Escape the Laodicean Church — Andrew Strom

The Laodicean Church and Western Comfort

All right, please turn with me to Revelation chapter three. Yes, we're going to begin by speaking about the Laodicean Church tonight. You know, it struck me for some time that this is the greatest danger in the West, by far, is that we live in such a comfortable environment.

We really live in a lukewarm environment such as never existed before in history. There's always been rich people, but for very few years, has there ever been a wealthy middle class in the world? Probably happened only in the last hundred years.

And we have a situation now where anybody in our countries, you know, I come from New Zealand and I've lived in Canada, UK, United States, and so on. And you know, you go worldwide and it's very clear that we're probably the most comfortable generation in those Western countries that has ever existed in history, the most comfortable generation.

And the reason that worries me is because I've also been to the third world countries and there is such a difference in the level of hunger of the Christians. Because we're so comfortable, the natural thing for us to do is to relax, including spiritually, just sort of becoming part of the culture that's around us.

And it concerns me desperately because this can invade us in such ways that we don't even notice it's happening. So I wanted to start with the scripture tonight. Revelation 3 .14 says, to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write, these things says the amen, the faithful and true witness the beginning of the creation of God.

So it's Jesus speaking. He says, I know your works that you are neither cold nor hot. I would that you are cold or hot so that because you're lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.

Now, isn't that the most drastic thing you can imagine being said to the church or to a church? I think we're in this modern day, the epitome of lukewarm. You know, I've been to Africa in situations where you're out in the back blocks, preaching to people in the open air.

There's hardly any Christians. There's far more idol worshipers in the audience than Christians. You're down below is a whole town made of what we would think of as tin shacks. And no Australian or New Zealander in their right mind would live there.

But the entire, everybody lives in one of those. And the astounding thing to me is that every night the crowds grow bigger of people sometimes walking five or more miles to come and hear the preacher rebuke the idols and say, you must repent and turn to the only one true God.

And you would think that people would shrink back from that because you're touching on something that is very personal to them, the idols that they worship in that area. And yet the crowds would grow and grow every night.

And I compare that sadly with often when I'm in the West and if I start preaching repentance and conviction of sin and things that are liable to make anyone uncomfortable, the crowds are likely to shrink and shrink.

And it really concerns me so greatly because I feel that when we are, in a sense, we're treating Jesus this way. You know what I mean? In a sense, when we treat the word of God this way or when we treat perhaps a message or a convicting message, I mean, Jesus preached uncomfortably every day.

We don't realize, we think he's a nice guy that went around saying lovely things. He didn't, you know, after his first sermon it says, they took him to a cliff and went to throw him over. You don't get thrown off cliffs for preaching things that make your audience happy.

You get thrown off cliffs for things that make the audience unhappy, amen? I don't know if you've been threatened with cliff throwing lately from what you've been preaching. You know, Stephen, what does it say about Stephen once he preached his sermon in the book of Acts?

It says, they ran at him, gnashing at him with their teeth. They picked up rocks. They threw the rocks at him until he was dead. Stephen was the first martyr in the church. You say, well, preaching like that, such as we don't ever hear, or if we do, we run a thousand miles in the other direction in the modern world, why?

Because we live in a marketing culture. Because for the last 50 or 60 years, we've conducted a giant experiment on ourselves and the experiment goes like this. I wonder if we can sit under a deluge of advertising and entertainment and ear-tickling and flattery and nonsense, you know, beamed into every home every day.

The average American household, for instance, watches four hours of television every single day. So you think of that over a lifetime, you're just talking probably years of sitting in front of a box. Now, you know, sitting in front of a box is neither here nor there except for the fact of it's obviously influencing us.

It's obviously influencing us. Why? Because I don't think there's ever been a collapse of the morality and just simple lifestyle of any people than what we've gone through in the last 50 years. I think it's unprecedented.

Our life is unprecedented. The ease with which we live, the comfort that we live in is unprecedented. Our shiny cars and beautiful houses and everything we have mostly has never, ever happened in history before except to princes and kings.

You know, again, in Africa, you go into a village somewhere and you find out what they call a king. You know, they'll say, oh, we're gonna take you to the king of the village. So, you know, yeah, okay, well, let's go see the king of the village, no problem.

