Laodicea; The Chruch Of Today? Series

Since the Garden of Eden God wanted to provide everything we needed. He wanted to make our lives easy, all he wanted was fellowship with us. Now it seems that we provide everything we need and want out of our own self-sufficiency, and the only thing we need from Him is salvation, or his intervention when problems come, and most people don’t even see the need for that.

People these days say that God is obsolete. I guess to some degree that’s true because we have made him obsolete, trying to get Him out of the picture by our own efforts to provide what we need. I really believe that God wants us to be poor in the sense that we are not so self-sufficient. Unless it was possible to have everything and still have a desperate zeal for and dependence on God.

That is why the Gospel is booming in underdeveloped countries, because they need God to provide the basics. In many ways in western culture man has replaced God with their own achievements, this has been true since the tower of Babel, and it allows us to put God in the background of our lives, calling on Him only when desperate.

The Laodicean church was smug. “Look what we have achieved, we don’t need anything”. But Jesus says, “Oh yeah, you say you are rich, but I tell you, you are poor”. Translated into our day, this church had plenty of money, padded mahogany pews, a giant pipe organ, professional music, a dynamic preacher who sold lots of books, the most important people of the community attending, and all the other churches compared themselves to it.

But the Lord, who really owns the church had horrible things to say about it. He is basically saying the church is not a country club operated for the benefit of its members. It’s not a performing arts centre where one is entertained by charismatic speeches and wonderful music, and it is not a political action group. It is supposed to be salt and light to a dying world, with nobody inside dying.

Ray Stedman says the Laodicean church period is characterized by people dictating what is to be taught that will tickle their ears, rather than submitting to the authority of the Word of God. Isn’t it interesting that the name Laodicea means “people’s rights”.

There was a time when the church taught that not only are our rights as Christians not important, but that the old self was to be crucified, denied, and kept under strict control. Again this death to self and resurrection in Christ is symbolized in the Baptisms we will witness today. But today the church is increasingly compromising on the Word of God and putting self at centre stage, rather than Christ and what he demands from His church.

How can the Church of Christ condone abortion, or the marrying and ordaining of homosexuals? Yet it’s happening at an alarming rate in many churches under the vale of love, inclusiveness, and tolerance. The church was never commanded to be tolerant of things that go against the revealed will of God.