Once upon a time, I convinced myself that certainty was the enemy. That conviction was arrogance in disguise. That the most enlightened position was perpetual suspension. Never quite believing, never quite doubting, always hovering in that comfortable fog between yes and no.
I was wrong.
There’s a sickness spreading through the modern Church, and it wears the mask of sophistication. It calls itself nuance, balance, open-mindedness. But underneath? It’s something far more insidious. It’s the spiritual equivalent of watching your own life through a window. Present but not participating, close enough to claim membership but far enough to avoid the cost.
The Book of Revelation doesn’t mince words about this condition. In a letter to the church at Laodicea, Jesus delivers what might be one of the most “punch in the gut” lines in all of Scripture: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.”
Not a correction. Not a disappointed sigh. Vomit.
The Geography of Indifference
To understand why this metaphor cuts so deep, you need to understand Laodicea’s water problem.
The city sat in a peculiar geographic position. Wedged between Hierapolis, famous for its therapeutic hot springs, and Colossae, known for its cold, pure mountain water. Laodicea had neither. Its water arrived through aqueducts, and by the time it reached the city, it was tepid, mineral-laden, and functionally useless. Too cool to heal. Too warm to refresh. Good for nothing but spitting out.
Jesus wasn’t making an abstract theological point. He was using the most tangible, disgusting reality His audience knew to describe their spiritual state.
Hot water heals. It soothes, purifies, transforms. A hot faith does the same. It burns with conviction, cauterizes wounds, brings warmth to cold hearts.
Cold water refreshes. It quenches thirst, revives the weary, offers clarity. A cold faith, even honest unbelief, at least provides the refreshment of intellectual honesty. The clean taste of someone who knows where they stand.
But lukewarm? Lukewarm is nauseating. It claims the benefits of faith while refusing its demands. It wants the identity without the transformation. The comfort without the fire.
The Gray Area As Religion
I became an expert in the gray area.
Not intentionally, at first. I think it started as an embrace of the ability to see multiple sides, to complicate binary thinking, to “help” others see the complexity they were missing. When someone expressed passion about anything, I could immediately generate the counterargument. Not to seek truth, but to remain above the fray. Uncommitted. Safe.
This wasn’t wisdom. It was cowardice dressed up like the devil’s advocate.
Psychologists have revealed something crucial about human nature: we’re hardwired to seek the comfort of the middle. In famous studies, participants would deny obvious truths like which line was longer, or what they clearly saw, simply to avoid standing out from the group. The lukewarm position isn’t just a personal failing; it’s a vulnerability written into our psyche.
But here’s what I didn’t understand back then: relativism, the philosophy that truth is subjective, that morality is just opinion, that conviction is intolerance, isn’t a neutral position. It’s an active rebellion against the concept of knowable truth. It disguises spiritual laziness as intellectual humility, and it sabotages the Gospel at its foundation.
Because the Gospel isn’t a preference. It’s a claim about reality. If truth is merely personal, then salvation isn’t urgent. It’s optional. If morality is subjective, then sin is just a cultural construct, and judgment is just cosmic unfairness.
The Laodiceans weren’t outright denying Christ. They were doing something worse: they were making Him optional. Comfortable. A nice addition to their already prosperous lives.
The Economics of Self-Destruction
Jesus doesn’t stop at diagnosing their nausea-inducing faith. He exposes their underlying delusion: “Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing, and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked.”
This is the particular genius of lukewarmness. It feels like wealth while you’re actually spiritually bankrupt.
Laodicea was indeed a wealthy city. It was a banking center, famous for its black wool production and its medical school that produced an eye salve. The church there had absorbed the city’s prosperity into their spiritual self-assessment. They had confused cultural success with divine approval, material comfort with spiritual health.
This is the trap: when faith costs you nothing, when it makes no demands that conflict with your desires, when it requires no sacrifice that distinguishes you from the surrounding culture, you’re not experiencing Christianity. You’re experiencing its aesthetic.
The theory of cognitive dissonance helps explain why this delusion persists. We’re motivated to maintain consistency between our beliefs and actions. If we believe we’re faithful but live indifferently, the psychological discomfort is unbearable. So we adjust: we redefine faith to match our behavior rather than adjusting our behavior to match true faith. We tell ourselves that moderation is virtue, that zealotry is dangerous, that our comfortable middle ground is actually the mature position.
But maturity and mediocrity are not the same thing.
The Violence of Half-Measures
I used to think playing it safe was harmless. Neutral. I wasn’t hurting anyone by refusing to commit, by keeping my options open, by maintaining plausible deniability in my beliefs.
But Jesus’s parable of the talents demolishes this illusion. The servant who buried his master’s money didn’t steal it or squander it. He simply did nothing. He played it safe. And for that, for that exact “harmless” choice, he was called wicked and thrown out.
The lukewarm position is not a zero on the moral scale. It’s a negative number. It’s active disobedience masquerading as caution.
Why? Because it’s a fundamentally consumeristic approach to God. The lukewarm heart wants to sample Christianity, to keep it as one option among many, to enjoy its benefits without submitting to its authority. It treats Jesus not as Lord but as a service provider. Useful when needed, ignorable when inconvenient.
This is what makes it more offensive than cold unbelief. The unbeliever at least respects Christianity enough to reject it honestly. The lukewarm person insults it by pretending allegiance while undermining it from within.
The Cure
Jesus doesn’t leave the Laodiceans in their disgust. He offers them a way out, but it requires acknowledging their poverty: “I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see.”
The prescription has three parts:
- Gold refined by fire : genuine faith that has been tested and proven, not the cheap counterfeit of cultural Christianity.
- White garments : Righteousness that comes from Christ, not the filthy rags of self-made morality.
- Eye salve : Spiritual sight that recognizes their true condition, not the blindness of self-deception.
The cure for lukewarmness isn’t trying harder to be moderate. It’s burning away everything that isn’t real. It’s the terrifying, liberating choice to abandon the comfortable middle for the passionate heat of genuine faith or the refreshing honesty of acknowledged doubt.
Epilogue : Leaving The Middle
I can’t tell you the exact moment I left the lukewarm position. It wasn’t a single decision but a series of small deaths. Each one killing another excuse, another rationalization, another gray area I’d built to avoid commitment.
What I can tell you is this: the middle feels safe until you realize it’s a prison. The gray area seems sophisticated until you understand it’s just fog. Relativism masquerades as compassion until you see it’s actually cruelty. Because if truth doesn’t exist, then neither does rescue.
The choice Jesus presents to Laodicea, and to us, isn’t between perfection and failure. It’s between authentic engagement and nauseating indifference. Between a faith that transforms or a faith that decorates. Between heat that heals, cold that refreshes, or tepid water that He will spit from His mouth.
The comfortable middle isn’t comfort. It’s death by degrees.
So here’s the question that haunts me, the one I can no longer avoid: What am I willing to be wrong about? What convictions am I willing to die for? And what lukewarm positions am I clinging to simply because letting go would cost me something?
The time for the gray area is over.
Hot or Cold.
Choose.
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