What’s wrong with being lukewarm? Isn’t being somewhere in the middle the right place to be? The safest place to be? I mean, who would ever complain of people trudging silently and patiently along, never bothering anyone? Why did the Bible deem it better to be cold instead of being lukewarm? Is being bad better than being not good enough?
I used to ponder about this when I was a lot younger, because I just couldn’t believe how being lukewarm can be very much like a sin for one to be reprimanded for. It was only later though that I realized the true gravity of the condition of people being referred to as such.
What is being lukewarm anyway? To begin with, we should make a clear distinction between being lukewarm and being average. Being lukewarm does not refer to one’s status or capacity in life, but in one’s state of inner consciousness and aliveness in spirit.
Being lukewarm is a state of passivity, of being totally crippled to move either forward or backward, of being stuck and not having the least desire or discontent that would prompt him to change and grow and really live. Being lukewarm is being oblivious to what is happening around him as he isn’t even aware of any activity happening within himself. He has reached a state of living where he can get by, and where he has been able to achieve enough that he is afraid of losing what little he has, and hence unable to risk anything to gain that which could really make him happy.
Truly it would be better if the person is in a worse condition. By then, he would have risked everything believing that he has really nothing to lose and everything to gain. It would have been better if he were miserable and in pain. He would have sought the cause of his troubles and remedied them, arriving nearer to his healing and salvation.
But for a man who doesn’t even want to move from where he’s always been, who is too comfortable to know he isn’t really happy, who is afraid to risk dying so he can find new life, for such a lukewarm spirit, what is it that can save him and bring him out of the comfortable grave he has made for himself? What can prompt him to laugh like he’s never laughed before? What can prompt him to weep as he has never wept? What can prompt him to love and find the real meaning to the life he so desires to save but unknowingly loses the more each time he chooses to be right in the middle and safe?
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"