www.bymonline.org | SEPTEMBER 2018
Remedies For Backsliding
George D. Watson
Great Self-Abasement
I mention as the first remedy for heart wanderings, great self-abasement before God; that the evil which
the soul has fallen into is to be squarely faced and acknowledged without palliation, or excuse, or self-defense;
that self must be utterly dethroned; that God must be honored; that His truth must be magnified at the expense of
self-annihilation.
It is a great gift from God that any backslider will have the grace to repent and confess and return to Jesus;
but for this divine gift which God puts in the heart of the wanderer, the soul would never return to Him. The gift
of repentance is just as truly divine and a token of God's favor as the gift of the Holy Ghost. It takes grace to
acknowledge our faults, to turn against ourselves, and to show ourselves no quarter (Rom 2:4).
Get Right With God
Another remedy is a fixed determination to get right with God and with our fellows at any cost! We are
going to the judgment day, and we need to have a judgment-day righteousness in our souls here. This
determination to get right may involve only an apology to a little child, or a friend, or the confession of a
mistake; it may involve great restitution; it may involve a loss of wealth, and what the world calls honor and
reputation; it may involve the loss of friends; it may involve abject poverty, going to prison, or banishment.
It may involve sufferings which may tear the heart into a thousand tatters, and melt the eye with grief; but
if it involves everything the imagination can conceive, the loss and pain themselves are infinitely better than to
have the frown of God and the flames of hell!
God alone knows who really love Him; He alone can judge His creatures. When the soul seeks nothing in
the universe but the smile of God and fears nothing in the universe but offending Him, it will gladly consent to
pay any price to get perfectly right with Him!
Look to the Lord for Consolation
Next to this fixed determination to get right is the steady, constant looking to Jesus alone for all
deliverance and comfort.
The soul never knows in how many ways it leans on creatures for comfort, until it is so situated as to be
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