What is a backslider and can they return to God?
Question 7060
The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown cold and whose obedience has broken down. The question of whether such a person can return to God is one of the most pastorally urgent questions a minister faces.
What Backsliding Actually Means
Backsliding is not primarily about dramatic moral failure, though that can certainly be part of it. At its root, it is a withdrawal from walking with God. The believer stops reading Scripture with genuine engagement, prayer becomes mechanical or disappears entirely, fellowship with other believers is avoided, and the convictions that once shaped daily life begin to be quietly set aside. It is, in the language of Revelation 2:4, leaving one’s first love: not as a sudden event but as a gradual cooling that the person often does not fully recognise until it is well advanced.
Scripture is frank about this possibility. The letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 are addressed to genuine congregations of genuine believers, and several of them have gone seriously wrong. Ephesus has left its first love. Sardis has a reputation for being alive but is in fact dead in practice. Laodicea is neither cold nor hot. These are warnings directed at real people in real churches, and they demonstrate that the Christian life is not automatically self-sustaining.
What the Bible Says Happens
When a believer backslides, they do not lose their salvation. The eternal security of the believer rests on God’s faithfulness, not on the believer’s consistent performance, and that security does not fluctuate with the condition of the believer’s walk. What does happen is deeply serious. Fellowship with God is broken, not the relationship itself. The warmth and assurance of knowing God go cold. The joy that is a mark of genuine Christian living evaporates. The ability to bear spiritual fruit withers. And Hebrews 12:5-11 adds something worth sitting with: God disciplines those He loves as a Father disciplines His children, and that discipline, though painful, is evidence of genuine sonship rather than abandonment.
Prolonged backsliding brings its own consequences. The person becomes more vulnerable to temptation, more entangled in the world, and less able to hear the Spirit’s voice. The longer the drift continues, the harder it becomes to return: not because God’s welcome has grown conditional, but because the backslider’s own heart has grown less responsive to the things that once moved it.
The Prodigal Son
Jesus’ parable in Luke 15:11-32 is the most searching portrayal of this whole dynamic in Scripture. The younger son takes everything his father has to give him, goes to a far country, squanders everything, and ends up feeding pigs in desperate hunger. He “came to himself” (Luke 15:17), which is precisely the moment of genuine spiritual turning, and he resolved to return. What follows is remarkable: while the son was still a great way off, his father saw him and ran. There was no hesitation, no condition attached, no probationary period. The robe, the ring, and the sandals were an immediate restoration of full standing.
The son never stopped being his father’s son. Even in the pig field, the relationship had not been severed, though the fellowship had been completely broken. His return did not reconstitute sonship; it restored the lived experience of it.
Can a Backslider Return?
The unambiguous answer from Scripture is yes. James 5:19-20 addresses this explicitly: “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” Galatians 6:1 instructs those who are spiritual to “restore him in a spirit of gentleness” when a brother is caught in a transgression.
The mechanism of return is equally clear. 1 John 1:9 states that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse. Confession is not complicated; it is honest acknowledgment before God. The Father is not waiting to exact humiliation but to restore fellowship, and the Holy Spirit, who indwells the believer throughout even the worst period of backsliding, continues to press toward that restoration.
What is not required is to be saved again. The person who has genuinely trusted Christ and then wandered does not need to repeat their conversion. They need honest confession, renewed surrender, and a return to the ordinary means of grace: Scripture, prayer, fellowship, and obedience. These are not the conditions for God’s renewed acceptance; His acceptance of His child is not in question. They are the conditions for the believer’s restored experience of fellowship, joy, and fruitfulness.
So, now what?
If you recognise yourself in this description, the appropriate response is not prolonged self-examination but immediate return. The door is open. The Father is watching. 1 John 1:9 is as true for the person who has wandered for years as it was on the first day they believed. And if you are walking alongside someone in this condition, James 5:20 gives you both the mandate and the encouragement: bring them back. That is not meddling. That is love.
“And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” Luke 15:20