I’ve written about apathy in the past. It’s been something that I have grown increasingly aware of in the past year or so, both in my own life and others. I have seen so many people this school year and last that are simply drifting through. They’re the people going to a Christian college merely because their parents made a promise to pay, or merely because it was the path of least resistance. It was the next logical step to keep their façade intact. The tormented screams of the Holy Spirit have all but been stifled in their lives. I am talking about the lukewarm and the spiritually dead/
Nate Pfeil said in his video “The Fire”, that “most professing Christians have never realized their actual need for Christ… they’ve never been told that the very first level of Christianity is a complete denial of all of your desires and everything you’ve ever been… They don’t understand that being a Christian means that they are crucified to the world and that the world is crucified to them.”
The truth of the matter is that there many professing believers today who wake up every morning without a consideration to the sacrifice Christ made for them. They live their lives opposed to God, delving into every sin that is “permissible”, living in habitual unrepentant sin. I was one of these people. I first prayed the sinner’s prayer at the ripe age of 4 years old. I fooled my way through elementary school, junior high, and high school. I professed with my mouth repentance and faith in the Gospel, while I had a condemned heart rotting within my chest. I lived the typical ‘Christian kid’ life. I went to the same solid church for 18 years. I participated in Awana. I could articulate TULIP and argue the 5 points of Calvinism; I even wrote a capstone paper in a public high school on the same topic. I even drank black coffee like a good Baptist. However, I struggled with addictions and knew for sure that if I were to die any moment I would be in hell. Unsaved. Apart from Christ. Tormented for eternity. Yet, I lived with my white washed façade, imagining my life was perfect. Pretending I had accepted Christ’s redemption.
I share that to simply say that, I’m not some cynical critique of other Christians. So please don’t dismiss my thoughts because you think I’m being judgmental. I have lived the hidden life. I know what it is like to know the truth, reject it, and yet still pretend and try to convince myself I was saved. I came to Cedarville as a drifter, and now seeing others that have absolutely every reason to be in love with God but aren’t seems right now to be more than I can bear.
We are told that when we graduate we will have an understanding of God and theology that 85% of Christians do not possess. It scares me how some of the most fervent of believers are those in foreign countries, where they know a mere fraction of the theology and doctrinal understanding that we know. Those who have grown up in the church have an understanding of God that gives them no excuse to not love God with every fiber of their being yet daily disregard Christ.
As a church we have “become callous, have given [ourselves] over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness”. Ephesians 4:19. I have “The American Church” written next to the verse in my bible. This verse is the end of a description of the gentile world. As a church and as a people we are becoming more and more like our world than like our savior. Many a ‘good’ Christian flocked to watch The Passion of the Christ, saw their savior have the skin ripped off his body and gruesomely nailed to a tree, and yet they live their lives without a consideration to him whatsoever. They have been lulled into the idea that they can be apart of the world. They’ve heard Paul’s famous dissertation in Romans Chapter 12 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2
Yet, somehow the message is lost. For some reason it’s forgotten that the world we live in, no matter how much we want it to be friendly to our cause isn’t. Christians pretend to be ignorant to the fact that we have a severely radical belief, one that cannot co-exist with the world around us.
When addressing the church in Laodicea in Revelations 3:14-17 Christ said, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.”
My conclusion is short and simple. If you are living with a façade, stop playing the whore. Stop professing with your lips that you love the master and creator of the universe and live your life with lukewarm and at best apathetic devotion to him. You could fool everyone here but it won’t save your soul. Heed Jesus’ words. Know that apart from Christ, you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Don’t realize it too late.
“Since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for out God is a consuming fire.”
Hebrews 12:28-29
