In the recent past, we have had cause to examine why the Lord described riches as deceitful. Two things stood out then; that is, the tendency to think it is what makes us significant and secure. Studying the church in Laodicea, we can safely add another deceptive nature of riches. It provides a faulty standard of measuring spiritual progress. While the church was boasting of its riches in financial and material terms, God saw it as wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked! God was particularly against that church because of its lukewarm state – neither hot nor cold. Such a situation cannot fit into God’s plan for this age. We are approaching a time when the church of Christ must be restored to its apostolic fervour; no other arrangement can make it fulfil its prophetic mandate.

When Jesus said He would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail, He must have had in mind a firebrand church. In the language of the prophet, the church He had in mind must be comparable to a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth. (Isaiah 41:15). The current reality that we see is a far cry from the militant, conquering people that Jesus had in mind. What we have is a great flux; churchy enough that it cannot be called the world, and worldly enough that it cannot be called the church. As if A. W. Tozer was describing our days, he put the matter so poignantly in his book, I Talk Back to the Devil: “In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone, and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone”. The solution that has been watered down must be re-mixed according to biblical standards, so that it can become medicine to cure the world. God can begin this great restructuring with you as you reject everything that is alien to the Bible and submit to the Holy Spirit.