At Braden or Blake’s practices you will hear at least one coach telling the batter to “Follow through.” This means that the batter needs to continue his swing and not stop in the middle of the swing. Go all the way through to the other side with the swing is what is meant. A half-hearted effort results in a bad hit or even a total miss. God’s people in the Old Testament were told to go through the land of Canaan and wipe out its inhabitants. They were to kill all the inhabitants and to tear down their idols and destroy them. We know this did not completely take place – they did not follow through.
Sadly, many of God’s people today fail to follow through when it comes to living the Christian life. There are some terrible consequences that can happen as a result. One is, we may be worse off in the end than we were in the beginning. It happened to Israel. They failed to wipe out the Canaanites and Israel became more wicked than the inhabitants were. As a result, Jerusalem was eventually wiped out (2 Kings 25:8-10). “To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (James 4:17). Paul tells us that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Failing to follow through in the Christian life results in spiritual death.
Another consequence of not following through is that we will get stuck in a rut of living. It happened to Israel. They sinned, they got punished, they cried out and God saved them. Over and over in the Old Testament this took place, until, eventually, God could no longer save them because they were so far gone. Their problem was that they got accustomed to things as they were. We do this today. We see sin around us and are influenced by it and, eventually, we give in if we don’t follow through with the Christian life. We get complacent in this world and stop thinking of the world to come. Failing to follow through leaves God’s work undone and we stay in the rut of doing little or nothing for the cause of Christ.
People will die. In the end, many Israelites were killed (2 Chronicles 36:14-17). If they had just followed through with God’s commands they could have had an amazing life with God. How many people around us are going to lose their souls because we don’t follow through with the Christian life? You may be a person’s only hope of hearing the gospel. If we don’t meet that person’s need of hearing the gospel and seeing the gospel lived out in our lives, they will die. However, we will as well.
Are you following through in the Christian life?