The local church is called an elect lady by the Apostle John. She is called a body, the body of Christ, by the Apostle Paul. The New Testament, therefore, compares a local church with a human body; specifically, a woman. This local assembly is not a storefront mission, or a newly-planted work. It is an established church, with all the benefits and detriments associated with age. This elect lady has the wisdom of experience, the accumulated knowledge of years of Bible teaching, and the spiritual understanding that comes with those years of operating in New Testament order.

All of those are benefits of the years. But the detriments of aging can also affect this elect lady. Just as a human body weakens and gets frail in its advancing years, even so a church can lose vitality and zeal over time. Every assembly has the potential to become lukewarm. The warning of Revelation 3:15-16 is that if a church becomes lukewarm, it will be spewed out.

An assembly becomes lukewarm whenever a significant portion of the saints become lukewarm. A church is not a building; it is a group of people who have been called out of the world, and called into the body of Christ. There are ten signs to tell if you are losing the fire of your zeal for the Lord. You have become lukewarm when:

1. Prayer ceases to be a vital part of your life.
2. Your love to read and study the Bible ceases, and you are content with the knowledge you already have.
3. Compassion and love for others grows cold.
4. Sports, recreation, entertainment and vacations become a large and necessary part of your thinking.
5. Acquiring money and goods is more important than acquiring the things of God.
6. You carry bitterness, anger, or hard feelings toward other saints, and murmur against them.
7. You watch morally-degrading movies, TV, web sites, and read morally-debilitating literature.
8. You find yourself adapting contentedly to the world’s lifestyle.
9. The slightest excuse seems sufficient to keep you from doing your spiritual duty.
10. Church attendance, especially midweek prayer services and Sunday night worship, is no longer important enough for you to make the effort to be there.

The danger of lukewarmness, of course, is that if you don’t repent and become zealous for the things of God, Revelation 3:19, the Lord will spew you out; or if enough saints become lukewarm, He will remove the candlestick. Elsewhere in this issue, we have a feature article on the effects of aging on an assembly. But here, we sound the warning trumpet: be sure you aren’t becoming lukewarm in your passion for serving the Lord.

Churches and movements have represented the present move of God, grown lukewarm and cold in less time than has passed from the calling of William Sowders to today. The early church became apostate in less than 100 years. Iniquity destroyed every church the Apostle Paul built – in just a few years after his passing. How long was Corinth or Ephesus a shining beacon of truth and godly order? 40 years? 60 years? How long has your church been a part of the body of Christ? It is hard to keep a “candlestick” assembly in existence as part of the true move of God for more than a couple of generations. What the first generation fights for, and the second generation builds, subsequent generations often lose. Hopefully, the feature article in this issue will help to identify the issues of an aging assembly, and point out the biblical remedies that can be employed.