“Dead, or Lukewarm?” – FBC Morning Light (12/4/2023)

Well, good Monday morning to you, heading into the first full week of December, last month of this year, and I hope your week is going to get off to a good start today.

I hope it gets off to a good start by hearing a few things from the Word of God today. In our

Scripture reading plan, we're reading Hosea chapters 13 and 14 and Revelation chapter 3.

We are nearing the end of our reading through the Bible for the year. By the way, in 2024, the

Bible reading plan is intended to be a chronological plan, so we'll be reading through the

Scriptures in a chronological way, rather than in the strictly,

I guess the way the chapters are given to us in Genesis 1 through 50 and so forth.

We'll read chronologically, which should be an interesting way of reading through the Bible. Today, I want to focus on the fifth and seventh letters to the churches in the book of Revelation, to the church at Sardis and to the church at Laodicea.

Just a few thoughts from each. The Lord confronts the church of Sardis with the problem of living off their reputation.

I think we all have the tendency, the proclivity of doing that.

We get excited about serving the Lord, we get involved, we get busy doing some service for the

Lord or getting faithful in our Bible reading devotions and so on and so forth.

But after a while, the excitement of it all wears off, the enthusiasm wears off.

Before you know it, we're just going through the motions, we're not really paying much attention to what we're doing.

We're kind of living off the reputation. We're thinking that we're alive and vibrant because we're still doing the stuff, but in reality it's just dead.

There's no life to it. There's a lot of ways of applying what the Lord says to the church at Sardis when he says in verse 2 of chapter 3,

I know your works, that you have a name, that you are alive, but you are dead. This is a whole church that's marked by a reputation, a known church, a church that at one time was very vibrant and had a great testimony and so forth, but now they're just living off of that past.

What was their reputation is no longer a reality. I want to challenge us to warn us against that, to be alert to the propensity that we have of just going through religious motions, maybe of just getting up and going to church on Sunday because it's the routine, it's what we do, but we're not really affected by it, we're not really changed by it, and yet we may think that because I go to church that I'm right with God and I have a vibrant faith and so on and so forth.

Let's be a little self -reflective about that. And then when you get to the last letter, the church at Laodicea, of course the

Lord says to this church, I know your works, you're neither hot nor cold, because you're lukewarm

I'm going to spew you out of my mouth. I've heard preaching on this that has said you need to be red hot for the

Lord and it's better even to be cold dead than to be lukewarm.

What the Lord is really saying here is that the church at Laodicea is just not useful to him.

If they were cold or hot, there'd be usefulness to them as a church.

In terms of water, hot water is great for making coffee, cold water is great for refreshing you on a hot summer day, but lukewarm water, not so much.

And especially in Laodicea. Laodicea was known for its tepid, mineral -tasting water that was just really kind of nasty.

It kind of reminds me of the town where I served in my first pastoral ministry.

The town, just a few years before we had moved there, was ordered by the

EPA to build a new water tower and dig a new well to pump up water for the city.

And when they did that, the water quality just tanked and it was nasty.

It was so nasty. I remember the first day, the first morning we were there, I got up to make coffee.

I couldn't even drink the coffee. You couldn't drink the water out of the tap. It was just nasty. Well that's what the water was like at Laodicea.

And the Lord was saying that the church there was like the water.

It was just tasteless, and not worse than tasteless.

It was nasty. And he said, I could just spew you out of my mouth. Why? Because the church had lost its usefulness.

And so the challenge for us is that we maintain our usefulness to the Lord by being committed to Him and serving

Him. The church of Laodicea, the Lord says, your problem is you don't see yourselves rightly. You think because you're rich, you're wealthy.

But you don't need anything. But you really do. You need me. And you need the

Spirit of God to enable you to serve me effectively and to be useful to me.

So the church has just become lackadaisical and lethargic, the people of the church thinking that they don't need anything, but they do desperately need something.

They need to see themselves in their true condition, and they need to see themselves as being utterly dependent upon the

Lord, and see their need to be useful to Him. And I think we have the same thing, the same needs in our lives, don't we?

We can, because we live in a relatively comfortable society and culture, we can think we're fine, we're comfortable.

But we're not. We need the Lord. We need the Spirit of God to fill us and to work in us, and to grow us, and to drive us to Christ.

We need to be dependent upon the Lord, we need to be dependent upon His Spirit. We need that, that we might be useful to Him in our work, in our homes, in our relationships with our neighbors in the community, in our churches.

We need to be dependent upon the Lord. But may we be useful to Him. May we shun lukewarmness, and may we shun, as in Sardis, the living off of our past reputation.

May God help us. Let's pray. Our Father and our God, we thank you for these challenges from the letters to the churches in Sardis and Laodicea.

May we see ourselves rightly, that we may repent where needed, and may serve you effectively.

And this we pray, in Jesus' name and for His sake, amen. All right, well listen,