Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2802
“Iknowyour works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I would you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” Revelation 3:15,16.
IF this had been an utterance of mine, it would have been accounted vulgar. As a sentence of Scripture, I suppose it may be permitted to escape the censure of fastidious modern critics. The vernacular tongue and the homely figure may be decried as vulgarities, but if so, it will be by those whose tastes have been ill-schooled. A vicious refinement has come into vogue. If men call things by their right names and use good old Saxon words, they are perpetually brought under the lash for having indulged in vulgarities. A return to such “vulgarities” in the pulpit would be a return to power! I would far rather have, again, the homely language of Hugh Latimer, with all it singularity—and, I must confess, with some of its grossness—than have the namby-pamby style of modern times in which sacred things are spoken of as if they were only meant to be whispered in drawing rooms and not to be uttered where men meet in everyday life. The fact is, the Bible is a book which deals with things as they are—a book which, just like all of God’s works, is glorious because it is natural and simple. God has not polished the rocks in the valleys. He has not set the mountains all in order, nor has He yet been pleased to make all parts of the earth just as fair and beautiful as if they had been intended to form a lovely landscape! But, at least, in some places He has hewn them out and left them rough and rugged—to stand in all their naked glory. So is it with this Book of God. There are things in it at which the too-polite shrug their shoulders—not so many, perhaps, in the original as in our translation—but still, sufficient to shock a prudish taste. The Bible is, none the less, chaste because it scorns to call foul things by fair names. I love the Word of God because, while it is a God-like Book, it is also a man-like Book. In all the Glory of His Infinite Wisdom, the Lord has written to us this Divine message in the rugged grandeur and sublime simplicity of language which even a child can comprehend!
The Lord Jesus here uses a plain, homely metaphor. As tepid water makes a man’s stomach heave, so lukewarm profession is nauseous to the Almighty. He could better endure either the coldness of apathy or the warmth of enthusiasm— but the man who is lukewarm in religion moves Him to the deepest loathing. He vomits him forth from His mouth! His very name shall be dismissed from the lips of the Lord with the most sickening abhorrence that fancy can paint. It is an utterance so strong that no sentence of the most vehement and impassioned orator could rival it. There is such a depth of disgust in this warning against lukewarmness that I know of no figure within the range of imagination—and no words in the whole vocabulary of language which could have conveyed the meaning of “Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness,” so fully, or with such terrible force!
I am going to try to show you, from this text, first, some reasons why lukewarmness in religion is so distasteful to Christ. And then to point out to you some dissuasive against lukewarmness, urging you to be fervent in your Master’s cause.
I. First, then, I am to give you SOME REASONS WHY LUKEWARM RELIGION IS SO DISTASTEFUL TO THE LORD JESUS CHRIST.
And first, let me say that it is so because it is a direct insult to the Lord Jesus Christ. If I boldly say that I do not believe what He teaches, I have given Him the lie. But if I say to Him, “I believe what You teach, but I do not think it of
sufficient importance for me to disturb myself much about it,” I do, in fact, more willfully resist His Word! I as much as say to Him, “If it is true, yet it is a thing which I so despise and consider so contemptible, that I will not give my heart to it.” Did Jesus Christ think salvation of such importance that He must come from Heaven to earth to work it out? Did He think the Gospel, which He preached, so worthy to be made known that He must spend His life in proclaiming it? Did He think the redemption, which He worked out, to be so valuable that He must shed His own precious blood in order to complete it? Then, surely, He was in earnest, so, if I profess to believe the Truths that He taught and yet am indifferent, do I not insult Christ by seeming to insinuate that there was no need for Him to be in such dead earnest—that, in fact, He laid these things too deeply to heart?
His intense zeal was not on His own account, but on behalf of others and, according to all reason, those who are the interested parties for whom Christ’s solemn engagements were undertaken should be even more earnest than He was, if that could be possible! Yet, instead of that being the case, here is Christ in earnest and we—too many of us—are lukewarm, “neither cold nor hot.” This lukewarmness does not merely seem to give God the lie, it does not merely appear to censure Christ, but it does, as it were, tell Him that the things which He thought were so valuable, are of no worth in our esteem—and so it insults Him to His face! O my Brothers and Sisters, have you ever really thought what an insult it is to God when we come before Him with lukewarm prayers? There stands the heavenly Mercy Seat. The road to it is sprinkled with the precious blood of Jesus, yet we come to it with hearts that are cold, or we approach it leaving our hearts behind us. We kneel in the attitude of prayer, yet we do not pray! We prattle out certain words, we express thoughts which are not our real desires, we feign needs that we do not feel. Do we not thus degrade the Mercy Seat? We make it, as it were, a common lounging place rather than an awful wrestling place, once sprinkled with blood and often to be sprinkled with the sweat of our fervent supplication. When we come to the House of God to which Jesus Christ has invited us as to the banqueting house full of rich provisions, do we not come up, full often, just as we go to our shops—no, not with so much earnestness as we take with us to the Exchange or to the counting house? What do we thus seem to say but that God’s House is a common place, that the provision thereof is but ordinary food and that the solemn engagements of God’s sanctuary are but everyday things—not worthy of the zeal and energy of a sensible man, but only meet to be attended to with lukewarmness of spirit.