So you boil up to this guy's place and it's not as nice as most of us live in right now, but he's a king over there because everybody else is living in a tin shack and his thing's made of, you know, whatever.

And it's bigger than all the rest. And I tell you, we don't realize how close to this absolute Laodicean state that we're in. So what is the warning that Jesus gives to Laodicean church? It's unlike any warning given to any people by Jesus.

He's saying, because you are neither cold nor hot, you're not freezing cold down there, you're not way up hot, fervent, and really, you know, laying down your life. You're somewhere in the middle and he says, because you're neither cold nor hot, I'm about to spew you, or God is about to spew you out of his mouth.

Pretty serious stuff. Okay, and then what does he say? Verse 17 says this, because you say, I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing, and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

So you notice this enormous disparity between what the lukewarm people think of themselves as a church. I mean, they may well be thinking to themselves, you know, our worship team in the modern day, you think of this kind of conversation happening in people's minds.

Our worship team is so good lately. You know, the sound system that they bought last year, my goodness, it's just wonderful that, you know, the Christian bookshops that we have, you know, in every city and the things that we can get, the DVDs we can buy, all of the teaching materials from around the world.

We must be just the most blessed church in history. Seriously, we're rich, we're increased with goods, even of the spiritual kind, rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing. And what is Jesus saying about the very same people?

He's saying, you're wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Think about that. Think of the disparity between those two things. And I'll tell you the most serious one of those, in my opinion, and that is the blindness.

Because you can be utterly lukewarm and all around you can be lukewarm. And so you look at them and you say, I guess I'm doing okay. And you look at it and even if, you know, even if you look hard at the situation because the blindness is upon you, you're never gonna see it.

The most serious problem that the lukewarm people have is that they're blind. So nothing's gonna get through to be able to show them, hey, things are not really rosy. In fact, they're desperately bad.

Spiritual Hunger and the Sermon on the Mount

Because what is Jesus searching for in the hearts of every people that he wants to reach? I tell you, it's in the Sermon on the Mount. It's when he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, they shall be filled.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God. So we're looking at a situation where I go over there and the thing I'm feeling in these people, these desperately poor people who have no education, some of them probably cannot read a word of the Scriptures and yet they'll come out to these meetings way in the far distance, they'll walk for miles.

Why are they doing this? Because they're hungry. That's why they're doing it. You know, hunger makes all the difference and I mean every ounce of difference. If you lose hunger out of your culture, out of your church culture, even out of the surrounding civilization that you live in, you're in terrible trouble with God because you're unlikely to ever get out of where you're at.

Hunger is the thing that drives you closer to Jesus, drives you into making those incredible self-sacrifice decisions that only hungry people ever make. Hunger is the most important thing. That's why in the Sermon on the Mount, it almost takes prominence of place with Christ.

Prominence of place. We had better find hunger or if we have had it or if we have it, not to lose it. And yet how can that possibly be done because we're living in a culture that thrives on lukewarmness, that thrives on being comfortable and entertaining yourself to death, you know, and just living for the sports shows and the, you know, whatever absolute nonsense is coming over.

You know, I'm a New Zealander, so I used to follow rugby before I went to America. When I was in America for four years, I suddenly realized there's hardly one person, there might be one and a half people in America that care about the All Blacks, you know.

One and a half people. And I came to the conclusion, do you know, this is a complete waste of my time. I'm not gonna care anymore. And when I got back to New Zealand, it's kind of like, I'll end up watching the odd game if somebody, you know, sticks it on in front of my face, you know, what are we doing?

What are we living our lives for? What do we care about? What's our hunger after? What are we doing with our lives? You see, these African people, because they have nothing, and I mean they really have nothing, they have everything to hunger after, because we have everything laid on, because we can all go and hop in a vehicle and drive down the road and find food somewhere, and we have supermarkets just laden with goods.

I was so shocked when I was first taken into what they called a supermarket in Africa, because basically, in New Zealand, it would be what we call a dairy, or I think what you guys call a milk bar over here, but I'm not sure about that.

So, they take me into this kind of small shop, and I said, see, we've got supermarkets here. To be in this culture that we're living in, we are the most at risk of becoming the Laodicean church without even knowing it's happened.

