Lukewarmness

In his testimony in CT magazine, Johnathan Bailey tells how he went from repeatedly “getting saved,” to eternal life in Christ.

Jonathan grew up as a pastor’s kid. His father pastored a nondenominational, charismatic church. He and his brother had BB gun shootouts in the vacant sanctuary and learned how to do donuts using the youth pastor’s car before he could legally drive. When he got older, he threw himself into the behind-the-scenes work of the youth group. Jonathan insisted on working the sound booth, because it allowed him to avoid worshiping and watch others worship instead. Jonathan writes:

As a teenager, I was pretty sure I believed God existed, but without firsthand experience of him, “Christianity,” went in one ear and out the other. I knew facts and Bible verses but there was my arch nemesis: the altar call. I had never experienced any long-lasting change after raising my hand and repeating a prayer, so over time, I came to loathe phrases such as “walk the aisle,” and “repeat after me.” Each attempt at getting saved seemed to take life rather than give it.

At the age of 22, he became a summer camp counselor along with one of his best friends. On the final night of camp, the sermon ended with an altar call. Jonathan saw his friend walk forward. But more shocking than that was the later evidence that something had really happened to him that night. His friend stopped drinking and partying, he began to read the Bible and Christian books voraciously, and attending church. He seemed to want to know God, be like him, and he had joy.

Jonathan says,

This was the opposite of what I had experienced growing up. The cycle usually went something like this: get saved in a burst of emotion, commit to Jesus for a few days or weeks, then let the devotion fade away.

But my friend grew month after month. His commitment and love for God were unwavering. The thought seized me: “Change is possible. It’s actually possible.” It gave me hope that Christianity could bring real change in my life.

One morning, an honest prayer began to spill out of me: “God, I don’t love you. But I want to.” Then one night everything changed. I was in a deep sleep, when suddenly my eyes opened. I was feeling confused about why I was awake at 5 a.m. I lay silently in the dark for a few seconds. Then I heard something in my mind, distinct and clear. It was like no other thought I had had. I heard these words: “Get up, pick up your Bible, and sit down at your desk.”

I got up and found my Bible, which had been collecting dust under a lamp on my nightstand. I picked a random spot. I looked down to see the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, verse 37. I read: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Like the destruction of a great dam, the flood waters of God’s love crashed into me. In that moment, my secondhand spirituality became firsthand. My knowing about God was replaced with knowing God, and like my friend’s experience, the change was permanent.

That doesn’t mean faith has been easy, but it has been the most thrilling adventure of my life. Battling habits of pride, anger, lust, and gluttony has become an adventure. Through the joy and the pain, Jesus has shared his eternal life with me, filling and freeing me.

Jeanne Pouchain knows she’s not dead. But she has to prove it in court. The 58-year-old French woman was declared dead by a court in 2017 during a decade long legal case. An employee Pouchain had fired years ago sued her for lost wages and told a court that Pouchain was dead after she stopped responding to the employee’s letters.

Without evidence, the French court accepted the allegation and levied a judgment against Pouchain’s estate. The court’s decision set off a chain reaction in France’s bureaucracy, which scrubbed her from official records and invalidated her identity cards and licenses.

Pouchain recently told The Guardian, “I have no identity papers, no health insurance, I cannot prove to the banks that I am alive … I’m nothing.” Pouchain’s attorney then presented an affidavit to the court from her doctor attesting to her continued existence. Her former employee says Pouchain had been pretending to be dead in order to avoid paying the court-mandated damages.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians can also appear to be dead if they let their spiritual life lapse. This is true in church membership (Rev. 3:1) and also in the lifestyle they choose if they fall into worldliness (Eph. 5:14-15; Rom. 13:11).

Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, once referenced what he called the "counter-intuitive phenomena of Jewish history"—a phenomena that applies to Christians as well. "When it was hard to be a Jew," Sacks wrote, "people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time."

