True Christianity requires more than correct doctrine—it produces a burning heart for Christ. The Lord’s letter to Laodicea speaks against spiritual complacency, where believers are neither cold nor hot in their devotion. When we grow lukewarm, Jesus stands at the door of His own Church, knocking and seeking renewed fellowship. Although Christ owns the Church, He pictures Himself outside of it and knocking to come in. The path to spiritual fervency comes through an individual hearing His voice and responding to let Him come in to His own Church. When an individual responds to the call of Christ, the Lord answers by coming up to that one and creating fellowship with him or her and deepening their relationship with Himself, allowing His presence to rekindle their first love.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] It is my joy to get around to most of the home groups and to be in attendance not always every time but as much as I can during the week and then that way I’ll get to see how they’re going and I have fellowship which I enjoy. I think do you need to turn this down or is it okay? Alright. Okay, now one of the things that happened was I was trying to talk those home group people into taking an evening service along the way and I think with some of them I’ve been successful and others not but one of the home groups was going into how to explain, how to interpret the book of Revelation. They gave themselves a pretty hard task to talk about the book of Revelation and I still

[00:00:49] think there’s something you need to fix. Good. So that particular group took us to the early chapters of the book of Revelation where there are these letters from Jesus to the seven churches. Put your hand up if you know about the seven letters to the seven churches just so I can get an indication. So the Apostle John had been put on a penal island where he was stuck there for a while and he wrote letters to the seven churches in Asia Minor and they are those seven letters that you find in chapters two and three in the book of Revelation. We had in the verse that Joey put up, that verse 11, Besides this you know the time

[00:01:46] that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believe. It’s talking about the fact that when you first come to Christ and you’re justified about the fact that you were a sinner but now you’re forgiven and that’s the initial of salvation, but salvation continues through your sanctification. As time passes you’re going to get nearer to the moment when you’re going to go to be with God and glory, or else Christ might return before that happens. That is the third part of salvation. This is what he’s talking about that that final moment of the end of the age is coming. It’s nearer to us than when we first believed. That’s always true for every person every But it’s something to notice that you can come to a moment in life of realising that

[00:02:38] time has passed since you first became a Christian. I want you to ask yourselves, can you remember, not everybody can remember the exact moment, but can you remember when you first became assured that you belonged to Christ? Maybe very ways you can. Think of it for a moment and how far back was that? Have you become a Christian for a long time or is that one, two, three years? Well something happened, now we’ll take that part off the screen, we’re going to speak from one of these letters of Christ to the churches and it’s the final one, there’s seven of them. One of the things the Home Group got onto, and I found it very helpful, was to think of the varying ways we have interpreted those 7 letters. One is that John was led of the Lord to write them to the seven existing churches and they actually go around in a circle. It was a letter that everybody got everyone else’s letter as well.

[00:03:45] So the seven churches all this letter passed on to them from John and from Christ of course, And it is the beginning of the book of Revelation. Now, that book of Revelation, I really need you to do something down the back and put the gain down so that it doesn’t reverberate. Or is it that I’m hearing it worse than others because of these? Can I have a short hand, please? No, I can have a hand here. You can hear from the audience if I’m not here.

[00:04:16] You can all hear OK? All right, I’m getting a double hearing somehow. Yeah, all right. OK, so what the home group did was to recognize that across time, Christians have interpreted the seven letters in seven ways. One is that it’s simply a record of what Jesus had John write to the seven existing churches. And what they were written to about and the wisdom that he gave is applicable to when we have similar churches.

[00:04:45] And that’s how you interpret them. The second way is that they’re actually representative of different ages the church was prophetically going to go through and the future from that moment. And so you can line up some of the things discussed in those seven letters, different ages and different times in church history, particularly Western church history, where what the letters talk on is what the churches are like at the time. And the Church of today is very similar to that

[00:05:19] which is addressed in the seventh of the letters, meaning that the end is close. And the idea that it’s maybe later than you think, because if you follow that interpretation, the later seen letter, which is number seven, is addressing the problem of Luke warmness. It certainly matches how you see the church around the world in this generation of ours. And then the third way is that at any given time around the world, there might be a church

[00:05:51] which is similar to any of the seven letters. And so the benefit of the book of Revelation is that you can find one of these letters that is akin to how things are with you, and you can receive the admonition that comes with it. That’s very helpful. And that home group actually produced a little diagram so I can get some of these copied if you ask me for one. And it’s a way to understand that particularly that middle type of interpretation