We are incredibly at risk. So, I would come back from Africa, and I've been over there maybe five or six times, and I would come back from Africa, and every time, I would come home or come to whatever Western country I was living in or whatever, and I would go.

I was thinking to myself, I wonder if anyone is gonna be saved from one of our countries. That's how bad it was. Like, I wonder if anybody's gonna be saved, because all the hungers over there, all the hungers over there, it really worried me so much.

So, this blindness is part of the lukewarmness. I think it's the most deadly aspect of it because you can't look at yourself and see and go, oh, yes, we can see the lukewarmness. It becomes blurry before your eyes, and everywhere around you is lukewarmness, and the whole culture has turned into one massive, tepid pool of mediocrity as far as hunger goes, and so we look around ourselves and say, well, I must be doing all right, and I'm sure that's what these people did.

What does it say? Verse 18, Jesus is still speaking. He says, I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire that you may be rich, and white raiment, white garments that you may be clothed, and that the shame of your nakedness does not appear, and anoint your eyes with eye salve that you may see.

Rebuke, Repentance, and the True Gospel

Anoint your eyes with eye salve that you may see. As many as I love, he says, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent. Do you know how many preachers in the modern Western church are willing to issue a rebuke?

You know what Jesus just said here? He said, as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten, but in the modern church, do you know what? We can hardly find a rebuke anywhere. We cannot find chastening, though the modern church desperately needs it.

Why, because every preacher just about in the whole Western universe is wanting to tickle the ears and is worried about his offering. He's worried that if he preaches the real truth like Jesus did or like the apostles did, everybody's gonna stand up and go walking down the road to the next church and go, you know, they've got a better worship team down there anyway.

You know what I mean? It's a selfish, selfish culture that we've created, and the church has played into it because what's it all about? It's about marketing. It's about entertainment. It's not about the piercing word of the Lord, is it?

It stopped being about that a long time ago, and the few poor guys that are left that actually preach truth, those guys get no invitations to the big conferences. They don't get on Christian television.

Those guys are at the bottom of the barrel, scraping around down there. The guys that make all the money in the modern church and build big ministries, what are they mostly doing if you listen to them carefully?

I don't know if you've ever heard the guy Anthony Robbins or Tony Robbins. He's a motivational speaker. He's not a Christian, but I know him. He's a motivational speaker in the United States. He spends all his time uplifting people and encouraging them to go for their dreams and dream bigger and make it higher, and you know, praise God.

I don't mind the odd encouragement every now and again, but I want to tell you, the modern equivalent of that in the church is where you don't mention the cross. You don't ever mention sin. You think God was a teddy bear in the sky that exists only to bless and bless and bless, and you issue no rebuke, and I say that that kind of preaching does not love anybody enough to tell them that they're about to go off the cliff.

That's not love. Jesus just exercised love in some of the hardest words he says to any church. He says, as many as I love, I rebuke and I chase sin. In other words, what's he doing? He's laying down his life.

Every preacher that truly preaches truth, you know what they're doing? They're laying down their life. They're saying, you may get offended. You may feel pierced in the heart and jump up and go down to the church down the road, but I will lay down my life in order to speak truth to you, whether you abandon me or not.

Jesus was like that all the time, all the time. He had crowds of people that would follow him one day and hear him say something, and they literally turn on their heel and all walk away, muttering under their breath because of what he was saying.

So we live in a day where all the old preachers that we used to have in the 1970s and everything are all drying up and disappearing, and we can hardly find a rebuke in the land just when we most need it, and we can hardly find any chastening of the lukewarm church, even though this is the moment when it needs to be done the loudest, and it's been that way now for at least 20 years, and it's getting worse every year.

So if you want to build a big cathedral for yourself, if you want a big giant ministry, you learn in the modern age how to tickle people's ears, and if you're really good at it, you can build yourself a crowd, amen?

We see evidence for that everywhere, and if you really want to build it big, you get yourself the best worship team in town and the nicest sound system, and you entertain people so that they will come, and the message better be entertaining as well.

That's the modern church, and that's the way it's going. It's been heading that direction for quite some time. It's a church really built around self, not around the cross. What did Jesus say? What's the true gospel say?

Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, said Christ. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. We have, in the modern day, invented a gospel that has no cross at the center of it. Everybody wants to jump straight over to resurrection.

