Complacency

During our recent elder’s retreat, one of the questions we asked ourselves was: what are the burdens we have for our church?  What’s our sense of the dangers and opportunities we face?

We have had an extended period of peace and blessing as a congregation over the last few years.  (Certain people have had their share of struggles, but, as a congregation, we have been blessed.)  The danger in such a situation is, of course, spiritual complacency – leading to spiritual deadness and sin.

In the letters to the 7 churches in Revelation 2-3, the repeated warning is a warning against complacency.  The churches were losing their first love, tolerating sin, being content with appearances, being lukewarm.  They were exhorted to remember, be faithful, repent, hold fast, wake up, endure patiently, seek fellowship with Jesus.

In one remarkable passage, Jesus said to the church in Sardis, “Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.  Remember, then, what you have received and heard.  Keep it, and repent.” (3:2-3).

The church in Sardis was “only mostly dead”.  It’s possible to be a Christian and yet be barely alive.  The church was failing in works to be what God intended them to be.  What I find surprisingly interesting is Jesus’ solution.  Certainly this church needed to wake up and do something if their works were incomplete.  But Jesus says they needed to wake up and remember something – “remember what you have received and heard.  Keep what you have received and then you will repent.”

The Christian life is always about thinking first, then doing.  It is about living out of the Gospel.  Why so many exhortations to “remember”, to “hold fast”, to “keep my word”?  It is because the power to obey comes from the source.

The number one thing we cannot be complacent about is our hold on the Gospel and its reality in our hearts.  You’ve heard of people who are ‘cutters’?  Sorry to borrow from such a sad term – but we need to be spiritual ‘cutters’.  As we saw in our sermon yesterday from Acts 2:37, we need to be “cut to the heart”.  We need the Word of God which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” piercing our hearts.  We need to be convicted and comforted and changed daily by the Gospel.