Are We Lukewarm?
POSTED Feb 14, 09:43 AM
Are We Lukewarm?
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either one or the other! So because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16)
Can you imagine what the world would be like if we and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ gave ourselves fully to the work of the Lord. If we all placed the Lord first in our lives and our neighbors second (this includes of course our families). As the apostle Paul wrote in a letter to the church of Corinth “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm, let nothing move you Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” There would be nothing that the church could not accomplish. We would reach the lost with the Gospel, feed the poor, care for the widow, and most importantly, do the will of God. We would, as Christ commanded Peter, feed and care for his sheep.
When Jesus spoke of the widow’s offering in the book of Mark, he set the example of giving. She gave it all and held nothing back. What could we not accomplish if we did the same? How can we live a life of plenty when so many of our fellow believers are living a life of need?
I am not talking solely about our money. How strange is it that we measure our giving to the Lord on how much money finds its way into the offering plate. We measure our commitment to the Lord the same way that we measure our success on earth. It is almost hypocritical. Jesus stated in the temple, concerning taxes, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to the Lord what is the Lord’s. So this raises the question, What is the Lord’s? Is it just our money? Or do we belong to the Lord? Is our life the Lord’s? If we truly give ourselves wholly to the Lord, the Lord gets it all and we will see a time when we can longer differentiate between where we end and the Lord, who lives in us, begins. The world will see the light shining from within us. The world will see Jesus in us.
We have chosen, or some could say that we have been forced, to live in a box that has been molded and structured in accordance with the standards of the world. We worship the Lord from within that box. We measure our commitment to the Lord from within that box. We measure our success and the success of our churches from within that box. We measure our giving from within that box. We measure our fruit of the Spirit from within that box. We somehow have to find a way to break out of the box, and truly analyze what “Giving ourselves to the Lord really means. We need to be willing to stand up like Isaiah and say “Here I am send me”; we must heed the words of Christ, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”; and, as John so plainly stated “whoever claims to be in Him must walk as Jesus did”. We all need to stop saying to ourselves “How can I best serve the Lord from within the confines and standards of the world?” And begin asking, “How can I live in this world while maintaining my complete submission and service to the Lord?”
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