Tim Keller uses the following scenario to illustrate how we can sometimes love God just for the good stuff he's "supposed" to give us (based on our terms, of course), rather than loving God for God's sake. Keller writes:

Imagine being in a situation where you were dating somebody and you seemed to be falling in love. As part of getting to know one another, you let it be known that when you got married you were coming into a significant trust fund. The person who you're falling in love with said, "Oh, really? Well, it doesn't make any difference to me whether you're rich or poor. I love you for who you are."

Suppose, just before the wedding you learned that you weren't going to get that trust fund? When you relayed that to your spouse-to-be, he or she got so disappointed that they called off the wedding. How would you feel? What would that tell you about this person's love for you? What would you say? You would start to say, "You never loved me for me. You were using me. You loved me because I was going to get you somewhere or get you something. You didn't love me. You were using me."

Possible Preaching Angles: Instead of loving the Lord for who he is, we love him for what we believe he should give us right now (instead of waiting for our the promised "eternal weight of glory"). But when we realize we're not getting the trust fund that we think should come right now, we're ready to walk away. Sometimes the trials of life reveal the true nature of our faith. Sometimes we see that we are not serving God, we are using him!

Kendall Schler of Columbia, Mo. was the first to cross the finish line at the GO! St. Louis Marathon. Schler had her photo taken with Jackie Joyner-Kersee and was expected to receive $1,500 in prize money along with a spot in the 2015 Boston Marathon.

However, Schler was disqualified after official discovered that she didn't actually run the race. Officials said it's believed that Schler somehow slipped onto the course after the final checkpoint without being discovered in an attempt to fool officials into thinking she ran the entire course. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Schler never registered times along the route, and she never showed up in any of the photographs taken along the route.

KSDK, a local television station, has a video of Schler crossing the finish line, but in the video she sure doesn't look like someone who has just won or even just completed a major race.

According to one story (which may be a legend), in the late 1960s, the now-iconic investor Warren Buffet pried seed money for his very first stock fund from eleven doctors who'd agreed to kick in $105,000. Then, in a symbolic act of his own commitment, Buffet added $100 of his own money to the kitty. No one knows exactly when the phrase "skin in the game" entered the American lingo, but many pinned it on Buffet's willingness to plunk down his own $100. The now common phrase captures the essence of an investment of heart and courage and risk, not the mere investment of money.

The idea is simple: You have no business asking others to trust you with their money if you're not willing to put your own resources at risk. If you have no "skin in the game," no stake of vulnerability, then your engagement is distant and rhetorical rather than personal and visceral. We might play fast and loose with others' resources but not with our own. Put another way, it's one thing to work for an entrepreneur; it's quite another to be the entrepreneur. The first involves little personal investment; the second demands our heart, our time, our sacrifice, our Commitment, some real "skin."

It's easy to forget our initial God-given mission, just as it's easy to lose our first love for Christ and drift away from our call to follow Christ. For instance, take one of the most popular board games of all time and the one most commonly associated with ruthless greed, competition, and big business. It's called Monopoly. But according to a new book titled The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (written by Mary Pilon), the famous board game was designed to provide a warning about the dangers of greed and big business. The initial version, known as the Landlord's Game, was invented in the early 1900s by Elizabeth Magie who wanted to teach players about the evils of monopolies and land ownership.

But over time, as the game spread through word of mouth and as people developed local versions of the game, the focus drifted from that original vision and purpose. Instead, the game started focusing on building (rather than preventing) huge monopolies and bankrupting your opponents. That's the game's version that Charles Darrow, and then later Parker Brothers, turned into the hyper-competitive game that we know today.

An article in The Wall Street Journal asks, "Why work out when you can just buy the clothes and look like you did?" The article explores a growing trend in the athletic apparel market—people are buying sports clothing without actually practicing the sport. The article notes "the U.S. athletic apparel market will increase driven in large part by consumers snapping up stretchy tees and leggings that will never see the fluorescent lights of a gym." For instance, sales of yoga apparel increased by 45 percent but yoga participation grew by less than five percent.

