Prone to Wander

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek Your servant.

–Psalm 119:176

Why do those of us who love God so easily depart from Him? You’re probably familiar with the old hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” The third verse says, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”

Many Christians have sung that hymn for so long that I think we’ve become oblivious to the contradiction in those words. I don’t know about you, but I’m never prone to leave what I love. For example, I loved the television program 24. Every week, I would sit down to watch 24 and tune out everything else. If the house were on fire, I might have been motivated to get out of my chair, but that’s the only reason I would ever leave the television program I loved. I also love my wife and daughters. When my girls were young, I traveled quite a bit, and I certainly didn’t enjoy leaving the family I loved.

So if we say we love God, why are we prone to leave God? We profess that we love Him, yet we are prone to fall into immorality that destroys our relationship with God and with others. We are prone to go days, weeks, months, or even years without opening God’s Word. We are prone to follow destructive habits that derail our spiritual lives. We are prone to renounce everything we believe at the first hint of suffering for our faith. Why are we prone to wander away from God?

1. W. Tozer wrote, “Every farmer knows the hunger of the wilderness, that hunger which no modern farm machinery, no improved agricultural methods, can ever quite destroy. No matter how well prepared the soil, how well kept the fences, how carefully painted the buildings, let the owner neglect for a while his prized and valued acres and they will revert again to the wild and be swallowed up by the jungle or the wasteland. The bias of nature is toward the wilderness, never toward the fruitful field.” The same truth applies in our relationship with God. No matter how dramatic our conversion, no matter how sincere our intentions, no matter how saturated we are with biblical doctrine, the bias of life pulls us away from God. That’s the way things are. We are naturally pulled away from God.

This week, we’re going to study three reasons it’s natural–but not permissible–for Christians to wander away from God.

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Today’s devotion is adapted from “Coming Home to the Father Who Loves You” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2009.

Robert Robinson, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (1758), Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/come_thou_fount_of_every_blessing; A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous (Chicago: Moody, 2015), 121–22.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.