Hot or Cold

I’m still working my way through studying all of the scriptures about Jesus Christ.  I’m doing this because of a  talk President Nelson gave in General Conference in April of 2017.  He also wrote a blog post about it earlier that year.

I was a little late in starting and it is taking me much longer than 6 weeks to work through it but it is strengthening my testimony of a lot of things. It is also helping me to get to know Jesus Christ better and see just how much He loves us all.

If it is something you think you might like to do you can print all of the references out because a wonderful blogger has compiled all of the references into one printable document here.

Anyway, my studies this morning brought be to this reference:

Revelations 3:15-16

15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

I currently serve as the Relief Society President in my ward ( a ward is another word for congregation if you are reading this and aren’t LDS). As the Relief Society president I spend a lot of time thinking about the women in my ward. I recently got an email asking what we think should be the focus in the upcoming year or years. My first thought was service, we should focus on service. But the thing is, we talk about service all of the time. Even though we focus on it in our lessons and talks we have some problems finding volunteers to help with things. So it’s easy to say our focus should be on service but how do we get people to volunteer or say yes when asked?

After thinking about that question for a while I realized that part of the problem might be that we aren’t fully converted. We don’t have an understanding of  the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We aren’t all in.

So this morning when I was reading I was struck by these verses. God doesn’t want us to be lukewarm. In other words he wants us all in or all out. Make a decision. Don’t be a fence sitter. Do you believe Jesus Christ? The question isn’t do you believe IN Him, but rather, do you believe what He says all throughout the scriptures? If you believe what He says then you know things are going to be hard but it’s going to be worth the work and there will be joy in following the plan.

So many of us go to church on Sunday and then come home and get back to our regular lives. We go to church because, well, that’s what you do on Sunday. And then church is over more than just because the clock strikes 12. It’s over because it isn’t a part of us. We don’t carry it around with us.

We need to have a desire to improve, better ourselves, progress. And not based on what the world thinks we should be doing but based instead on what Christ wants for us. He wants us to become like Him and we can’t become like Him unless we are following in His footsteps. You become like those who you love, respect, and hang around with. Maybe we should be hanging around with Jesus Christ more. Adding prayer into our daily lives, considering who we should serve and when a person pops into our head, actually going and doing that service, spending time talking about spiritual things with our families, meditating and spending time in our scriptures truly studying the words.

I don’t want to be lukewarm. I want to be all in. How about you?

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