Don't go through the cross anymore. We're not gonna preach that thing because it's offensive. You will not be convicted of your sins in this church. That's virtually what we're saying, and do we get any real disciples?

I put it to you, probably not, unless it happens sovereignly by the power of God coming upon a person, because the preaching certainly won't get us into that place. Okay, as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.

Overcoming a Lukewarm Age

Be zealous, therefore, and repent. How do we survive spiritually in a lukewarm age? There's a verse down here that tells us. Verse 21 says, to him that overcomes will I grant to sit with me in my throne even as I also overcame, and I'll sit down with my father in his throne.

Overcoming. In a lukewarm age, just the same as, he's just had seven messages to seven churches here. In every case, he tells them what they must do or tells them that they must overcome. What's the thing that we have to overcome?

Living in an utterly lukewarm environment. Now, that is an incredible ask. Do you know, I think it's easier to have your spiritual fire stay alive in a persecuted environment than it is in a lukewarm environment.

I really believe that. Think of this for a second. There are prisoners in jail, and this happens continuously. There are prisoners in jail who become Christians while they're in there. They may be in there for five years, and the day comes when they're gonna get out, and while they're in prison, they're attending Bible studies, they're going to the prayer meeting.

For all the world, they look like they really are devoted Christians. The day comes when that clanging door opens and lets them out into this modern world of ours, and before you know it, they're gone.

They're back to their old life or sometimes even worse. You know, the drugs have come back and everything else, and you go, what happened? This world that we're living in is probably the most seductive spiritual environment in history.

We have invented for ourselves distractions that have never existed before. Have you ever tried to have, you know, a conversation with a thoroughly modern person? It's actually difficult now to even talk with people because they spend all their time looking at their phone and thumbing through it while you're talking to them.

It's kind of like, how distracted can we possibly get? We're connected all day, not to one another. I had someone telling me the other day about five teenagers who were all introduced. In the old days, those teenagers would have started talking to one another as they sat around the table.

Now what they do was everybody got out their phones and started flicking through it. I would say that behavior has ceased being human because we used to do a strange little thing called talking to one another, you know?

Talking to one another. Weird, I know. Strange, odd behavior. But the most spectacularly seductive toys and pastimes and distractions and every other thing, it's not that every one of them should be outlawed and we should make a set of rules.

Thou shalt not do this, this, this, and this. The whole point of it is this, is that if it's diminishing our hunger bit by bit, if it's entertaining us to death, if all it is is distracting us from the real things, you know, the mission that we have, the love of Jesus, the laying down of our lives to go and do and to love people and to do the things He said.

You know, if this is what's going on, can we even recognize it when it happens to us if we're so surrounded? So I tell you, overcoming that, overcoming. To Him that overcomes. At the end of this long passage, Jesus says that.

To Him that overcomes, He will sit with me in my throne just as I have sat down in the throne of the Father. Isn't that amazing? It's a promise from God of the reward. To Him that overcomes. It's getting worse in our countries.

Our countries are becoming secular, more secular every day. I came back to New Zealand after quite a few years away and I was just shocked. I felt like spiritually, all while I was away, year by year, something must have just been draining out of Christianity because I felt like so much of the fervor had gone.

Just in the space of, let's say, five or six years, it was so noticeable to me. I bet if somebody went away from Australia and came back and was a preacher and had gone around the churches in Australia, they could say the same thing.

Something is happening because of what we live in. It's affecting all of us more than we know. One of the saddest things you can do, or I guess eye-opening things, you know, you go to Africa and you notice that most of the teenagers you speak to haven't got that look in their eye of kind of bored, semi-arrogant indifference, which we find in the West wherever we look.

They look at you with respect. It's like they want to say, sir, can I help you with something? There's still that respect and that looking in their eyes and that, you know, it's almost completely gone when we go around here, when we go around our countries.

It's almost completely gone. There's the odd family that's raising their children that way, that's all. And that used to be across the board. It used to be, let's say, 40 years ago that our children were like that, that our teenagers looked that way, that they had respect for their elders, that they, you know, we think these are old-fashioned things.

I tell you, they're just part of normal culture all down the centuries. It's just that we've lost some of the very basics of our society, they're gone, and they're permanently gone. They're not coming back.

