[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters! Every time I see a full church, my soul rejoices at the beautiful number of all of us who are united together in fellowship with one another and with God. What a joy to praise God together in a congregation of believing souls! But then my soul is involuntarily overwhelmed, for I have to think of the even greater number of those who would be among us, but we wait for them in vain - they are not here, nor are they ever here. There are just enough of them in our congregation. There are about 2300 of us Reformed in Pasarete, and if we count by plenty, 600 of us are regular church-goers. This means that in our congregation, more than 1,500 Reformed brothers and sisters regularly attend church every week to meet with God. At this very moment, more than 1500 of our brothers and sisters are missing, not here - where are they? How interesting it would be to take a look among them, to see where they are and what they are doing while God is waiting for them.But let us narrow it down even more. The weekly Bible studies and other Bible missionary meetings are attended by about 100 souls in total. This means that out of the 500 regular church-goers, there are 500 who, in the drabness or drudgery of everyday life, never once find themselves in the fellowship of a believing brother or sister. As I get to know the members of our congregation, I am getting to know more and more brothers and sisters who, by their own admission, have never seen the new church - this church. That is, they have not been to church at all for at least a year and a half. What could be the reason for this? When I look for the reason, I very rarely find in the souls of our believers an open defiance, a conscious unbelief against God. There are also very few who have become angry with the church or one of its officials for some reason, and now take a position of sullen passivity towards it. Fewer still are those who do not come here because they attend other churches or because they are members of sectarian, occult communities and look down on the church from the heights of their imagined spiritual superiority. It is not unbelief, not open hostility, not sulking or sectarianism that keeps the Reformed masses away from the church, but a much more terrible, much greater and more dangerous enemy than all these: indifference. Today, many might excuse themselves with the fashionable excuse that they are busy and not available. My brothers and sisters, this is the greatest self-deception of modern man, for as much as it is true that life today is a great chase and a great rush, it is also true that everyone can do what he wants to do. With sincere repentance, Brothers and Sisters, we acknowledge that our non-Reformed Christian brothers and sisters, no matter how important and busy their dignity, have time to attend mass every Sunday, and even to participate in the thousands of activities of the congregations, but our Reformed great ones, or even our Reformed little ones, cannot manage to schedule their time in such a way that they have one or two hours a week for Jesus and His mother Church.
Thank God, there are not just Reformed people like that. I have seen Hungarian Reformed prime ministers, state secretaries, joint-stock company directors, factory workers and mothers with many children who regularly attended church services, or if they could not attend, then a Bible study or a presbytery meeting, so that even during their busy work they kept in touch with their church because they wanted to.
When someone mentions his busyness, in almost every case - and let us not be afraid to tell the truth: in every case - he is covering his indifference, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Such indifferent reformers are the majority. In our congregation, more than 1,500 souls do not care what Christ and His mother church are doing here in Pasaret, whether there is a church, whether the sermon is preached, whether their children attend. They don't care what works are going on in the church, that Jesus is calling them, that he died for them, that the afterlife is made up of two parts: heaven and hell. These are the lukewarm Christians of whom the Holy Spirit spoke to the Apostle John in the Word read, "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot." It is a very miserable state of mind that the Scripture indicates by the word cold: such is the cold, hard-hearted man, such is the cruel spirit that rebels against God. But even more miserable is the lukewarm state of mind, which is both cold and warm, and therefore neither cold nor warm. When cold and warm meet, they mutually lose their strength. Cold neutralizes warmth, and warm neutralizes cold. The lukewarm, the indifferent souls are not godless, not pagan, but they are worse than if they were. If we talk to them about Christ, Christianity, the Church, they listen as if they were old acquaintances of the matter. They smile amiably, nod approvingly, inquire politely, make polite but unmeaning promises when necessary. But they are never enthusiastic, they do nothing, their eyes never light up at the sound of an expensive promise or a grand plan. They remain mature, sober, so-called 'normal', and perhaps even secretly contemptuous of 'fans'. My brothers and sisters, I feel that there are three areas of experience in our lives where sobriety, wise moderation, cold objectivity mean poverty and death rather than praise: art, love and religion - only those who leave the cold prison of objectivity and sobriety and become a biased fan of art, or love, or God, will enter into intimate relations with them.
One would think that lukewarm is a transition between cold and warm. Maybe in physics it does, but in the world of the soul, lukewarmness is further away from warmth than cold. That is why we read in the Word: you would rather be cold! It is not that the spiritual state is on the way from cold to warm, but the other way round: from warm to cold! Indifference is therefore the state of a process of cooling down. To be lukewarm is to have once been warm, to have been a believer, but no longer to be one. So the warmth of the indifferent soul is found in his past. Some people's souls were once kindled by a conference, a Bible study, a sermon, but since then the flame has been losing its light and warmth. There are those who, at their wedding or confirmation, felt their souls penetrated by the warmth of simple faith, but have since forgotten how to fan the fire. Some find in their childhood memories some warmth that embellished their childhood, but alas, only that. There are those whose father or mother was a man of a spirit infused with faith, or whose ancestors of even more distant great name have radiated much blessed warmth in the public life of the Church, and behold, the late descendants become indifferent because they are content with as much warmth as the ancestry of the ancient Reformed family radiates to them.
