Revelation 3:14-17
Those who God loves, he disciplines through truth in love by giving us an honest picture of our lives. As we continue this series on the churches we see that in everything God says He is longing for intimacy with us. With the church of Laodicea He does commend them for their works but because they were a church that worked hard yet has chosen to be lukewarm, He ultimately rebukes them the most. God addresses the attitude in which they had succumbed to living their lives and implores them to become either hot or cold. Christianity is an all in the way of being, you cannot be halfway in and halfway out and please God. Those that please God through lip service have to have a change in their heart service eventually. The problem with being lukewarm is that God is not lukewarm, He is either healing like the fire or refreshing like a cool spring and that He how He longs for us to be.
Here are some ways we can slip into lukewarmness:
1) By becoming disconnected from community we become apathetic and indifferent to people around us
2) By getting overwhelmed or burned we’re either too far ahead or too far behind God.
3) By becoming complacent, we’ve allowed ourselves to become comfortable in life and nothing affects us
Becoming lukewarm takes time, it happens over years if we keep going through the motions we end up neglected and dying. All we have been called to do is to tell the world of Jesus and if we can’t do that, there really is no point in us playing the motions of church. We can have joy in the middle of difficult situations if we tune our minds to the words Heaven is speaking over us. Let the Lord redefine us and prune us so that we can become a church that is more zealous about protecting the gospel than protecting culture!
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