The trend isn't limited to yoga. Outdoor and camping retailers have debuted new lines of hiking boots and flannel shirts for people who probably have no intention of actually hiking and camping. Retailers are also rolling out jogging pants and preppy, $90 men's running shorts for men who may never jog.

The article quoted one buyer of athletic apparel who likes to wear yoga pants around town but who seldom has time to workout. She said, "When you put on your workout apparel, you think, 'Huh, maybe I should think about working out today.' "

In the 2013 film, Gravity, Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock, is a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky, played by Georg Clooney. On a routine spacewalk, the shuttle is destroyed by a freak hail of space debris, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone. According to one description of the film, "They are tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness. The deafening silence tells them they have lost any link to Earth ... and any chance for rescue. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into the terrifying expanse of space."

After the film's release, the German magazine Der Spiegel asked 69-year-old German astronaut Ulrich Walter to fact-check the film. Walter said that after becoming completely untethered, Sandra Bullock's character would have died. The interviewer commented, "That doesn't sound like a very nice way to go, drifting through nothingness in a spacesuit, waiting to die."

But Ulrich replied, "When you're slowly running out of oxygen, the same thing happens as does when you're in thin air at the top of a mountain: Everything seems funny. And as you're laughing about it, you slowly nod off. I experienced this phenomenon in an altitude chamber during my training as an astronaut. At some point, someone in the group starts cracking bad jokes … A person who dies alone in space dies a cheerful death." In other words, your situation is hopeless, you're slowly dying, but you think it's funny.

Possible Preaching Angles: Is it possible that our entire culture is, in many ways, cut off from our spiritual oxygen supply, "drifting through nothingness, waiting to die" and yet "everything seems funny"? Is this an example of what Neil Postman called "amusing ourselves to death"?

On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy (unofficially known as "Superstorm Sandy") slammed into the coast of the Northeastern United States. The Category 2 storm became the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter, with winds spanning 1,100 miles. Experts estimate that the storm's monetary damages topped $68 billion. At least 286 people were killed along the path of the storm in seven countries.

As Hurricane Sandy bore down on New York City, almost everything shut down—except at least one rogue Starbucks near Times Square. Desperate (addicted?) but highly committed Starbucks junkies fought high winds, dangerous rains, and dire warnings just to get a latte or a cup of coffee. Bethany Owings, 28, walked 10 blocks with her one-year-old daughter for a fix. "I saw on Facebook that they were open," she said. "It was scary not having Starbucks." Her neighbor and friend 29-year-old Chris Hernandez came along and later said, "When she said they were open, I was like, 'Pack the baby up. Let's go!' I didn't know they were all going to close. I started panicking. There's nothing else I would've gone out for. This makes my day complete." Alex Mwangi, 25, walked more than 20 blocks looking for an open Starbucks. He told reporters, "It took half an hour. But I'm a Starbucks fanatic. I go four or five times a day." David Low, also 25, said he went to three closed Starbucks before learning the store was open. Low said, "I'm really happy these guys are open. I can't get a pumpkin spice latte anywhere else. The 10-minute wait was worth it."

Possible Preaching Angles: Value; Worship; Christ—People will make sacrifices for what they value. If we value Christ, we will lay down our lives for him. The people in this true news story were nuts, but you have to say that they weren't lukewarm or uncommitted about following their deep desire for a pumpkin spice latte. Like Paul and Epaphroditus in Philippians 2, they risked it all to pursue what they valued.

Consider this mission statement of a well-known university: "To be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of your life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ." Founded in 1636, this university employed exclusively Christian professors, emphasized character formation in its students above all else, and placed a strong emphasis on equipping ministers to share the good news. Every diploma read, Christo et Ecclesiae around Veritas, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." You've probably heard of this school. It's called Harvard University.

