Have you ever gone to a spa or soaked in a hot spring?
These places are designed to be both therapeutic and refreshing to their guests.
Just recently, I heard a teaching on Jesus’ letter to the church at Laodicea that changed my perspective on the challenge Jesus made to them.
Most Westerners see His challenge to these believers as a call to be ‘hot’ or ‘on fire’ for the Lord.
In other words, He wants them to be passionately walking uprightly before Him.
However, to the Laodicean, His challenge meant something different.
They used aqueducts to bring water from the mineral hot springs of Heirapolis and the cold water from the snow melt from the mountains near Colossae into their wealthy city of Laodicea.
They drank the hot water because they believed it to be therapeutic for their health, and they drank the cold water for refreshment.
However, if the water was lukewarm, they deemed it to be unhealthy, and they would spit it out or even induce vomiting if they had swallowed it.
To them, it was toxic.
With that understanding, we see that Jesus was calling them to both therapeutic and refreshing as individual Christians and as a church body.
To be a lukewarm Christian is to be toxic.
How do we be both therapeutic and refreshing?
Very simply, we need to be conduits of the life of Jesus in us.
As we learn our new identity as saints in Christ Jesus, we also learn how to set aside our flesh patterns and put on the mind of Christ.
As we put off our toxic flesh, we are in a position to receive the therapeutic and refreshing living water of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When people interact with us, they will experience the love and joy of the Lord Jesus and come away refreshed and healed from the ravages of this fallen world.
So, beloved, as His children let’s take our hooks out of people and the things of this world, and instead, look up and receive the abundance of His love and life, so that our lives become both therapeutic and refreshing to those around us.
Blessings!
Robyn Henning