The Hebrews had drifted into a lackadaisical way of life. Their faith and perseverance were breaking down. Their general attitude and character were deteriorating right along with their loss of faith. This neglectful deterioration occurs when people permit themselves to be drawn back. It is easy just to drift along with the ever-present pressures of this world. These pressures will neither lessen nor go away. The people had regressed so far that they were on track to apostatize. Some of the Hebrews were not missing just an occasional Sabbath service but had abandoned attending Sabbath services entirely for extended periods if not altogether. The neglect of privileges and responsibilities was allowing salvation to slip away. The people were allowing the world to get them down. They were succumbing to a resignation. They were not busy confirming their souls. They had become insipidly blasé about what God has done for them and had ignored the help that God makes so readily available to them. The specific sin of apostasy from the faith they once knew and professed is a state brought on by many individual attitudes and sins. By the time a person reaches the apostate stage in the backward slide the sinner is deliberately even eagerly determined to abandon Christ to turn away from God and the way. The person sins automatically as there is none of God's Spirit left to constrain the person. The conscience is totally defiled. The person has forsaken God.

The Ephesian church had a tendency to become lax. They drifted with the tide, and this made them an easy target for false teachers. Their devotion to God's ways left a lot to be desired at certain times. They were far too tolerant of divergent beliefs and practices. Jude had to make his point rather bluntly because the people were too tolerant of untruth. They had started to get lax and had allowed the false teachers and the false teachings in. Mercy was needed because they had started to get lax.

People were slipping from a former higher level of commitment and growing increasingly careless and lackadaisical. Their problem did not involve sin in its most obvious sense but rather wrong attitudes that produced a lack of earlier enthusiasm or devotion to godly responsibilities. This change of faith led to a neglect of the message received. Neglect means to disregard, to fail to care for, to be remiss, to overlook, to ignore, to be inattentive, and to let slide by. It indicates disrespect, disdain, carelessness, indifference, laziness, shortsightedness, and forgetfulness. These attitudes show up in a failure to value the message as highly as other things that receive time and energy instead. The neglect was caused by a misunderstanding and a waning of faith that produced a lax, neglectful, and careless lifestyle. People were growing evermore careless in the way that they were living. The reason for the neglect and the dullness of hearing was spiritual laziness that manifested as sluggishness. People were behaving like little children with an undisciplined and short attention span rather than disciplining themselves to attend to serious spiritual responsibility. This pattern of neglect, failure to listen properly, and immature laziness led toward deliberate and willful sin.

Solomon's downfall began with laxity toward being careful about keeping God's commands regarding idolatry. Laxity is the first stage of lawlessness. The more lax Solomon became, the more double-minded he became. A double minded person loses his grip. Solomon gradually came to the place where he was not really hanging onto anything, but he was straddling between choices, gradually becoming more and more unstable, unsettled, and even deceitful until he became completely reintegrated into the world. He began to be moved almost entirely by human nature once again.

The Sardians were lax, careless, overconfident, inattentive, and totally unprepared. The church in Sardis reflected the unhealthy and careless habit that the citizens about them had picked up from the world, and it undermined their spiritual health. The religion of the Sardians went by the rules of do not provoke anything because that would disrupt trade and their very peaceful and settled life. They were willing to live and let live, to borrow from here and borrow from there and just get along because that was good for business and good for wealth. These attitudes put together made Christians make accommodations for their environment and made them unwilling to give any offense by what their God tells them to do. There was very little zeal there in the church in Sardis. The Christian fire was on pilot light and it was flickering in many of them. The Sardis church was a long way from being eager to serve one another and from being eager to remain unspotted from the world. They did not want to stand out. They were inert, comatose, catatonic, and showing no signs of life. They were in stasis and they needed to be revived if they were going to do anything profitable. In effect, they were treating the church like a social club in which there were no requirements for continued membership. Their works were done without faith, without love, and certainly without zeal. They were absent of the life or the Spirit of God. There was nothing in them. They were a sham and were being done just for the sake of doing them. They were doing their works for all the wrong reasons. Their works were either incomplete or immature. They were being done because the preacher says that these works should be done, or Jesus said in such and such a place that they should do them. But there was nothing from them in them. There was no oomph in them, no spirituality, and no growth in them. They were not paying the price. They were not sacrificing anything. They were certainly not putting themselves into these works to any great effect. They were not going on to perfection. Their works were simple things that they would know from the very beginning of their conversion that they should do. But there was no spirituality in them. They were on life support. There was still a chance that they could recover, but it would not be easy. They had to become watchful, alert, vigilant, and aware of their own spiritual condition. They had to get on a strict regimen of spiritual strength training. They needed to reinforce and upgrade their relationship with Christ and love for each other first of all. By this point, they were dealing with the barest, the bare minimum of spiritual activity. So they would have to go back to the very basic things and rebuild from there. Christ urges them to repent of their laxity, their lip service, their lack of Christian witness to the world, and then truly obey His commands and observe His way in their lives. They could no longer be Christians in name only. They had to be Christians in deed. They had to live it. Their problems are not something they can delay in fixing. Procrastination and delay are spiritual killers because if they have a tendency to do that they are going to keep on having a tendency to do that, and they will just put it off and put it off, thinking they are okay. They cannot dare risk to do just the bare minimum. They cannot risk just getting by.