Echoes From the Campfire

When the buzzards begin to collect it’s sure high time to watch out.”
              –Ernest Haycox  (A Rider of the High Mesa)

    “So because you are lukewarm (spiritually useless), and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth [rejecting you with disgust].”
              –Revelation 3:16 (AMP)
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One man, committed unreservedly to God and His Word, can make an enormous difference for good in the lives of God’s people.  One person can bring about victory, blessing and forward movement.  We live in a day when we desperately need such a person.  A person who will stand above the crowd, who will speak out and say, “thus saith the Lord,” despite what others may say about him.  To be that person requires absolute loyalty and obedience to the Lord.
    We live in times where there is a tendency for the younger generation to accept the status quo and lose the vision of the older generation.  We are even seeing signs that they are not satisfied with the status quo and are chanting for more to be given them, yet without them having to do their part.  Free education, free medical and health, free this and free that, but they do not understand or realize that there is nothing free.  
    I have been writing about compromise.  I want to continue to look at compromise and throw in some thoughts about complacency.  First, look at the following Scriptures:

         “You shall make no covenant with them or with their gods. They shall not live in your land, because they will make you sin against Me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”
                   –Exodus 23:32-33 (NASB)

If you would read Exodus 34:10-16, you would see that God commands that there be no compromise, that they should destroy the gods of the land, and do not intermarry with the people of the land.  Now, possibly one of the saddest verses in all of Scripture is found in Judges.

         “All that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel.”
                   –Judges 2:10 (NASB)

A generation of people that did not know the Lord.  This was a generation, as someone wrote, “Was so entirely devoted to the world, so intent upon the business of it, and so indulgent of the flesh, in ease and luxury, that they never minded the true God and His holiness and so were easily drawn aside to false gods and their abominable superstition.”  Instead of being filled with praise and wonder and grateful to the Lord of their fathers these people yawned with boredom, moaning, “Aw, we’ve heard all that before.”
    The people wanted blessing without the sacrifice.  They wanted luxury without obedience.  They want entertainment rather that reverence.  They are yawning in the face of God.  It is not a yawn from being tired, it is a yawn of indifference, one of Satan’s most effective weapons.  The generation that followed Joshua, and it is true of the generation of today, is one of lukewarmness, a complacency and apathy about Biblical truths.  They have lost their first love and have replaced it with self.  I think it was Ravi Zacharias who said that, “Spiritual amnesia inevitably produces spiritual apostasy.”
    The nature of their failure was not intellectual ignorance; they are not uniformed.  They, as people of today, know about the Lord; they have heard of His deeds, but they refuse to know Him or acknowledge Him.  They have become complacent about the living God and had forgotten how to walk in fellowship with Him.  In other words, they have lost touch with the Lord.
    Erich Fromm wrote, “Hate is not the opposite of love.  Apathy is.”  Apathy is a great crippler.  When people no longer care about the Lord, or care to be moral under the guidelines that He has set down they are a crippled people.  Possibly the greatest rejection of God is when people become complacent in view of Calvary and the great sacrifice God gave with His Son for mankind.