City Life Starter

The Word

15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. –Revelation 3:15-17

Reflection Questions

What do you think it means to be tolerant?
How does your definition of tolerance involve God?
Do you think it’s ok to be intolerant of certain things? If so, how do you gauge what makes something tolerable or intolerable?

By Aisha Darwesh

On Sunday, Pastor Chris gave us a great view of how the idea of tolerance has morphed in modern culture. In discussing the intricacies of tolerance, I was kind of curious to dig in the scriptures to find out what sort of things God is intolerant of in order to understand this idea better.

Interestingly enough, the scripture in Revelation 3 came up: “So because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” I don’t mean to be crude, but that word for “spit” in the scripture is eméō in the Greek, which literally means to vomit (or to be repulsed, showing utter rejection, desiring total separation, or “to reject with extreme disgust”).

Think of it this way: in the same way that people can have a lactose intolerance and be sick to their stomachs if they consume milk, cheese, or other dairy products, God has a “lukewarmness intolerance.” From the scripture in Revelation, we see that God cannot enjoy fellowship with someone who is lukewarm.

This begs the question: what does it mean to be lukewarm? Jesus gives us some hints in his interaction with the Pharisees. When it came to the Pharisees, it is clear Jesus could not tolerate their hypocrisy and soul-killing legalism.

Before I knew the Lord in a personal way, I always used to wonder how come Jesus pointed out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, but didn’t condemn the sinful people He interacted with also. That was before I understood Jesus’ purpose for coming to the world: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:17).

Allow me to illustrate lukewarmness with an example. Imagine an old, dilapidated neighborhood–rows and rows of homes that are falling apart. These houses have foundation problems, the wood is rotten through and all of these homes are about to be condemned. However, before that time comes, a Master Builder enters the scene and decides He’s going to rebuild each one of these homes, lay down a new foundation, and fix up the houses from the ground up.

This is great news, except that when He gets to some of the homes in the neighborhood, He sees that they have a thick coat of white paint on them. The homes with white paint on them are dilapidated and need rebuilding also, but since they have an outer layer of paint to disguise their rotten wood and brokenness on the inside, no one thinks the Master Builder needs to do anything with them.

That’s what the Pharisees were like–dilapidated homes with thick white paint to disguise their brokenness. Jesus likened the Pharisees to “white-washed tombs.”

“26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matthew 23:26-28).
The Pharisees were lukewarm because they had created their own way of being righteous that was actually abhorrent to God. Instead of recognizing their need for a Savior and allowing Him to establish their righteousness on the right foundation, they relied on a flimsy set of rules and traditions they could keep in order to be righteous. Because they were considered the social and religious elite in the Jewish culture, no one questioned their righteousness–until the True Righteousness, our Lord Jesus Christ entered the scene.
Jesus did a lot of things that didn’t sit well with the Pharisees. He broke a lot of their man-made rules, without once breaking the God-given law. For example, He made mud on the Sabbath to heal a blind man. The Pharisees considered making mud to be work and doing so on the Sabbath was against their list of rules.
In breaking the norms the Pharisees were accustomed to, Jesus was essentially peeling back the layers of “white paint” the Pharisees relied on to mask their need for a Savior. I don’t think that Jesus was deliberately trying to ruffle their feathers. He was trying to expose their need for a Savior because He wanted to save the Pharisees as well.
There are a lot of modern-day Pharisees the Lord wants to save. These are people who have basically created their own morals to live by. This moralism is a lot like lukewarmness because it disguises itself as warm and inviting but is really ice cold and has no power to save. Pastor Chris alluded to this in Sunday’s sermon when he mentioned that some who masquerade themselves as “tolerant” are really the most intolerant people of all. This is illustrated perfectly in the story we talked about in the book of Acts in which the people were shouting at the top of their lungs for two hours, lest a word of truth be heard (Acts 19:34).
God doesn’t want us to be riddled with confusion or to put our trust in a faulty belief system that excludes Him. He wants to set us on fire and to help us live in grace and truth. In order for that to happen, we may have to go against the ideology and so-called morals of modern-day culture.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank You for saving me from my own wretchedness. I would be totally lost without You. Help me to become a better listener, so I can speak Your truth. I trust You to equip me with the right response in every situation. Holy Spirit, guide me into all truth. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.