We're living in a world that's gonna become Sodom and Gomorrah, it's trying its best to become that as fast as it can. We are living in an age where things are in such decline, but because we're watching it happen on television, we are gradually becoming immune to it.

And so we don't know it's happening. But if I was to take you back 40 years and show you what was permissible on TV then and what's permissible on TV now, I tell you, you would be absolutely shocked. If I was to get someone from 1965 and bring them forward and say, this is what's on TV now, and our children stay up watching this, they would be so shocked, they're just about full on the ground, and I'm not talking about Christian people, I'm talking about your average person.

They would be so incredibly shocked. To us, it's become normal. We're living in something unprecedented. Do you realize that our culture is not gonna survive what it's become? You know that, eh? Yes. You know that our culture, that our civilization is dying, just like Rome was dying, except Rome took hundreds of years to die, and we're just taking decades.

Why? Because we're feeding ourselves stuff the Romans had no dreams of. We feed it, we drink it down like water in our modern culture. It's killing us. It's killing us. I believe over the next hundred years, Western civilization is going to bury itself in the ground.

It's following the example of Rome all the way down. So, lukewarmness. What are some of the practical things that we can do? What are some of the practical things that we can do? I don't know if you've ever noticed, going out on the streets and trying to talk to people has now become almost impossibly difficult.

Not because they won't ever hear you, but because there's such little interest. This is, you know, across all of our cultures, people are so busy going to and fro that they will not hear. They will not even stop and listen that long.

Serving Hungry People and Keeping Spiritual Fire

One of the things that I believe can keep us alive as a people is to start focusing outward. What have we got all around us in the local area here? We've got Papua New Guinea to the north. I think it's like a $250 plane flight to Papua New Guinea.

You've got Vanuatu, one of the poorest island nations in the world. You have the Solomon Islands. Vanuatu and Solomon Islands both have had major revivals 30 years ago. They are open to the gospel. They're hungry for the word of God.

If you want to go further afield, I get emails from Africa every day, or just about every day, asking me to go over there. You know, hundreds of these emails, I cannot even begin to think about answering.

There's a wide open field. They need teaching. They need sound basics taught to them. Do you know what happens to people that get involved with hungry people? I tell you, it rubs off on you and affects you, and your Christianity will maintain its fire.

If you allow yourself merely to just sit and be in the middle of a compromised generation, you have to beware, lest it also befall you, amen? So we have to become outward looking. We have to keep doing the works of God.

We have to be looking around for ways in which we lay down our life and say, God, send me, or God, do this through me. We have to keep our prayer life up. Doesn't matter what anybody else in the world is doing, anybody else in the neighborhood is doing, we keep our prayer life up.

We've got to keep close contact with God, because this thing here, this will eat us alive. It will have us for lunch if we let it. It's the most seductive environment on the planet in history. Nothing has ever existed like what we have now, nothing.

We have to realize it. Isn't it interesting that we're meeting here in a little old hall that probably was started by some people that loved Jesus, I dare say, 80 years ago or something like that. There's probably been all these great sermons preached in here over the years, and these things slowly fall into decay.

You know, I was in Wales. We held a couple of conferences. We lived in Wales for six months, and we held a couple of conferences where the Welsh revival started. 450 people can fit into this beautiful chapel, and there's only 18 people left, and they're all old.

They're like 70-plus years old, and when they die, I don't know what's going to happen to that place, because all the chapels in Wales are just getting sold off and used for apartments and so on. And out the back, there's the grave of Evan Roberts, one of the greatest revivalists that's ever lived.

And his grave is sitting there, and you can go and see the statue of Evan Roberts, and people say, wow, the Welsh revival. And you know, Wales is down to 7 church attendance. The place is like, it's like a nuclear bomb went off and wiped out the Christianity.

And you go, how did that happen? In the space of 100 years, you've gone from being the most on-fire revival country in the world, and now you're down to 7 church attendance, and you can hardly find anybody.

You find plenty of people that want to talk about their rugby team, you know, their rather somewhat lackluster rugby team. And there's hundreds of people that want to talk to you about that. You can't find hardly anybody that even knows, even living nearby.

We were like, living six miles away. The Welsh revival, oh, no, don't know. Maybe I've heard something about that. We're living in just unprecedented times. How can that happen? It happened by lukewarmness, that's how it happened.