[00:06:20] that represents the churches in the seven ages across time. Now let’s turn please to the book of Revelation that you already have, thank you, and to that seventh letter. And I’ve got basically three big points to bring out to you from it, but we’ll first read through the letter. To the angel of the church and later, see her write the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness,

[00:06:44] the beginning of God’s creation. I know your works, you’re neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot, so because you look warm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say I’m rich, I’ve prospered, I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. That’s Jesus, he knows how to add the adjectives on. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire

[00:07:16] so that you may be rich and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen. And salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love are reprove and disciplined or chasten. So be zealous and repent, behold I stand at the door a knock and if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and fellowship, or eat with him and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him

[00:07:48] to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and am sat down with my father and his throne. He who hasn’t here let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. I keep the screen where it is, but I want you to notice first of all, in this letter, we’re being addressed by a Christianity which is Trinitarian. Trinitarian is because our one God is in three persons.

[00:08:17] There’s the son who’s talking and has the throne given to him in heaven, consequent on his exaltation there. But he’s sitting down on his throne with the father, on the father’s throne. Look at it there in verse 21. And then it says, he who hasn’t here let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the first thing I want to say

[00:08:42] is that if you’re in a type of religion or a Christianity that’s not Trinitarian, you need to learn a bit more and perhaps shift to a different church. Because true Christianity according to the scriptures is one that sees the place of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, and our congregation has heard me say this many times, there’s a verse that says, the Lord our gods and the word gods and the Hebrew Elohim, it’s in the plural form of the word God, the gods, the Lord our gods, then it’s got a verb in the singular is, and then it says one.

[00:09:24] And I think some people haven’t woken up to the fact that we are in a religion that’s Unitarian and it’s not the case that there’s just one of God and sometimes he puts on his father face and addresses Everybody and the other times he comes his son And other times he’s the Spirit Know there are three eternal persons which is why the beginning of John’s gospel talks and says in the beginning Was the word and the word was with God and the word was God just talking about Christ and And we are in a trititarian religion, and you’re not getting the full benefit of it if you haven’t woken up to that fact. And here Jesus addresses the churches, but he says at the end that the Spirit is speaking to the churches. And a part of normal Christianity is that there’s a sense in which we have a communication to us from heaven,

[00:10:20] from Christ or from the Father, can’t always distinguish, but the Spirit is the communicator. He’s the one that often puts into practice, puts into effect the things that the Father and Son has decided. He’s the one that fans the flames of our hearts, which is what those seven letters are about, of Jesus speaking to the need for Christians to be on fire, to be alive. And that leads me to the second thing that’s in this letter. But what it’s about is the fervency that is normal Christianity. Look earlier in the particular chapter, and I’m referring to the verses up there, 14, 15. And verse 15, he says, I know your works. Now, we are taught often and quite correctly, so, that we’re not saved by our works. You don’t get to earn your salvation.

[00:11:22] You don’t get to have your sins disregarded because you do some good things to compensate. But yet the works have got a place. They’re not for our justification. That comes because Christ died for our sins, and Christ is our justification. and because God looks at us through Jesus, through being because he’s the Savior and we’ve come untrusted in him for his saving of us, we’re justified because of him and not us, not works. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for Christian works which are not so much the means by which we depend on getting forgiven but they’re the consequence of our having come into relationship with God and in that relationship the key that God is

[00:12:12] looking at the key that Jesus is particularly sensitive to is what those works say about your love for him and he goes on to say because I know your works you neither cold nor hot what that you were either cold or hot so because you look warm and neither cold nor hot I will spit you out of my mouth now Now incidentally Laodicea, the city to which this was written, had the need of water, but they got water through long pipelines and it came from somewhere where it was hot. And when it arrived at their town, it was neither hot now, any longer, or cold. And the people found there was something, I was going to say distasteful but unacceptable, about something that’s neither cool or cold water, which is beautiful, especially when when it’s a hot day, or hot water

[00:13:06] when you want to use it in your cooking. And if someone gave you a drink, I don’t know whether it’s ever happened to you, I go around to lots of different places and people give me cups of teas, which I love. But if I get one and I’m stupid enough to let it sit there without recognising it’s there, and 10 minutes later I pick up, oh dear, I’ve let it get cold, then I have to pretend I like it. And, although it’s good for your throat.