Only 80 years after its founding, a group of New England pastors sensed Harvard had drifted too far for their liking. Concerned by the secularization at Harvard, they approached a wealthy philanthropist who shared their concerns. This man, Elihu Yale, financed their efforts in 1718, and they called the college Yale University. Yale's motto was not just Veritas (truth) like Harvard, but Lux et Veritas (light and truth).

Today, Harvard's and Yale's legacy of academic excellence are still intact. But neither school resembles what their founders envisioned. At the 350th anniversary celebration of Harvard, Steven Muller, former president of Johns Hopkins University, bluntly stated, "The bad news is the university has become godless." Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, confessed, "Things divine have been central neither to my professional nor to my personal life."

Harvard's and Yale's founders were unmistakably clear in their goals: academic excellence and Christian formation. Today, they do something very different from their founding purpose. What happened to Harvard and Yale is called "Mission Drift."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Leadership; Church, mission of; Vision—"mission drift" applies to the leadership of the church. Greer and Horst write, "Mission Drift unfolds slowly. Like a current, it carries organizations away from their core purpose and identity." (2) Christian life; Backsliding; Spiritual formation—"mission drift" also applies to our individual spiritual lives.

Every January, millions of Americans, brimming with optimism and a little extra belly from the holidays, commemorate the New Year by making an unfamiliar urban trek. They go to the gym. One in eight new members join their fitness club in January, and many gyms see a traffic surge of 30 to 50 percent in the first few weeks of the year. Stop by your local gym soon after January 1st, and the ellipticals will be flush with new faces. But next thing you know, it will be April, our gym cards will be mocking us from our wallets, and our tummies will have sprouted, on cue with the tree buds.

Gyms make most of their money from two sorts of people: 1) absentee members and 2) super-users who pay not only the monthly fee but also for the add-ons, like trainers and classes, all the way down to the whey smoothies. Unfortunately, most of us fall into the absentee member category. In January, our cup of willpower overfloweth. But by June, the odds that you've kept your New Year's resolutions fall to under 40 percent.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Discipleship; Endurance; Lukewarmness—When it comes to following Christ, are you an absentee member? Have you started with Christ but slacked off? (2) Church; Membership—Gyms may thrive on absentee members but the church can't.

The Christian scholar Larry Taunton launched a nationwide campaign to interview college students who belong to atheistic campus groups. After receiving a flood of enquiries, Larry and his team heard one consistent theme from these young unbelievers: they often expected but didn't find more spiritual depth from their Christian neighbors. Larry writes:

Some [of these young atheists] had gone to church hoping to find answers to [tough questions about faith]. Others hoped to find answers to questions of personal significance, purpose, and ethics. Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: "I really started to get bored with church."

In contrast, these young atheists expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously. Larry writes,

Without fail, our former church-attending students expressed [positive] feelings for those Christians who unashamedly embraced biblical teaching. Michael, a political science major at Dartmouth, told us, "I really can't consider a Christian a good, moral person if he isn't trying to convert me …. Christianity is something that if you really believed it, it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven't seen too much of that."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Worship; Preaching—Surprisingly, many young atheists aren't looking for Christians who will water-down the faith. They want us to worship and preach with wholehearted devotion. (2) Commitment; Zeal; Discipleship—This story shows what lukewarm discipleship looks like to the watching world—it's blah. (3) Evangelism—These young atheists want and expect us to share our faith—assuming that it's done in an appropriate way.

Some time ago a rash of flying accidents for single-engine planes occurred across North America. When a comprehensive study was conducted of the 44 most recent fatal accidents involving Cirrus aircraft, a few lessons stood out. First, all but one of the accidents listed pilot-related causes. Second, and most surprisingly, experienced pilots were responsible for a majority of the accidents. A few of the accidents were caused by pilots with less than 150 hours of flight time, but over 75 percent of the accidents were caused by pilots with over 400 hours of flight time. Apparently, these pilots assumed that because they already had a lot of hours under their belts they could cut corners and get sloppy. By contrast, beginning pilots with fewer hours were extremely careful, even painstaking in their preflight routines, meticulously inspecting every rivet of the airplane. They did it by the book. The study concluded that pilots who get overconfident and stop pursuing ongoing safety training are four times more likely to have a fatal accident.

