A few years ago, my wife woke me up in the middle of the night because of an awful smell permeating through the house. After doing a once-over on the house and checking the attic to make sure a raccoon hadn’t crawled around up there and died, I finally realized where the smell was coming from. Apparently, at some point during the night, a skunk had crossed the road in front of our house and gotten hit by one of the neighbors. The smell was so pungent, so overwhelming, that it woke up my wife and a few other people in the neighborhood who were trying to figure out what was going on also. It was quite a scene on our block at 2:30 that morning.
It. Was. Disgusting. If you’ve ever driven down the road and smelt a dead skunk, you know exactly the type of scent I’m describing, and you know how that smell stays with you for at least a couple of minutes. Fewer things will make you wanna pull over to the side of the road and yack quite like that.
And yet, when you look at Jesus’ description of the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-22, that’s exactly how He describes it:
“So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.”
I’m not a Greek Scholar by any means, but my understanding of that word “spit” is more closely akin to the idea of vomiting; Jesus is telling this church that their actions have actually made Him sick to His stomach. Just what every church would love to hear, I’m sure.
What’s the Problem?
The first key to fixing any sickness is addressing what’s actually going on, and for the Laodiceans, the problem is pretty obvious: apathy. You wouldn’t think that a church in the first century would have a problem with laziness, considering how much persecution is raging throughout the Roman Empire and in the other churches, but here we are.
The other problem was that their self-perception was wildly off. Spiritually, they viewed themselves in a completely different light from how Jesus viewed them. Where they saw strength, God saw weakness. Where they saw riches, God saw poverty. Where they saw independence, God saw helplessness.
Their attitude was a lot like the parable of the two men who went up into the temple to pray (Luke 18:9-14). One was a tax collector who saw his own faults clearly, while the other was a Pharisee who simply talked about how glad he was that he wasn’t the tax collector. The problem wasn’t the quantity of sins for either man, but the perception of those sins. And that perception is what made him think he didn’t really need God, just wanted to communicate to Jehovah how awesome he was himself.
Isn’t that backwards of the way prayers are supposed to work?
And so it was with the church at Laodicea. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have any sins, it was that their own self-presumed righteousness kept them from seeing their deplorable spiritual condition. It’s ironic then, that in Jesus’ message to them, He has precisely zero words of commendation for them. None. Zip. Nada. They were spiritually bankrupt, as far as this letter is concerned.
I Do That Sometimes Too…
Do you? One of Satan’s best devices is to cover up the things that are lacking with the few things that are going really well in a person’s life. I can’t see my faults, in other words, because I’m too busy glorying in my supposed triumphs.
In fact, my prayer be very similar to the tax collector’s: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: democrats, homosexuals, atheists, or even like Joel Osteen over there. I attend services twice a week, I pay into the collection on the first day of the week…”
(For the record, that’s not a swipe at democrats, that’s more addressing partisan mentality. You could swap it for Republicans and it’d read the same way).
Because we’re evaluating ourselves by the perceived lowest common denominator, everything about us looks awesome. The problem is, no matter what we do, how hard we work, it all pales in comparison to the true holiness of God, which should be our Standard anyways (Romans 3:9-18).
Luke sums up our attitude pretty well in Luke 17:7-10:
“Which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come immediately and sit down to eat’? But will he not say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat, and properly clothe yourself and serve me while I eat and drink; and afterward you may eat and drink’? He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were commanded, does he? So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done..”
WAKE UP
Many people much smarter than I have done great work uncovering Jesus’ meaning in Revelation 3:15-16 about the Laodiceans being neither “cold nor hot.” Some make the point that both hot and cold water serves different purposes at different times (baths, drinking, etc), while others claim that what God is saying is that He would rather them be either 100% for Him or 100% against Him.
Regardless of which way it is – though I tend to line up with the former – the message is still the same: Do something about it! Get out of your comfort zone, push the envelope, break the mold – pick your cliche, just get moving!
Jesus has three instructions for them, all couched in the cultural climate of Laodicea:
Buy His Gold: Pure gold is refined by fire. Pure Christians are made the same way. Forged in the crucible of persecution and struggle, we “burn off” our own impurities by putting our faith to the test and stretching ourselves past what we think is our breaking point (1 Peter 1:7). “Buy His gold” by being intentional about growth.
Wear White Clothes: When Adam and Eve sinned, in a show of mercy, the very first thing that God did was to make clothes for them both. In the same way, God covers us by the sacrifice of His Son, if we continually ask for forgiveness and “do works befitting repentance” (Acts 26:20). Like the High Priest that had to cleanse himself before he could enter into the Holy of Holies, we need to purify ourselves before we can be fit for duty (Hebrews 7:27).
Anoint Your Eyes: View yourself in the right way. Purify your eyes and look at yourself through a spiritual lens rather than a self-aggrandizing egotistical sort of way. Look at your faults instead of your victories for the purpose of self-improvement. Identify weaknesses and attack them with the ferocity of Samuel (1 Samuel 15:33). When was the last time we took a true inventory of our spiritual condition? (John 12:40).
Laodicea’s issue was nothing they couldn’t recover from; if it were, He wouldn’t have given them steps to get better. Likewise, no church or soul is truly “beyond saving,” as long as we have the right motivation and goal.
After all, the last thing any of us wants is to smell as bad as a dead skunk on the side of the road.
