now they're saying you got to do these works of the flesh, and Paul said you're drifting. You're drifting. You're adding to the gospel. Here's a soul question. If you were to trace your walk with God over the last year, is the line slowly moving up, or is it slowly moving downward? The drift is real. Now this is incredible spiritual warfare when we're in the drift. Here's why it's so dangerous. When you're in the drift, it never trips an alarm. Never.

It's so slow and subtle. It never trips an alarm in you. It's like you're living in a house that has slow carbon monoxide leak, and your detectors are defective. They're now working, and you're slowly dying. It never trips. See, if you were to encounter a scandal, you would run back to God, but a slow drift never trips the alarm. The writer of Hebrews uses this very word, drift. He says in Hebrews 2.1, for this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away. Say that last sentence with me, so that we will not drift away. Christian, the Bible is your alarm system. It lets you know when you're in the drift. When you do what James says, look at it like a mirror, and look at it and let it reflect your life. It sounds the alarm that you are in the drift. You may be doing all the things that Christians do, but your love for Jesus is slowly drifting away. It's slowly becoming cold. That's why we need the Word of God. Here's a soul question for us. What is the one compromise that you have already made peace with in your life? Let's pray. Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, thank you for loving us. Your love is amazing, unending. We could never explore the depths of your love. Today, draw us closer to you. If any of us are drifting, get us out of the drift today. We thank you, Jesus, amen. Hey, I wanna say welcome to every campus here at Pell and all the campuses wanna welcome you today. It's so good to be in the house of the Lord together. If you're online, welcome. God behind bars, our community gatherings, welcome. And I wanna thank Pastor Zach for the privilege of sharing God's word today. Thank you, Pastor Zach, it's an honor and a privilege to stand here and to teach God's word. Are you ready to dive in and learn more about the drift? Are you with me? Come on, let's go. All right, so this is spiritual warfare. Let's talk about the church at Ephesus.

The church at Ephesus, when Revelation 2 was written, would have been about 40 years old. To put in comparison, Faith Promises, 30, 31 years old, and maybe 31, 32 right now. Getting close, somewhere in there. And so we're close in age, okay? And they were pastors, started by the apostle Paul. Pretty good founding pastor, huh? And so Paul started the church. He mentored young Timothy. Timothy became the pastor at Ephesus. And history records that when John, the apostle John, came off the Isle of Patmos, where he wrote the book of Revelation, that he, for the rest of his life, lived in Ephesus and was part of this fellowship, part of this gathering. This church, historians believe, grew to about 50,000 people. Can you say, woo, big church. And big church, huh? 50,000. And so they responded well to Paul's warning in Acts 20, 31, where he says, hey, there's gonna be people that are gonna come among you, and they're gonna act like they're speaking the truth or not, they're liars. And Jesus commended them for recognizing this. He really commended this church. Still, they drifted.

They slowly abandoned their first love. You see, people rarely walk away from Jesus' own purpose. They drift. They just drift. So let's talk about the drift. What does it look like, and how does it happen? How does this play happen? So when you became a follower of Jesus Christ, for those who are followers of Jesus Christ, you became a new creation. Turn to someone and say, new creation. 2 Corinthians 5, 17 says, you are a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come. What happened is your spirit became made new, a new man, a new woman. If you're a man, you're a new man. If you're a woman, you're a new woman. Got it? All right. So new creation. That's what happened at the moment you became a follower of Jesus Christ. Now, your spirit is just like Jesus. Everything that heaven desires for you is already in your spirit. It's made new. Your soul, however, is not like that. Your soul is your mind, will, and emotions. And our mind, will, and our emotions, and our flesh want to sin.

At least mine do. Do yours? Is that no? All right, wow. What a righteous group. Okay. Amazing. I'm sure we have other campuses who are in agreement with me. All right. So anyway, our soul wants to sin, but our spirit does not sin. In fact, it cannot sin, but our soul can. But when you first come to a relationship with Jesus Christ, it's amazing. Can you go back to when that happened? I was 12 years old. So it's about 51 years ago for me. 52, yeah, 51 years ago. Those early days, I was so in love with Jesus. I mean, I wanted to tell everyone about Jesus. This is what my soul looked like in those days. It was just so pure. I was so in love. I mean, just, man, Jesus is amazing. He saved me from my sins. My soul was just so pure. But then we begin to live life, and life, because of the sin came in the world, can be challenging at times.

