Will I Fall Away?

“God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” — 1 Corinthians 1:9 (ESV)

Many people coming to Christ are haunted by a fear: what if I start and then drift off? They’ve had good feelings before, they say, and those feelings vanished like early-morning dew. Spurgeon takes the fear seriously — and then points out the trap inside it. Some people really have turned back, he says, because they trusted Jesus to start them and trusted themselves to keep them going. “If we trust to ourselves for our holding on we shall not hold on.” A chain is only as strong as its weakest link; if Jesus is your hope for everything except one thing, that one thing will break. “If you look to Christ for your beginnings, beware of looking to yourself for your endings.”

And he doesn’t pretend holding on is easy. A marble statue needs no food, but a living person gets hungry every day; a living faith needs fresh grace every day. Some people are naturally restless, flitting like butterflies from one thing to another. All of us, he says, have shown enough foolishness “before the breakfast things are cleared away from the table” to make us ashamed. Life is long and tiring. Spurgeon borrows Bunyan’s map: the Christian road has its Hill of Difficulty and Valley of Humiliation, its Vanity Fair and its Castles of Despair as well as its Delectable Mountains. The world can be hostile. But think of it this way: God never provides anything we won’t need, so the very fact that he promises to keep us tells us we will need keeping. Real Christianity is “supernatural at its beginning, supernatural in its continuance, and supernatural in its close.”

So Paul’s promise matters: Jesus “will sustain you to the end, guiltless.” God strengthens what he starts. A young tree is helped to root itself “both by the soft showers and the rough winds” — the good days and the hard ones. And God doesn’t only want to keep you safe; he wants to keep you holy. “To be kept holy is better than merely to be kept safe.” Spurgeon is sad about Christians whose lives are a string of stumbles — “never quite down, and yet they are seldom on their feet.” That isn’t the plan. Jesus said, “I give unto my sheep eternal life; and they shall never perish.”

And why is Paul so sure? Not because the Corinthians were faithful. “God is faithful.” We are “variable as the wind, frail as a spider’s web, weak as water,” but God never starts a job and leaves it half done. “The saints shall persevere in holiness, because God perseveres in grace.” He has called you into partnership with his Son. Picture a business with two partners — one completely broke, the other unimaginably rich. Or, in Spurgeon’s plainest words: “Christ and the believing sinner are in the same boat: unless Jesus sinks, the believer will never drown.”

Now — what is this actually about? You don’t keep yourself saved; God keeps you, and that’s why you keep going. The fear of falling away is often a fear about yourself: I know how inconsistent I am. Spurgeon agrees you’re inconsistent. That’s exactly why your hope can’t rest on you. It rests on a faithful God who finishes what he starts.

But notice he never says, “So it doesn’t matter how you live.” Being kept by God looks like actually being kept — growing steadier, rooting deeper, getting back up. The security is the soil; holiness is the growth. And Spurgeon has a word for beginners who look at older, steadier Christians and think they’ll never be like that: you who are now a “babe” in Christ can one day be a “father” in the church — hoped for as a gift of grace, not earned by effort.

One thing to do this week: write down the thing you’re most afraid will pull you away from God — a friendship, a doubt, a habit, the fact that your feelings fade. Underneath it, write: “God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 1:9). Pray about that fear by name each night this week, and ask him for today’s grace, not next year’s.