It happened by compromises here and there. It happened with a comfortable life. It happened with taking notice just of the garbage that's fed to us over the tube every day, instead of taking notice of Jesus.

It's a slow thing. Do you remember the parable of the sower and the seed? You know, the thing that strikes me about it, of course, there's the seed that springs up quickly. There's the seed that Jesus talked about where it digs down deep and grows roots, you know.

And there's this other thing he talks about. He says it springs up, and then he says thorns come and strangle that plant. He said, what are the thorns? The cares of this life and the deceitfulness of riches.

It always struck me, what an interesting phrase. The cares of this life, or the cares of this world. The deceitfulness of riches, deceitfulness. And I always think, wow, that is so true. These things that we think often are blessings can be that thorn that sneaks up deceitfully behind our backs and we don't even know it's happening, and before we know it, we've gone into lukewarm mode and our downward track is like that.

The deceitfulness of riches, my goodness. Turn with me, please, to Matthew 25. Okay, Matthew chapter 25. This is the wise and foolish versions, which I'll talk about more than read it out because it's a whole passage there.

The Ten Virgins and Spiritual Readiness

But it begins by saying this. Then shall the kingdom of heaven be like unto 10 virgins which took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. So we've all heard this parable. Who is Jesus aiming this at?

Well, he's actually just been speaking a whole chapter on the last days. He's just spoken a whole chapter to his disciples, you know, Matthew 24, all about the last days, the time of the end, the end of the age.

What's gonna happen? In other passages, we find out that in the last days, they will be seducing spirits, that it will be a day of deception when, you know, such or the deception that it could even grab hold of the very elect, deceive the very elect.

Can you think about that? Imagine living in days. You know what the very elect means? You know, that's a rare phrase. It's not often spoken, even by Jesus. Didn't say, didn't use that term very often.

He's saying the very elect of God, those who are known by God from the foundation of the world, those who are known in advance by Jesus, the very elect of God, those chosen from the foundation of the world, and he's saying, if possible, it would even deceive them.

This is what the environment is in the last days. Now, it's not just a type of deception. You know, I've spoken against various deceptions in the church, but there's a broad general deception that's kind of, I would term it, the rise of self, the rise of self and the desire for just materialism and affluence and comfort is a kind of self-deception which will be so massively widespread, and already is, and it deceives us.

So here, he's saying, at the end of that, and talking about all that, he starts telling parables to his disciples to beware, to pass this warning on. Why? Because the 10 virgins, five wise and five foolish, are all believers.

Every one of them is a believer. They are all virgins waiting for the bridegroom to come, so they expect to be in the wedding. Amen? There's not one of them that doesn't expect that they belong there.

This is even more frightening, in my opinion. Why? Because we're about to lose 50 of them. They're gonna go. They go for only one reason. Their oil is in short supply. They have to go and get some more while they're going to get the oil, which usually, in Scripture, represents the Holy Spirit, and I would say, particularly, the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

So they're off to get the oil. While they're away, the bridegroom comes. He says, come in with me. The wedding feast is going to begin. The door is slammed shut as he goes in. The five foolish come back.

They say, let us in. They're fully expecting. Surely, we belong in there. We, too, have been waiting for the bridegroom. We, too, are part of this company. We only went away for a short time because we were lacking in this, but we're back.

Jesus says to them, I do not even know who you are. I don't know who you are. It says, then they went away into wailing and gnashing of teeth, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth. Why? Because they knew they were supposed to be in there.

We just lose 50 of these people, bang, they're gone. You see, Jesus is returning, it says, for a bride that is without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. How is he going to get a bride like that? Through suffering, through obedience, through the laying down of our life, through our hearts washing, through wearing the white garments.

He spoke one time, a parable, about the man who arrives in the wedding feast and he hasn't got the white garments on. He said, how did you get in here without the garments? He says, bite at hand and foot and throw them out into outer darkness.

They'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth. You know, I'm telling you, this is serious stuff. We're not talking about small things here. I don't like the sound of it when it says that the lukewarm will be spewed out of the mouth of God.

It sounds bad to me. I don't know about you. It sounds bad to me. I don't want to find that on judgment day when Christ is in holiness and judgment mode and that is all that he's in. People will be coming up to Jesus as though saying, oh, Jesus, can I sit on your lap?