Do you agree with that? So how does the drift happen in our life? Well, God works in the low seasons of our life. Are you aware of that? In the low seasons when it's difficult, God works, and if we respond to God, he will produce maturity and more in us, in our soul. He'll produce what's in our soul that's already in our spirit. But Satan and his demonic army also work the low season. See, Kyle, what's the low season? The low season is when maybe a relationship that you were so excited about just ends. Just ends. It's challenging. And you begin to question, where's God? He's working the low season. Maybe something you've been praying for for quite a while. And part of the problem we have with prayer as Christians is we want to put a time clock on God. And God's outside of time. But we want to put a time clock on God. And we put a time clock on God and we pray for something and believe it's going to happen. It doesn't happen by the time we want it to happen. We get discouraged. Are you with me? And we will begin to wonder, does God really love me? We begin to ask questions like, is God really good? It's the slow, slow drift.

So in the low seasons, he works those. In the low seasons, when we find ourself a little numb, he'll bring small comforts to our life, the devil will. And if we bite on those, they begin to produce some quiet compromise in our lives. So what happens in the drift? You see, in the drift, he even masquerades as something good. Paul said this about Satan in 2 Corinthians 11, 14. So Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. He masquerades as an angel of light. When you're in the drift and he's speaking to you, sometimes his voice will sound kind and wise. When people ask me, Kyle, why do you study the Bible? There's two primary reasons. Two primary. One, to know Jesus. Can you agree with that? Two, to know his voice. So that when I'm in the low seasons and the devil is whispering to me, even though it sounds wise and sounds kind, I can recognize that it's not the voice of God because I know his voice from the word of God. Amen? So he masquerades as an angel of light. You see, when we begin to drift, man, we begin to pray a little more sporadically and we find ourselves praying when we're desperate, which means there's a great need in our life.

But we're not praying in intimacy. We're just not in constant communication with our Father because of love. He still loves us the same. His love for us has not changed. It cannot change. He will not pull it back. But we're slowly drifting. It feels different in that season. All of a sudden, our soul begins to feel a little different and look a little different than it used to. You see, in the drift, we begin to believe certain things that are clear in Scripture, very clear. We begin to believe other things and we call it maturity. Maturity, wow. See, in the drift, we're still serving, we're still doing all the things we normally do, but all of a sudden, man, instead of serving for an audience of one Jesus, I begin to get concerned about what others think about me. Why did he get invited to do that and I didn't? Am I not appreciated? Wow. Our focus changes. We leave, eventually, probably in the drift at some point, leave the community that really loves us and holds us accountable,

prays for us and cares for us, and they're still doing that, by the way. We begin to find new friends who have some different beliefs, but claim they love God. One day, we wake up in the drift. It's the way we began. Our spirit's still like that, by the way. But our soul looks like this, and we wonder why we don't feel His love. His love has never left us, but boy, we have drifted. It's like going in the ocean, begin to play in the ocean, and you come out 15 minutes later and you're 100 yards down the beach. You didn't notice it happening, did you? Now your soul looks like this. It's not the real you. It's not your spirit, but your soul looks like this, and because it looks like this, now you're almost ashamed and filled with shame and guilt, and you're afraid to come to God, even though He loves you so much. He loves you so much. Jeremiah talked about the drift hundreds of years ago. He said in Jeremiah 2.13, they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold water. Listen, drift is trading the spring of living water, which is Jesus, for a leaky bucket, and calling it growth, calling it discovering myself, calling it deconstructing my faith. It's the drift.

