Adrift from the truth …

I’ve walked along many beaches in places such as California and Mexico, Fiji and Jamaica, and from Australia to Hawaii’s splendid shores. One thing I’ve seen is that all sorts of odd, unusual, and even remarkable things may drift onto shore.

Columnist L. M. Boyd wrote about the story of how good fortune drifted onto a shoreline for a man named Jack Wurm. In 1949, Mr. Wurm was broke and out of a job. One day he was walking along a San Francisco beach when he came across a bottle with a piece of paper in it. As he read the note, he discovered that it was the last will and testament of Daisy Singer Alexander, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. The note read, “To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike.”

According to Boyd, the courts accepted the theory that the heiress had written the note 12 years earlier, and had thrown the bottle into the Thames River in London, from where it had drifted across the oceans to the feet of a penniless and jobless Jack Wurm. His chance discovery netted him over six million dollars in cash and Singer stock.

It’s not likely that you and I will pluck something as remarkable off any beach sometime soon. When it comes to drift, it more often isn’t good things floating into our lives, but rather, our lives becoming adrift from what is good for us. The writer of the New Testament book, Hebrews, warns us about the danger of our drifting away from the truth …

“So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it.” – Hebrews 2:1

Our drift away from truth is a very real danger if we are not careful about what we believe and how we live. Respected Bible scholar, D.A. Carson, said this about our tendency to drift:

“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.”

Charlene Cothran had drifted far from the truth, and she shares in her story that God warned her unless she turned around, she would drift too far.

Cothran is the publisher of Venus Magazine, which is a periodical for lesbians of African descent. She recently announced on the magazine’s website that she has become a Christian and has rejected the lesbian lifestyle she had been living.

Cothran said that as a magazine publisher she has had the opportunity to address thousands of people publicly, influencing homosexuals to come out of the closet. Now, she says, she must come out of the closet again.

Cothran explained, “The spirit of God spoke directly into my soul and said you will choose this day who you will serve and if you make the wrong choice, I will allow you to drift so far away from me that you will never hear my voice again. I gave God my heart and soul in the parking lot of the mall, right there in my car. A river of tears flowed as Jesus washed me and forgave me and redeemed me for His work.”

Cothran will continue her work in the homosexual community, but she has changed her mission.

She said, “I intend to be just as ‘out’ about my transformation as I was about my lesbian life. I have given every gift I have back to God, including Venus Magazine. The target audience will remain the same but the mission has been renewed. Our new mission is to encourage, educate and assist those in the [homosexual] life who want change but can’t find a way out.”

To be adrift from the truth is to allow ourselves to move away from Jesus Christ, for Jesus is truth!

“Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me,” John 14:6.

We don’t naturally drift toward Jesus, but we can drift away from Him if we are not diligent about allowing Him to anchor our lives in holy living. Is Christ your anchor, or would you say you have become adrift from the truth? If you have, I encourage you to get up and hasten your way back to the Lord before you find that God has allowed you to drift too far to again hear His voice.

Scotty