Prayer: We worship You that You have brought us all here tonight. How we treasure this time. Lord, grant that we may open to You. Again we need Your anointing; we need the utterance to fellowship about the church. We like to be one with You in this moment. Lord, we believe it is of You that we are here. O Lord Jesus, speak from Your heart to us, what You want us to do, the way You want us to take. Lord, we would like to take Your way. Thank You for Your cleansing blood. Thank You for Your presence all the time. Thank You for all the churches. Thank You for Your move among us. Thank You for the Spirit and the Word. Thank You, Lord, for Your forgiveness. How we thank You that we may take You as our sin offering and as our trespass offering, even as all the offerings. O Lord Jesus, we do enter into You, enjoy You, participate in You. Lord, tonight impart Yourself into us again; dispense more and more of Yourself into each one of us. Thank You, Lord.
My burden these days is that we should realize the danger there is that we may fall into those perils we talked about last time.
If we fall into emptiness, this emptiness always leads to division. It may not sound logical, but this emptiness actually works to bring forth the divisions. If we study church history, we can see that first indifference came in, then divisions.
From the whole Bible we can see that God wants His chosen ones to be eagerly seeking Him. Among the sixty-six books there is one book of seeking, that is, the Song of Songs. No seeking is as strong as that between the female and the male. The Song of Songs illustrates how the Lord wants His chosen ones to seek after Him. The basic negative scene in the Old Testament is the indifference of the Lord’s people to Him.
In the New Testament there is the same thing. When God became incarnate and lived on this earth, actually He didn’t do that much work. What He did was to attract His chosen ones. In the four Gospels we can see how the Lord Jesus was like a magnet, attracting people to Himself. The Gospels show that the story between the Lord Jesus and His disciples was one of love. The Lord did not tell His disciples much what they should do for Him; He just kept attracting them to love Him. When the time of His death came, it was a test of the disciple’s love toward the Lord.
In the seven epistles in Revelation when the Lord rebuked the churches, the first one rebuked was Ephesus, and that rebuke was due to the loss of the first love (Rev. 2:4). The last one that was rebuked was Laodicea (Rev. 3:16). When we lose love, the result is lukewarmness. The lukewarmness is the product of indifference.
Indifference apparently is not important. If you go back to the world, or if you leave the church, everyone sees it. But you still remain in the church serving the Lord, taking care of the church. Nonetheless, you may have lost the first love and become indifferent. There is the danger.
The impact of the work for the Lord should be the zeal. If we lose our zeal, we don’t have the impact. We may still do the same work, but there is emptiness because indifference has come in. The way we take care of the church, the way we work for the Lord, really doesn’t mean much. The impact depends upon zeal. Without eagerness, we are through.
To the first church in Revelation the Lord’s warning was that He would remove the lampstand (Rev. 2:5). To take away the lampstand means that the testimony will be gone. The warning to the last church was that He would vomit them out of His mouth (Rev. 3:16). Not only will the testimony be taken away; even you yourself will be given up by the Lord. He will spit you out; He will not keep you.
In between these two churches we can see all the evils mentioned. These evils came in because of this indifference, lukewarmness. None of us can have the assurance that we will escape this peril. It is very easy to fall into this situation. In fact, there is no need to fall into it; we may just be in it. Here we are in southern California. Probably all the churches are in a similar situation. Five years have gone by; the churches are established, the problems solved. Things are peaceful. We just go on according to our regular schedule. This kind of situation is dangerous because we may unknowingly get into a state of indifference.
According to history, quite often the Lord does something or allows something to stir things up. At present we have no trouble and no goal. Suppose we were in an atmosphere for migration. Migration might become the motivation for us to stop being indifferent.