It's the drift, and now my soul looks like this. So what's the solution? Humanly, we think, well, I'll just discipline myself, and I'll start going to church regularly, I'll start reading my Bible, I'll start praying more, start serving, all good things, all important things, but your soul still looks like this. You can do all those things and not be in love with Jesus like you used to be. So the answer, Jesus gives it to us in Revelation 2, verse 5. Remember then how far you have fallen. Look at it. Remember then how far you have fallen. Repent, and do the works you did at first, otherwise I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Jesus gave the church at Ephesus, those Christians, and he gives you and I today three words, remember. Remember the intimacy you had with Jesus at one time, the love relationship you had with Jesus at one time. Remember it, remember it, remember it. Then he says, repent. Repent means to change your thinking 180 degrees, to begin to align your thoughts with truth, with God's word, and the truth will set you what? Free. By the way, that truth has a two-fold meaning. It's the truth of God's word that will set you free, and it's bringing the truth of your soul's condition, recognizing and seeing it, and coming to Jesus with that truth, and he, the truth, will set you free. Then he says, return.

Return what? First, return to your first love, but I want to tell you today, you cannot, you will not return to your first love unless you repent. Return to your first love, and then you'll begin to do the works, the reading the Bible, praying, serving, giving, all those things. You'll begin to do those from a loving heart. relationship, not from a duty, not from a check off my box, I am righteous, from a love relationship. Paul says this in Ephesians chapter 5 and verse 26, just to make her holy. Who's her? He's talking about the church, that's you and I, the church. To make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the Word. Let's read that verse together out loud, come on, every campus. To make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the Word. Now listen, you think, I just need to resolve to do better, but you cannot change the condition of your soul on your own. You need Jesus and you must invite the Holy Spirit to come and change you from the inside out. Otherwise, all you're doing is behavior modification on the outside. Jesus will come, the Holy Spirit will come and will take the Word and He'll begin to wash over you and fill you up and it will begin to overflow and that overflow will begin to disperse things that shouldn't be in there. I want you to listen to the Word right now and let it wash over your mind, your will, and your emotions. Listen. The Spirit Himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God's children. This hope will not disappoint us because God's love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. And the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the one who gives life. The flesh doesn't help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and our life. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. I say then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. I baptize you with water, but He will

baptize you with the Holy Spirit. I pray that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through His Spirit and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God's love and to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Repent. Let the Holy Spirit wash over you. Jesus said, are you thirsty? Come drink of me and you will never thirst again. Only Jesus can satisfy. Excuse me. Maybe you're here today and you don't have a personal relationship with God. For Jesus Christ, your sins have not been forgiven. The devil will come after you two ways. One, he will make you feel that your good works are enough. The Bible says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Number two, he'll come after you to make you believe that your religion will save you. The most religious people in Jesus' day, Jesus said this of them, your hearts are far from me. Today, if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. What's that mean? All your sins, past, present, future will be forgiven. Done, and you'll be in a relationship with God through Jesus.

If you would like to do that today, we're gonna ask you to pray a prayer with us. Repeat after me. We're gonna all pray it out loud together. Say, Jesus, thank you for loving me. Thank you for coming to the cross for me, dying for me, paying the sacrifice for me. Thank you for your blood that takes away all my sin. I surrender my life to you. I make you Lord of my life in Jesus' name. Their eyes still closed. If you prayed that prayer at any of our campuses for the very first time, we wanna put something in your hand. Would you just hold your hand up? Just hold your hand up and ushers will find you. They'll get to you. At every campus online, God behind bars. Come on, let's praise God for people that surrender their life to Jesus. In the screw tape letters, Lewis wrote down the enemy's last line of defense for us as believers. Are you ready? This is his last line of defense. Listen to this. Do not miss this. Screw tape tells Wyrmwood that when a person feels conviction, like you and I may be feeling right now,

when a person feels conviction, the move is to let him or her wallow in that conviction. Let him or her feel terrible. Let him or her resolve to do better. Hell can live with your sorrow all day long, but it cannot survive this. Listen, a step of action. Action. If you find yourself in the drift today, no matter where you're listening, you must take a step of action if you wanna get out of the drift. You can't resolve in your heart right now, sitting there, I'm gonna do better. Won't work. You must take a step of action, and the action is to repent. So every campus right now, the Holy Spirit is convicting you that you have been in the drift and you do not love Jesus like you did at one time. I'm asking you to take a step of action today. More importantly, Jesus is asking you to take a step of action today. Get out of your seat, come to this altar and repent. I want us to all stand, and I invite you right now, come and join me. I'm going down to the altar to repent.