Do not become a lukewarm Christian, for you will miss out on the beauty of God.
According to Vatican Radio, Pope Francis stressed this to faithful during his daily morning Mass at Casa Santa Marta, drawing from today’s readings, which featured the warning in the Book of Revelations against those Christians of the Church of Laodicea “who are neither hot nor cold: I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
The Lord, the Pope reminded, warns against that calm “without substance” of the lukewarm, calling it “a calm which deceives.”
“But what does a lukewarm person think?” Francis asked, noting, “The Lord says it here: He thinks he is rich. ‘I have grown rich and have need of nothing. I am calm.’ That calm which deceives. If, in the heart of the Church, of a family, of a community, of a person there is an ever-present calm, God is not there.”
The Pope urged those who may be currently ‘lukewarm’ not to fall asleep in the false belief of needing nothing.
“The lukewarm are not aware they are naked,” he said, noting they also “lose the capacity to contemplate, the capacity to see the great and beautiful things of God.”
“For this the Lord seeks to awaken us, to help us convert. But, he continued, the Lord is “present in another way: He is there to invite us: ‘Behold, I knock at the door.’”
When the Lord knocks at our door, the Jesuit Pontiff highlighted, we need to be able to discern. There are Christians, the Pope lamented, who “are not aware when the Lord knocks.”
“For them, every noise is the same,” the Pope said, noting, “We must ‘understand well’ when the Lord knocks, when He wants to bring us His consolation.”
“The initiative is from the Spirit towards the Lord. He raises His eyes and says: ‘But come; invite me into your house.” The Lord is there… He is always there with love: whether to correct us, to invite us to supper, or to be invited by us. He is there to tell us: ‘Awake’… ‘Open’… ‘Come down’. It is always He.”
“Do I know how to distinguish in my heart when the Lord tells me to awake, to open, or to come down?” the Pope asked, praying the Holy Spirit give us the grace to know how to discern these calls.
