Only a pure and simple faith will survive and prosper in the coming days. A faith encumbered by anything other than a devotion to Jesus Christ will stall and leave us stranded on a road of despair.

Recently, I saw an interview with a “prepper.” He was preparing to survive the anticipated social disorder by ensuring the basics of life are in place like food, water, shelter, and security. He was living a very simple and sustainable life. To many who are blind to the realities of life and repeated cycles of human history and think their bank and local supermarket will always be open for business, he would appear to be a kook. Those who see where the future is moving, and when that future finally arrives, the prepper will be labeled as wise and prepared.

During the interview, the prepper spoke about natural disasters. He addressed earthquakes that will bring down bridges and overpasses and shut down the electrical power grid that powers the local gas pump. A vehicle, no matter how tactically cool-looking it appears on a calm pre-earthquake day, will not be able to traverse impassible rubble-filled streets. If someone was away from their stored supply of fuel, their bug-out vehicle will become another hunk of abandoned debris blocking what little navigable road remains. The prepper’s suggestion was to buy a mountain bike. It will not require gas or a cleared road to travel. It will work in all but the direst of situations.

If our faith was reduced to the basics of survival, what would it look like? Does it require a building, a crowd, a particular leader, or money to sustain its survival? Can it maneuver through the debris of life like divorce, betrayal, or death and still make it to a place where we can live and prosper when life as we knew it has been shaken beyond imagination?

Paul addressed a mountain bike kind of faith that keeps us mobile and spiritually alive in times of crisis. “I fear that somehow your pure and undivided devotion to Christ will be corrupted, just as Eve was deceived by the cunning ways of the serpent” (II Corinthians 11:3). Paul warned of a divided faith that has been encumbered by additions of things that don’t matter or lies that will corrupt a simple faith focused solely on Jesus and nothing else.

The Corinthians were so accommodating to the surrounding culture they were in danger of losing their pure and undivided devotion to Jesus. “You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different kind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed” (vs. 4).

To prepare our faith for what is to come and be able to navigate through the rubble of social disorder and religious error, we cannot make room for a different Jesus, another path of salvation, or the spirit of the age that empowers deceptions of all kinds, especially the ones that don’t ruffle feathers.

A lifestyle void of spiritual prepping that accepts a “faith” that waters down the supremacy of Jesus Christ, follows a different spirit, and a humanist gospel will look and sound appealing in the calm before the storm but in the end, it will leave us stranded on the impassible roads of life. We will become stranded and vulnerable because we allowed our faith to be led astray by something other than a pure and simple devotion to Christ.