Revelation 3:15 , Revelation 3:19
I. Look at the loving rebuke of the faithful Witness: "Thou art neither cold nor hot." We are manifestly there in the region of emotion. The metaphor applies to feeling. We talk of warmth of feeling, ardour of affection, fervour of love, and the like; and the opposite, cold, expresses obviously the absence of any glow of a true, living emotion. So, then, the persons thus described are Christian people with very little, though a little, warmth of affection and glow of Christian love and consecration. (1) This defectiveness of Christian feeling is accompanied with a large amount of self-complacency. (2) This deficiency of warmth is worse than absolute zero. If you were cold, at absolute zero, there would be at least a possibility that when you were brought into contact with the warmth you might kindle. But you have been brought into contact with the warmth, and this is the effect.
II. Note some plain causes of this lukewarmness of spiritual life. (1) The cares of this world; the entire absorption of spirit in business. (2) The existence among us or around us of a certain widely diffused doubt as to the truths of Christianity is, illogically enough, a cause for diminished fervour on the part of the men that do not doubt them. That is foolish, and it is strange, but it is true. Beware of unreasonably yielding to the influence of prevailing unbelief. (3) Another cause is the increasing degree in which Christian men are occupied with secular things.
III. Note the loving call to Christian earnestness: "Be zealous therefore." The word "zealous" means literally boiling with heat. We must remember that zeal ought to be a consequence of knowledge, and that, seeing that we are reasonable creatures, intended to be guided by our understandings, it is an upsetting of the whole constitution of a man's nature if his heart works independently of his head; and the only way in which we can safely and wholesomely increase our zeal is by increasing our grasp of the truths which feed it.
IV. Observe the merciful call to a new beginning: "Repent." There must be a lowly consciousness of sin, a clear vision of past shortcomings and abhorrence of these, and joined to these a resolute act of heart and mind beginning a new course, a change of purpose and of the current of our being.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,April 8th, 1886.