[00:13:33] I wanna tell you that there’s something wonderful about a hot drink, and something wonderful about a cold drink, but in the middle not so good. Would that you were either cold or hot, so because you’re lukewarm and neither cold nor hot I will spit you out of my mouth. Now what’s fascinating to me, is that this is a passage which really hit me when I was young, quite young. In fact, in the home group I’m talking about that does the revelation study, I went there recently and Darryl normally leads it,

[00:14:12] but he had elections he was in charge of and taking care of. So he left it to someone else and it was in one of the newly arrived people to that home group. His name is Dan, he was here this morning. But I went for the first time to his house to go to it. This is on last Wednesday night and it was a home group as we went further into what we were doing. I can’t remember exactly the details now, but we had a time of study and then as we’re leaving, Dan got talking. It turns out that he and I had a little bit of history in common, maybe not quite the same years, but we’ve both been people who’ve had a lot of involvement in Papua New Guinea and he was a child in Papua New Guinea.

[00:15:00] I had one of my first big crusades in Papua New Guinea and Baroko Baptist Church. And so we have something in common. And when I realised that he was there, I burst into joy because that was a very special time. And I made some friends there who have remained friends in evangelism ever since. My episode was 1975. But suddenly I realised that this fellowship that I had with Dan was due to something God did once. And what was more, it made me tell him my story about how I got turned on fire as a Christian. And the story came about because as a young student finishing school and going to university for the first time, I had an older sister, Jenny, who was a university student and very much involved in Christian things. But there was a Christian group for overseas students, and it was called OCF.

[00:16:04] Put your hand up if you’ve heard OCF. Alright, some of you heard this sermon. This is you hearing my most original sermon, if you want to know. I only have one earlier than this, than this sermon. This is my most original sermon, and what was a shock to me was Dan participated in OCF. His age group’s a bit different, but nonetheless, OCF was a tremendous organization. My sister being in it, they decided to run a camp. They invited my parents, my dad working at the college and mother came along to be the camp parents for this camp, and they invited an evangelist from Victoria to come and be the speaker.

[00:16:49] She came home telling about the glorious details that they’d arranged up at Mount Remarkable for this camp. Because she was going and my parents were going, that left my older brother and me. My older brother, we get on very well, except for the fact that he shot me twice on different occasions. They were accident sort of things, or well, I was chasing him at one stage and he fired back at me and he ran up my arm. When my parents came home, I made up a story. I said I was trying to be the rifleman and swing the rifle around and it came off my finger and I shot myself.

[00:17:27] She jumped in the car and down to the doctor and she told the story. He was smart enough to know it’s very difficult with a rifle to shoot yourself up the arm. She told her off a long lecture of how she needed to look after her kids better. She kept saying, no, this is what happened. My brother eventually, about a year later, confessed that it was him. Anyway, the whole story of all of that has to do with the fact that I still love my brother and he and I, but my parents couldn’t leave us alone in the college where dad was a principal when Jenny, my very responsible older sister, and my parents were away. Because they commanded and said, you’ve got to come too. Now that gave me a problem.

[00:18:21] The problem was that Peter had a big motorbike, an ex-police bike, and he used to take me to school sitting on the back, but he liked scaring me and he used to shoot through gaps. When you’re sitting on the back, your knees stick out and these knees got to clip little cars that he was revving between and I was scared. Sometimes if he thought I went to blow my nose, he’d rev it and see if he could get me off the back. He never succeeded at that, but I no longer volunteered to go on the back of his motorbike. My parents were going to drive up, they said, you can come with us, but that would be remarkable as a fair drive. I thought that would be boring and I’d have to sit in the back sitting up like Jackie.

[00:19:15] The young people from the university were going by bus and I suddenly twigged on a good opportunity because there was one of those young people who was involved in OCF and this fellow was from Tanzania and this fellow, an African person, had been a complete wash out, had drunk it on the streets and the Christians had found him out of it lying in the streets and had taken him back to where they met, sobered him up and when he got sober told him of Christ and won him to the Lord. His life radically changed. Now he had a scholarship to come to Australia and study forestry. He’s one of these Africans, they all have different styles, but this type had curly hair and he didn’t used to have to cut it, he just squashed it in a bit more and it was

[00:20:05] sort of afro-ish and if you asked him if you’ve got a pen, he’d go, ooh, he’s one. He was quite a character studying forestry. I thought it was a bit of a joke because he came to Australia to study forestry when we’ve got the Nullarbor which means no trees and for the here he is having left Africa to come to study forestry in Australia, but he came as a person that had come to Christ and the thing about it was he couldn’t stop talking about it, so every person he met didn’t matter who it was, didn’t matter how big and important was the German professor, but he bailed him up by asking him the question, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal saviour? He asked the German professor. He didn’t care how, some people looked at it as very fundamentalistic and, you know,

