Over thirty years I’ve heard many definitions of what a “hot” Christian is. Back when I was in a legalistic church, a deacon confronted a young adult couple over their delinquency in church activities, asking them to rate their pursuit of Jesus on a scale of one to ten. He rigged it so that any answer other than ten got the “lukewarm” diagnosis. Guess what? They ranked as lukewarm!
Lukewarm is not a spiritual thermometer that we rank ourselves by. The real question is what does “hot” mean to Jesus?
For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
Revelation 3:17 ESV
The Laodiceans assessed themselves as rich based upon past experience with Jesus. Jesus’ standing outside the door and knocking disclosed their impoverished present relationship with Him. Like God’s people of old, they stopped asking, “Where is the Lord?” (Jer 2:6). Fellowshipping about Jesus with each other had supplanted fellowshipping with Jesus.
I don’t know about you but my usual tendency has been to resist even remotely being identified with this lukewarm church. But in so distancing myself from reproof, I now see I missed a rich blessing.
I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.
Revelation 3:18
Buying from Jesus is not like your typical buying. In commerce we exchange like for like. We swap money for stuff of comparable worth. Not so with Jesus! He says, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!” (Isa 55:1). When we give Him our thirst, He enriches us totally out of proportion! God’s ways are so much higher than our ways!
Besides buying gold and white garments, Jesus also counsels to buy salve to anoint our eyes to see. Uniquely only here in the New Testament, “anoint” is egchriō, derived from chriō (anoint), so pregnant in meaning. Jesus offers us the Holy Spirit as salve to open our eyes to see His glory. I buy from Jesus this salve by simply offering Him my blindness.
Are we blind? Yes and no. At times Jesus uses hyperboles to make strong points. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother…he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). Jesus’ point is not literally hating Mom and Dad but that the highest human love is as hatred in comparison with love for Him. So although we’ve seen, the light we have now is blindness compared to all the light that God is. If all that Jesus did had been written even the whole world couldn’t contain the books (Jn 21:25)! So I can always approach the Lord as a blind man. I’ve explored only a few shorelines along a vast unexplored ocean of the knowledge of God.
My son Micah’s science lesson included a YouTube video about the relative sizes of planets and stars. Our sun is ginormous compared to Earth but placed alongside other supergiant stars? It’s a grain of sand. In admiring a sunrise one morning I imagined what massive red supergiant like VY Canis Majoris would be like instead of the sun. The entire sky would be ablaze in unparalleled brilliance! Even the sunshine of what I’ve seen of God is darkness compared to what I’ve not seen.
I’d never noticed this before but Jesus’ triple title here harmonizes to the three things we’re to buy from Jesus:
And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.’
Revelation 3:14
The Amen corresponds to gold. Because all God’s promises are yes and amen in Christ (2Co 1:20), Jesus as the Amen (let it be so) secures all the riches of those promises for us. The faithful and true witness corresponds to the white garments, picturing the righteous acts of the saints.
The Beginning of God’s creation corresponds to the eye salve. The beginning of the creation is day one when God said, “Let there be light.” Day one of the new creation is fulfilled spiritually this way: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Co 4:6). Light, so vitally important to sight, marks the beginning of the creation of God, both old and new. So Jesus, the Beginning of God’s creation, offers salve to open our eyes to His light to shine into our hearts!
I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
Revelation 3:15-16
So what’s a hot Christian to Jesus? “Hot” in the Greek means hot like boiling water or the glowing of heated metal (think blacksmith). So what causes our love for Christ to boil? The two disciples on the road to Emmaus understood: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Lk 24:32) When Jesus anoints our eyes to see Him in the Bible, that kindles a fire inside us. This is first love. It’s how our new creation began. A burning heart for Jesus makes us hot Christians.
This aha moment inspires me to ask Jesus daily for His Spirit to anoint my blind eyes. As He opens the Scriptures in response, my heart has been burning in love for Him. Let’s yield to Jesus our blind eyes today and every day to buy from Him eye salve to appreciate His great worth.
Glory Unveiled: Discovering Jesus 