Sometimes we as Christians are 400-flying-hour disciples. Accidents take place because we stop doing it by the Book. We stop studying the Word of God. We compromise on devotions …. We slump on allowing the standards of Scripture and the Holy Spirit to inspect every "rivet" in our hearts and lives. We go on day after day cutting corners, wondering why we lose power on the climbs, and we stall. Accidents may often be the consequences of thinking we know better.

Remember the character of Treebeard, a leader among the race of Ents, the shepherds of the forest in The Lord of the Rings? The Ents are described as a "deliberate" people, extremely slow to decide on a course of action. In reality, they are eager to avoid committing themselves in the great contest against the Dark Lord. "I am not altogether on anybody's side," Treebeard explains, "because nobody is altogether on my side." Up until the eleventh hour, the Ents hope to maintain a policy of strict neutrality. But their desire to be left alone—their refusal to choose Goodness—becomes untenable as the dark forces of Mordor gather against the inhabitants of Middle-earth:

"Of course, it is likely enough, my friends," Treebeard said slowly, "likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now."

Wherever we are in our journey, whatever we believe, our earthly march will come to an end. Whether we meet Jesus at the moment of our death, or when he comes again—without disguise—we will face him …. As C. S. Lewis warned, "That will not be the time for choosing. It will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it or not."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) An Invitation to Accept Christ (for non-Christians)—When it comes to trusting in Jesus for our salvation, we cannot remain neutral forever. (2) The Call to Serve Christ (for Christians)—When it comes to serving Christ in the world, we have to decide if you will serve God with our whole hearts or remain disobedient. There is no neutrality.

Charles Colson tells the following story about his home town of Naples, Florida, which he calls "one of the garden spots of the world."

It's an absolute nirvana for all golfers, and they all come there. They're all CEOs of major corporations, and they retire to Naples, and this is "it"—twenty-seven golf courses and miles of sparkling beach and the best country clubs. I watch these guys; they're powerful people. They have this New York look on their face; they're determined. But now, all of a sudden, they start measuring their lives by how many golf games they can get in.

I often say to them, "Do you really want to live your life counting up the number of times you chase that little white ball around those greens?" And they kind of chuckle, but it's a nervous chuckle, because in six months they've realized how banal their lives are, and they've got beautiful homes—castles—and when they get bored with that, they build a bigger castle, and they're miserable. The object of life is not what we think it is, which is to achieve money, power, pleasure. That's not the holy grail. The object of life is the maturing of the soul, and you reflect that maturing of the soul when you care more for other people than yourself.

Arthur F. Burns, the former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve System and ambassador to West Germany, was a man of considerable gravity. Medium in height, distinguished, with wavy silver hair and his signature pipe, he was economic counselor to a number of presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan. When he spoke, his opinions carried weight, and Washington listened. Arthur Burns was also Jewish, so when he began attending an informal White House group for prayer and fellowship in the 1970s, he was accorded special respect. No one in fact quite knew how to involve him in the group, and, week after week when different people took turns to end the meeting in prayer, Burns was passed by—out of a mixture of respect and reticence.

One week, however, the group was led by a newcomer who did not know the unusual status Burns occupied. As the meeting ended, the newcomer turned to Arthur Burns and asked him to close the time with a prayer. Some of the old-timers glanced at each other in surprise and wondered what would happen. But without missing a beat, Burns reached out, held hands with others in the circle, and prayed this prayer: "Lord, I pray that you would bring Jews to know Jesus Christ. I pray that you would bring Muslims to know Jesus Christ. Finally, Lord, I pray that you would bring Christians to know Jesus Christ.Amen."