[00:20:58] but something about him, the fervency that he had just shot out and he’d asked all the people, I remember there was a young man who lived across the back fence from where the college was, he was roughly my age, I’d never talked to him. Everyone arrived from Africa and within a short time had witnessed him across that back fence about Christ. You can’t help notice the difference when there’s someone who’s neither cold nor hot, someone that seems to have a fire in their faith. That’s actually what this letter, this addressing into the letters is about, it’s being not lukewarm, not cold nor but someone who’s hot for Christ and true Christianity not only needs to be doctorally correct in being Trinitarian but it also needs to involve the

[00:21:56] relationship with Jesus that has fire in it and Jason exemplified it and he’d asked all sorts of people, I heard he was his favourite question, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal saviour? I became afraid that he’d asked me the question because although I knew I knew Christ, I also knew I didn’t have the same love for him that Jason had. This letter is calling on the fact that it goes on to say because you’re lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth, that’s Jesus speaking. For you say, and this is the next bit that really hit me, I am rich, I’ve prospered, I need nothing, not realising that you’re wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked, if ever you’ve got a list of adjectives that said that you’re not something there, this

[00:22:48] is it. In comparison to Jason, I was realising painfully that there was perhaps something missing in me. Well on that camp up there at Mount Remarkable, I was 14 I think at the time and all the rest were university students, there was one of them there who was from a Russian place, I think he lived in Australia for a while but he had a good Russian accent when he needed one and I found that rather interesting and I copied his accent too when he had it on the Russian part and when we arrived at the camp, they’re all university students and I’m 14, prepubescent, if you saw a picture of me you’d laugh because I’m gawky and skinny and fair and looks younger than I really was and I’m there with all of these older ones

[00:23:44] but they had one day when they didn’t have people, the spokesman from Victoria was giving the talks and they had none of that but they had a day set aside to go walking up the top of Mount Remarkable. It’s quite a good stretch of a walk and they’d invited local youth group persons to come, not that they were a lot, but there were two girls who were my age and they came along and that was good for me because I kept on my Russian accent and they wanted to know who I was and I told them I was from Russia and made up a whole lot of storyline that that I’m here to study university, which why I look so young. And this conversation, I had to keep up all the way up

[00:24:30] to the top of Mount Remarkable. I don’t know whether they must have guessed sometime or other when I was pulling their legs. But when we got back down to the finish of it all, they had arranged for there to be some afternoon tea. And they had this tremendous punch with all the beautiful things that make punch nice. Lots of pineapple you’ve got to have. And I’m 14. There’s two girls my age.

[00:24:58] And there’s punch, which do you think got bigger? I was running between them and the punch to get another glass. And Jason saw me getting an extra glass of punch. And he came really quickly across. And he said, Jimmy, which is what I was called back then, those two girls, are they Christians yet? I knew that they weren’t. I’d found out where they’re at. But then he said, Jimmy, he says, have you told them about Jesus yet?

[00:25:38] And in my head, I had this glass of fruit drink. But it came over me like a thunderclap, a thunderclap. What was the difference between him and me was that he loved Jesus, which is why he had the question, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal Savior? And I didn’t really very much. And that realization, I want to tell you, was 60 years ago. It’s been a long time since the Lord got me active and on fire. And it’s something that I have to always watch. It’d be very easy to lean back on things

[00:26:27] you’ve seen and done or times when you’ve loved the Lord and just lose the edge of it. And in that original passage I showed you, don’t worry putting it up, but the original passage, the Apostle Paul says near the end of the Book of Romans, it’s a long time since we first believed. And what he’s actually getting to is that the time when Jesus comes to test what we are is closer than when we first believed. and tonight I want to tell to you that Jesus says to you it might be closer to

[00:27:11] the end then you realize when he comes don’t let his coming catch you at a time when you’re lukewarm and so he goes on to say and uses the metaphor in the part here about the letter to the latest hens in the next slide he uses the letter for no sorry I it’s the previous one yeah he uses it to say that you’re not as rich as you think you are you need to let me warm you up and that’s the purpose of the later part that he goes on to say behold I stand verse 20 at the door and knock and in one of our previous sermons we talked about the fact whose church is this and the answer is that Christ’s Church but yet he sometimes stands at the door of his own church and knocks because we take it is our church we take it is where we enjoy things where we’re in charge no it’s

