I have a bad habit of making a cup of coffee and then starting to do something else, only realising when the coffee is lukewarm that I’ve not had my drink. I hate lukewarm coffee, so I have the choice then of abandoning the drink and making another or reheating it.
It’s very easy for us in our Christian lives to ‘go off the boil.’ The passion of our first love gets dulled with time. The cares of the world and the anxieties and sorrows of everyday life can easily diminish our zeal and passion, reducing faith to the fairly ordinary and inconsequential, to a duty rather than a delight.
Jesus had stern words to the church at Ephesus, rebuking them for the loss of their first love (Rev 2:4-5) and even sterner words to the church at Laodicea, whom He accused of being lukewarm (Rev 3:14-22) Being lukewarm may be undesirable in a cup of coffee; it’s certainly undesirable in God’s eyes in a life of faith.
I usually solve my coffee problem by reheating it in a microwave oven. To reignite faith, I need to seek God and ask Him to rekindle the fire that once burned bright within me. Tepid followers of Christ won’t change the world. We need the fire of God in our lives to be effective witnesses.
‘Every morning I lay out the pieces of my life on your altar and watch for fire to descend.’ (Ps 5:3, The Message)