Lukewarm and Loving It – Part Three

Many believers today are lukewarm in their Christian faith and how they are living their faith out in every day life. Yesterday we looked at “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” and the fact that this is not compatible with the Christian faith and simply does not challenge, grow, or develop our faith. Thus we are, in some ways, defective Christians who are not living a Bible-based lifestyle.

There is another reason why believers are lukewarm and neither hot or cold. To be blunt – we have a vast number of believers who have uncommitted hearts. Jesus commented on this Himself when He said, “These people honour Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me” (Matthew 15:8). Defective Christians would rewrite this and live by a different version of this verse. “Love the Lord your God with most of your heart and with some of your soul and with a bit of your mind.”

Imagine a football coach gathering his team and challenging them by saying, “Guys, we are going for the championship. This is our year! And let me tell you what it’s going to take – I’m going to need you to give … a 50 percent effort.

Or imagine a guy standing in front of his bride at the altar and saying, “I promise to honour you and cherish you. And I promise before God and these witnesses to be faithful to you pretty much some of the time.”

None of us would settle for this attitude in any other area of life, so it is amazing how we tolerate this spiritually. Many of us treat Jesus like He is simply another option – and we can choose to be strongly committed one day and not another day. Or, we can say “yes” to this aspect of life He spoke about but ignore Him and say “no” with regard to this other area of life. We are following Him at a distance. We are a fan or a follower. But, He demands that we be His disciples. There is a world of difference.

Churches are doing the same thing. They say, “Come to our service and it won’t cost you anything. We will keep it so short it’s almost like you weren’t even here. We won’t take an offering, because somebody might be ticked off that we believe in generosity. And we won’t ever teach anything calling for change or commitment. Please come, and we will water down our message so that no one could possible ever be offended, challenged, or changed.”

God doesn’t want you to settle for Him. God doesn’t want 10 percent of your life. He doesn’t want 50 percent. Not even 99 percent will do. He wants total commitment. He wants all of your life – all of you.

So, we can’t hold to the out form of our religion and deny the life-changing power of the Gospel (2 Timothy 3:5 and Romans 1:16).