Satan's greatest triumph is not when he has made a soul an enemy of God, but when he has made him indifferent. And this operation is done unnoticed, and we ourselves are the least likely to notice that indifference has crept into our hearts. The indifference begins by believing when Satan starts to make convincing arguments that, in fact, Sunday sanctification is not something to be taken very seriously, because there are other good Christians who work on Sunday. Then I begin to realise that I am somebody, I don't have to stand before God with such a beggar-like attitude. I read my Bible, I even go to church services, but it all starts to become an empty formality for me. Then slowly I neglect the Bible reading, the praying, the constant vigilance, I still go to church now and then, but now I am only a Christian in appearance.
So not only those who are not here now can be indifferent, but we can be indifferent too. One can also be indifferent in spirit, lukewarm in spirit, even if one is not religious in outward practice. Are you quite free from it, my brother?
I am struck by this saying in the Word: you would rather be cold! Yes, for the open enemy is never so dangerous as the secret one. The church knows that it must defend itself against atheists and pagans, but everyone thinks that the indifferent are children of the church. In the struggle against organised denial, communism or modern paganism, the church only grows stronger, hardens, and among the lukewarm the life of the church slowly goes out, like the flame of the domestic hearth in a broken family. Moreover, it is easier to lead a heathen to Christ, to soften and warm a heart of stone, than to shake a lukewarm Christian out of indifference. That is why indifferent souls are the greatest enemies of Christ and His Church, because it is not an external danger, but a gaping wound in the body of the Church through which the Church is slowly bleeding to death. That is why Jesus says to the man who is indifferent to Him, "because you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will put you out of my mouth". Which means that the Lord of the Church excludes them from His community of life, blots out their names from the book of the living, cuts them off from His trunk like a limb from a human body. The severed, cold limb is still lukewarm for a while, the tissues of the body are still alive, but it is doomed to die. It is precisely this indifference, this lukewarmness, that is the harbinger of spiritual death.
In the Word read so far, Christ's words are very sharp and incisive, one could almost say merciless. But even with all its cutting edges, He is always guided by one purpose, and so in this passage as well: the salvation of sinful man. Behind every word of severe punishment and sharp discipline is the Lord's concerned love. He expresses it in the Word that follows, "All those whom I love I will rebuke and rebuke. Be zealous therefore, and repent." It is only because Jesus loves his church so much that he rebukes indifferent souls so sharply.
But after the judgment, he also proclaims grace! Jesus says: "I stand at the door and knock. Jesus not only knocks, but he knocks, he bangs, and he does this precisely to wake up the indifferent, to shake up the indifferent souls who are listening here. Every sermon, every Bible study, every church meeting is nothing other than such a great rattling of souls. There is only one way out of indifference: to let Christ into our lives for once, to let him stay and take possession of us, to settle down in us. Indifference is gone once my soul is opened to Him.
Even now Christ stands before you and rattles the door of your soul. It cannot be all the same to you whether Christ or Satan, the church or the world, means life to you! As we have just read in the Bible, "what is the covenant of truth and unrighteousness? What is the fellowship of light with darkness? And what fellowship hath Christ with Belial? Or what has a believer to do with an unbeliever?" - in the soul of one and the same man? Jesus said: you cannot serve two masters. Impossible, physically impossible. Either-or! I cannot divide my soul! I can't be indifferent, because that means that it doesn't matter to me whether Christ or Satan, heaven or hell, wins.
Choose, decide, my brother, but today! And if you have decided for Christ with all your soul, if you have admitted Him to you: let us all stand together, let us go forth everywhere, and let Christ knock with our hands on the doors of other souls, and call to decision by our word the hundreds who are regularly absent from here! Let us not be ashamed to knock regularly each week on the door of a house and on the door of a soul, inviting them to worship, to Bible study, to fellowship with our Reformed brothers and sisters. Let us shake up our acquaintances, let us shake up the thousand and five hundred Reformed brothers and sisters in Pasaréti from their torpor of terrible indifference, and tell them not to be ashamed to be burning-hearted Reformed Christians and to join us!
My brothers and sisters, Jesus says, let us take him to our hearts and pass him on to others: 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will go in and have supper with him, and he with me. He that overcometh, I will grant him to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame and sat with my Father in his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches."
Amen.
Date: 27 October 1940.
Lesson
2Kor 6,11-18