Categories
Faith

When the heart grows cold

Many who fall in love swear that it will last forever, but the feelings of attraction gradually fade and in time the hear grows cold. It can be like that for those who fall in love with God. In the third chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, the writer discusses how the Israelites in the wilderness, although they had seen God’s mighty power, allowed their faithfulness to erode with time and their hearts to become hard. The writer then provides this warning:

Watch out, friends, in case anyone amongst you develops a sinful unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. Encourage each other day by day, while there still is a “today”, to make sure that none of you become calloused by the deceitfulness of sin. We have become partners of Christ, if we maintain until the end the confidence which we had in the beginning.

Our relationship with God is just like our relationship with anyone: we can neglect it and let it wither away and die, or we can keep working on it and allow it to grow strong and last our whole lifetime and beyond. Many who fall away from the faith do not make a conscious decision to do so; the pressures of life just cause them gradually to drift away, they spend less and less time praying and thinking about God, and then one day they realise that their faith has disappeared altogether.