The Danger of Drifting: A Faith Shipwreck Warning
By Elizabeth Prata
“Man without Christ is a shipwreck upon the rocks, rocked by every wave of temptation, with no anchor, with no hope. Death looms before him as a door to judgment, for the wages of sin is death,” says Dustin Benge in his Hearts Aflame episode of Puritan devotionals.
In the episode above, we meet Scottish late Puritan Thomas Boston. In Boston’s well-regarded classic, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, Benge explains that “Thomas Boston vividly portrays the fallen condition of humanity—alienated from God, enslaved to sin, and without hope apart from Christ. The depth of human ruin is sobering, yet it magnifies the glory of divine grace.”
Do you recognize the depth of your natural misery without Christ’s redemption?
The episode talked about man without Christ,
“Man without Christ is like a ship wrecked upon the rocks, tossed by every wave of temptation, with no anchor, no hope.”
This maritime metaphor is real to me. I have sailed about 15,000 nautical miles living in a sailboat upon the waters from Maine to Florida and across to the Bahamas and back, twice. I’ve sailed from Tampa Florida to the Dry Tortugas, and zoomed from Naples, Florida to Rhode Island in a 21 foot powerboat. I’ve crossed the Gulf Stream in calm, at night, and in a storm. Gone through the washing machine that is Hell’s Gate in New York City. I’ve been in the Storm of the Century 1993. I’ve been in Hurricane Bob. I know lighthouses, rocks, shoals, and shipwrecks (Charley’s Crab was lost in the storm of ’93, and another friend lost his boat in a different storm in the Caribbean). We came close to shipwreck ourselves, twice.
Shipwreck is a very bad thing.
Worse would be making a shipwreck of the faith.
Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) made a career out of painting maritime scenes, including shipwrecks. Like this one:
Without Christ, we can do nothing. Oh, I know the skeptic will say, ‘Doody-head, of course we do things! We live and breathe and work and have kids and play baseball and drive cars and all the things!” Correct. But the pagan without Christ can do nothing that pleases Him. Without Christ we cannot bear fruit for the kingdom, worship Him rightly, live for holiness, reflect His image, or do anything at all.
Paul advised Timothy to ‘fight the good fight’, keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. (1 Timothy 1:19).
Jude wrote that the ungodly pretenders are unreasoning animals and warned that they “are the ones who are hidden reefs in your love feasts…“(Jude 1:12a). Do you know what hidden reefs do? Wreck your ship.
Hebrews 2:1 says For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. Do you know what happens when you don’t pay attention? Your mooring becomes loose and you drift away from the dock or the mothership, and untethered, you soon lose sight of land. Shipwreck.
‘Drifting’ is the thing to be afraid of. Just as some boat, not made fast to the bank, certainly glides down stream so quietly and with so little friction that her passengers do not know that they are moving until they come up on deck, and see new fields around them, so the ‘things which we have heard,’ and to which we ought to be moored or anchored, we shall drift, drift, drift away from, and, in nine cases out of ten, shall not feel that we are moving, till we are roused by hearing the noise of the whirlpools and the falls close ahead of us; and look round and see a strange country. McLaren’s Expositions.
Now, if you are truly saved, you can never lose your salvation. Judas had the rejection inside of him all the while, he just pretended to be a disciple of Christ. He followed with his feet, but his heart could do nothing.
Matthew Henry says of 1 Timothy 1:19’s shipwreck,
As for those who had made shipwreck of the faith, he specifies two, Hymeneus and Alexander, who had made a profession of the Christian religion, but had quitted that profession; and Paul had delivered them to Satan. Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (p. 2352).
Warren Wiersbe said, “Paul changed the illustration from army to navy (1 Tim. 1:19). He warned Timothy that the only way to succeed was to hold fast to “faith and a good conscience.” It is not enough to proclaim the faith with our lips; we must practice the faith in our daily lives“. Wiersbe, W. W. (1996). The Bible exposition commentary (Vol. 2, p. 213). Victor Books.
A good conscience is key to the verse. Shipwreck comes when one ignores the conscience, suppresses what is good, and eventually sears it so that he or she drifts, winds up on the rocks, and wrecks their faith.
As is said in the Hearts Aflame article, The depth of human ruin is sobering, yet it magnifies the glory of divine grace.” The wondrous mystery is that Jesus relieves us of our sin burden, erases it from the record books when we repent. Those who recognize the depth of our natural misery are deeply grateful for having this burden and misery removed. The Lord’s divine grace shines so brightly that the Christian never looks away but only grows in love and attachment to Him, and as a result, we are “keeping a pure conscience.”
Further Rescources
John MacArthur: The Vanishing Conscience (book)
The Conscience, by Richard Greenham (essay)
The Puritan Conscience by J. I. Packer (essay)