[00:28:19] Christ’s church. But he pictures himself at the door of his own church. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. And then he says, if any individual, any person, any one person, any man, any person hears my voice and opens the door, I will come on in to him and fellowship to eat with him and he with me. And so the invitation from Christ that comes to us through this seventh letter, the one to the loudest is, this invitation is, he wants to warm us up, he wants to set us on fire, he wants us to regain the love we may be once had and it’ll be achieved by opening the door to let him come and relate to us personally at a deeper level. I know you’ve heard me say before, but in this church I had the blessing that one of the home groups, another one where they emphasise the people running it. That what counts in a church, what counts in services like this, I don’t know how they worded it now, but whether or not the pastor actually has his prayer time in order. And

[00:29:34] it was one of those occasions when God gave me a needle in the back to get things in order. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anybody hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into that one and fellowship with him in a meal and he with me. That’s Jesus who through the Holy Spirit speaks to us tonight. What he wants of you and me is that we love him and we keep attending to the relationship. Find the things that, depending on what gift is yours, that when you do it, it really gives you a charge. I know what mine is, just talking to people about Christ. The best way for me to have a day, I go home zinging, is to go and get a few bus rides and sit next to someone in a bus shelter. Then they’ve got nothing, they can’t get away for a while, the bus hasn’t come. But tell people about Jesus. It’s what I love to do most. And when I joined Jason, I didn’t use his question, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal Saviour? When I started from that moment

[00:30:57] on at my high school to tell anybody and everybody about Jesus, something happened in me. Something happened 60 years ago that I always need reminding of and not letting the time that’s passed mean that I’ve slipped back from being what that makes you to be. When you have Jesus and he comes and fellowships with you, there’s something of his person. I made lots of mistakes in my witnessing. I’m not going to tell you them all now, any of them now. I laugh at some of them, but the funny thing is that even though I didn’t always do it right, when there is a sense of Christ that’s speaking to people, it gets them. Jason was like that, so everybody used his big question, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal Saviour? He did it at the University, the big intellectuals, professors. He didn’t care. And on that particular camp at Mount Remarkable, by the end of it, there were scores of students who gave their testimony time through my brother Jason talking

[00:32:10] to me at university. I have come to know my need of Jesus. And they said, I’ve just happened here in this camp. It was a glorious camp to be present at 60 years ago. And on the home group, this last, when do they have that home group? Wednesday night. And I realised that the fellow whose house we’re at, he’s new to our church, and that was the first time, or second time, maybe he’d been at the home group, maybe third time, but he had it now at his house, first time at his house. Right at the end, he told about being in Papua New Guinea, involved with OCF. All these memories came back to me again. What a thing that organisation is, they get the students from overseas, and they tell them about Jesus. And Jason, my older sister, worked in those, and they saw many students come to Christ. And I hear it’s still going, this organisation. It’s not the organisation that we need. It is the awareness that what

[00:33:20] Christianity truly is, is Trinitarian. It is about works as well as getting right with God, but not works to justify you, but works because you’re already in the door. And because you’ve drawn close to Christ, it’s about walking and being close to Jesus. And occasionally, he needs to pinpoint the letter to the letter, since to us, to call us to go back to it. That’s my lesson for us tonight. Some of you probably heard some version thereof of this sermon, because I’ve given it around Australia, everywhere, and seen a lot of people who’ve not only got on fire for Christ, but some hear that verse in Revelation 3, Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and they’re not necessarily converted. And they take it that it’s an invitation from Jesus to let him have access to changing them. He’ll do that because he died for you, because he rose again to be your saviour. He’s been to heaven and has sent his Holy Spirit to come and live in you

[00:34:28] in the moment that you say yes to Jesus to be your personal saviour. Then he gives his Spirit to you to live in you, and he makes you on fire. And in that love is what you find is the work that comes out of you spontaneously because you’ve found Jesus. And he loves to see that. Do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal saviour? It’s what I ask you tonight. And let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for that home group that got onto the Laodicean Letter, along with the other six of them. I thank you, Heavenly Father, for the home group being at Dan’s place this last week. And I thank you, Heavenly Father, for suddenly finding out that he was the person that had been working in OCF in New Guinea. And I had such good happenings to do with people from there and other places around the world. Father, I praise you for what it is to be a real Christian, because the real one is not just believing a set of things,

[00:35:44] not just doing a set of things, not just being a church person, but a dinky, dire, real Christian, somebody who loves Jesus. And Lord, if there’s someone here who needs the question from Jason 60 years ago delivering it, but through my sermon, getting to them, do you love the Lord Jesus as your own personal saviour? Jesus wants you to, and it’s why this letter is here in the Bible and the Revelation. We thank you for tonight, in Jesus’ name. Amen.