SIGNIFICANT: THE LOW LEVEL OF MORAL ENTHUSIASM

“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation? …” (HEBREWS 2:3)

In only one field of human interest do we Americans seem slow and apathetic: that is the field of personal religion.

 

Church people habitually approach the matter of their personal relation to God in a dull, halfhearted way which is altogether out of keeping with their general temperament and wholly inconsistent with the importance of the subject.

 

Dante, on his imaginary journey through hell, came upon a group of lost souls who sighed and moaned continually as they whirled about aimlessly in the dusky air. Virgil, his guide, explained that these were the “wretched people,” the “nearly soulless,” who while they lived on earth had not moral energy enough to be either good or evil. They had earned neither praise nor blame, and with them and sharing in their punishment were those angels who would take sides neither with God nor Satan.

 

The writer pictured the doom of all of the weak and irresolute crew to be suspended forever between a hell that despised them and a heaven that would not receive their defiled presence. Not even their names were to be mentioned again in heaven or earth or hell.

 

Was Dante saying in his own way what our Lord had said long before to the church of Laodicea: “I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth”?

 

The low level of moral enthusiasm among us may have a significance far deeper than we are willing to believe!

 

  1. W. Tozer