Pastor Andy Webb posted this on facebook and I thought it was awesome. Piercing it is.
MARKS OF RELIGIOUS DECLENSION
American Tract Society (vol.10 #353)
1 . When you are reluctant to religious conversation, and the company of serious, heavenly-minded Christians, and enjoy yourself best with men of the world.
2. When, from preference, you are absent from meetings for prayer, confine yourself to Sabbath meetings, are easily detained from them, and are ready to excuse such neglects.
3. When you are afraid to consider certain duties seriously, lest your conscience rebuke past neglect, and insist on fidelity now,
4. When it is more your object, in doing duty, to pacify conscience, than to honor Christ, obtain spiritual profit, or do good to others.
5. When you have an over-critical spirit respecting preaching ; are dissatisfied with the manner, as inelegant, too plain, too intellectual, or not according to some favorite model ; or with the matter, as too doctrinal, or too preceptive ; or when you complain of it as too close, or are suspicious of personality.
6. When you are more afraid of being accounted strict, than of sinning against Christ by negligence in practice, and unfaithfulness " to your Lord and Master."
7. When you have little fear of temptation, and can trifle with spiritual danger.
8. When you thirst for the complacency of men of the world, and are more anxious to know what they think or say of you, than whether you honor the Saviour in their sight.
9. When scandals to religion are more the subject of your censure, than of your secret grieving and prayer before God, and faithful endeavors for their removal.
10. When you are more afraid to encounter the scorn of an offending man, by rebuking sin, than of offending God by silence.
11. When you are more bent on being rich than holy.
12. When you cannot receive deserved reproof for faults, are unwilling to confess them, and justify yourself.
13. When you are impatient and unforbearing towards the frailties, misjudgments, and faults of others.
14. When your reading of the Bible is formal, hasty, lesson-wise, or merely intellectual, and unattended with self-application ; or when you read almost any other book with more interest than the book of God.
15. When you have more religion abroad than at home; are apparently fervent when "seen of men," but languid when seen only in the family, or by God alone.
16. When your religious taste is more for the new things of men, than for the old things of the treasury of God's word.
17. When you call spiritual sloth and withdrawment from Christian activity by the names of prudence and peaceableness, while sinners are going to destruction, and the church suffering declension ; unmindful that prudence can be united with apostolic fidelity, and peaceableness with most anxious seeking of the salvation of souls.
18. When, because there is false zeal abroad, you will neither trust yourself, nor others, even in that "fervency in spirit, serving the Lord," which Paul taught and practised.
19. When you are secretly more gratified at the falls of some professor of religion, than grieved for the wounds he inflicts upon Christ.
20. When, under chastisement of Providence, you think more of your sufferings than your deserts, and look more for relief than purification from sin.
21. When you confess, but do not forsake besetting sin.
22. When you acknowledge, but still neglect duty.
23. When, under slight temptations, you step across the strict, straight lines of the divine law ; doing improper things on the Sabbath ; not being exactly just in business transactions ; swerving from strict veracity ; and do such things without much shrinking of conscience.
24. When your cheerfulness has more of the levity of the unregenerate, than of the holy joy of a Son of God.
25. When you live so little like a Christian, that you are embarrassed and ashamed in attempting religious duties.
26. When you say in yourself, of this or that sin, "Is it not a little one?" "the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing ;" and think so lightly of sins called small, that you are not disturbed respecting great ones ; when, also, you laugh at sins in others, instead of reproving them, and mourning before God.
27. When the habit of neglecting duty is plead as an excuse, instead of an aggravation, and a reason for penitence.
28. When you have so many worldly plans, and please yourself so much with success, that you are unwilling or afraid to think of death ; and in your daily manner of living say, " I would live here always."
29. When you think more of being saved by Christ, than of serving Christ ; more of security of heaven, than of deliverance from sin, saving dying men, and honoring God.
30. When you shut your eyes from self-examination, for fear of what you shall find in yourself to alarm you and shake your hope.
31. When you lean on the opinion of others that you are a Christian, instead of faithfully searching your heart and life, and comparing them with the "sure word."
32. When you speak more frequently of declension in the church, than in your own heart ; or talk of both more than you mourn and pray before God, and labor for a better state of things.
33. When the worldly spirit, savor, and cares of the week follow you farther into the Sabbath, than the spirit and savor of the Sabbath follow you into the week.
34. When you are easily induced to make your duty as a Christian bend to your worldly interest.
35. When you can be in frequent association with men of the world, without solicitude lest they do your soul hurt, or you do theirs no good, or both.
36. When, in your thoughts, reading, or conversation on religious subjects, your clearness of head, ingenuity, and justness of conclusions, outgo your spirituality, and heartiness, and love to Christ and his Gospel.
37. When your orthodoxy is the most or all there is which is right in you ; and when you contend more about its positions, than you strive for holiness.
38. When your zeal, instead of being "according to knowledge," is according to your pride and prejudice; and you are more occupied in censuring the coldness of others, than in affectionate endeavors to persuade them to do their duty, and quietly and humbly to do your own.
39. When your activity in religion depends upon the excitement of occasions, instead of being the fruit of steady, spiritual-minded, disinterested principle ; and when you take more delight in the bustle of outward and popular religious movements, than in secret communion with God, and in duties in which you are retired from the notice of men.
40. When you think more of " the mote in your brother's eye," than of the "beam in your own."
41. When you find it difficult to tell wherein you are essentially different, as to your state of heart and habits of life, from what you were before you professed to be a Christian.
Declining professor of religion, will you use these pages as a help to self-examination, that you may know yourself and your state. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked ; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." " Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain and are ready to die ; for I have not found thy works perfect before God."
