Chosen vessels of mercy, notwithstanding their backslidings, are brought back; but
ah! remember that nine out of ten of those who backslide never were God’s people.
590.531
It is very easy to go back in the heavenly pilgrimage, but it is very hard to retrieve
your steps. 623.198
By little and by little, as a rule, backsliding leads on to overt apostasy and sin. No,
no, so mature a servant of the devil as Judas is not produced all at once; it takes time
to educate a man for the scorner’s seat. Take care, therefore, of backsliding, because
of what it leads to. If you begin to slip on the side of a mountain of ice, the first slip
may not hurt if you can stop and slide no further; but, alas! you cannot so regulate
sin; when your feet begin to slide, the rate of their descent increases, and the
difficulty of arresting this motion is incessantly becoming greater. It is dangerous to
backslide in any degree, for we know not to what it may lead. 920.150
It is a wonderful thing, that even if you have been a prodigal, and have spent your
living with harlots, yet if you are his child, you may call him “Father.” Did not the
prodigal say, “Father, I have sinned?” There is good pleading in this fact, for you are
not unchilded even by your sin. 1232.263
The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up, nay,
you have to cut every step with an ice axe; only with incessant labour in cutting and
chipping can you make any progress; you need a guide to help you, and you are not
safe unless you are fastened to the guide, for you may slip into a crevasse. Nobody
ever slides up, but if great care be not taken they will slide down, slide back, or in
other words backslide. This is very easily done. If you want to know how to backslide,
the answer is leave off going forward and you will slide backward, cease going
upward and you will go downward of necessity, for stand still you never can. 1235.292
It is not easy to persuade one who has been a backslider to come back to his first love.
The return journey is uphill, and flesh and blood do not assist us in it. 1302.379
Devotion to God will be found to be the basis of holiness and the buttress of integrity.
If you backslide in secret before God, you will soon err in public before men. 1377.554
Tell me where you lost the company of Christ, and I will tell you the most likely place
for you to find him again. Did you lose the company of Christ by forgetting prayer,
and becoming slack in your devotion? Have you lost Christ in the closet? Then you
will find him there. Did you lose Christ through some sin? Then you will find him in
no other way but by the giving up of the sin, and seeking by the Holy Spirit to mortify
the member in which the lust doth dwell. Did you lose Christ by neglecting the
Scriptures? Then you must find Christ in the Scriptures; where you lost him, you will
find him. It is a true saying, “Look for a thing where you dropped it, for it is there.” 2611.101
Nine times out of ten, declension from God begins in the neglect of private prayer. 2931.187
I trust that you do watch against the more coarse and vulgar sins to which others
are prone, and that you will not be allowed to fall into them; but there is such a thing
as falling by little and little. 2969.15
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