The fireworks are over. On July 4, more than a million people gathered on the National Mall for what the White House promoted as the largest pyrotechnic display in history, part of a Semi quincentennial weekend that stretched from a first-ever daytime ball drop in Times Square to a 16-day state fair between the Capitol and the Washington Monument.
The National Archives read the Declaration aloud on its steps and America turned 250 with the confidence of a nation that believes it has arrived!
I love this country. I spent more than three decades in public safety, and I have stood in enough hard places to know what our freedoms cost. Walking our nation’s capital, past the monuments to people who overcame when the survival of this Republic was genuinely in doubt, I felt what most Americans felt this summer: gratitude.
But gratitude and self-congratulation are not the same thing. And the question that has stayed with me since the last fireworks faded is not whether America has been blessed. It is whether we know the difference between being blessed and being well.
Two thousand years ago, a wealthy city in Asia Minor could not tell the difference.
The city that needed nothing
Laodicea sat on the major Roman trade routes, a regional hub for banking, law, and commerce. It had impressive public buildings, an amphitheater, a thriving textile industry known for a soft glossy black wool, and a medical school famous for its ear and eye treatments. When a devastating earthquake leveled the city, Laodicea refused imperial assistance and rebuilt with its own money. It was rich. It was strong. It did not need anyone.
Laodicea, however, had one embarrassing weakness. It had no adequate water of its own. Hot mineral water was piped in from the springs at Hierapolis and cold water came from the direction of Colossae, and by the time either arrived through the aqueducts it was tepid, mineral-stained, and sediment-filled. Cold water refreshes. Hot water heals. Laodicea’s water did neither. You drank it and spat it out.
That is the picture Jesus reaches for when He addresses the church in that city.
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.”
— Revelation 3:15–17
Read that carefully, because the charge is not immorality. It is not heresy. Jesus does not accuse the Laodiceans of a scandal. He accuses them of self-assessment. You say you need nothing, and you do not know what you are. The sin is not a single act. It is a condition of self-deception, and it is the only condition in the seven letters of Revelation that produces this particular reaction from Christ: not correction, not discipline, but disgust.
The American numbers
Here is where the news cycle and the Word of God meet.
If you read the headlines of the last eighteen months, you would think American Christianity had turned a corner. Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of U.S. adults still identify as Christian, and that after nearly two decades of steep decline, the share has held relatively steady between 60 and 64 percent since 2019. Pew confirmed the plateau again in December, reporting that key measures of religiousness are holding steady. This would lead us to believe that Christianity’s decline has halted, for the time being.
Then I read what Gallup reported in March. Weekly attendance at religious services has fallen to 31 percent, down from 44 percent in 1992. Fifty-seven percent of Americans now say they rarely or never attend, compared with 42 percent in 1992. Among young adults, it has been reported that over 60 percent seldom or never go to church.
Put those two data sets side by side and you have the most precise portrait of Laodicea that modern polling can produce.
Six in ten Americans keep the label. Three in ten keep the practice. The identity has stabilized while the devotion has drained away. We have a country full of people who will tell a pollster they belong to Christ and will not, on a given Sunday, attend church and interact with fellow Christians. That is not cold. It is certainly not hot. It is exactly the temperature of the water that came out of the Laodicean aqueduct.
Drift is a process, not a decision
Nobody wakes up and decides to become lukewarm. Scripture is careful to show us that drift usually begins with a small absence rather than a large sin.
Consider David. His collapse did not begin on the rooftop. It began with a logistics note: “in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle… David remained at Jerusalem” (2 Samuel 11:1). He sent Joab. He stepped back from the one responsibility God had given him, and the gap between his calling and his choices created idle time, comfort, and disengagement. The rooftop and sin came later. Sin always follows drift.
Also, consider David’s son. Solomon asked for wisdom, built the temple, and led Israel in worship — and then the very blessings God gave him became the setting of his decline. Peace, prosperity, power, and unmatched wisdom stopped driving him to dependence and started dulling his vigilance—he drifted away from the God who had provided so much. “He loved many foreign women,” and “his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11).
Neither man rebelled outright. Both drifted. Which is why Hebrews warns us to “pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away” (Hebrews 2:1). Drift is not dramatic. It is quiet, comfortable, and progressive, and it is almost always downstream of neglect: neglected prayer, neglected Scripture, neglected obedience in small places.
I have described this for years, in plainer language, as hokey pokey Christianity. One foot in, one foot out, turn yourself around. The problem with a hokey pokey Christian is not that the person is standing still. It is that he/she is moving constantly and advancing nowhere. Putting one part of their life in for Jesus and pulling it back out when obedience gets expensive-half in, half out, unstable, exhausting to themselves and to everyone who loves them.
Jesus was blunt about why this cannot work. “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). John was blunter: “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). The rich young ruler of Mark 10 wanted eternal life and kept his idol, and he walked away sorrowful — the clearest picture in Scripture of a man who wanted heaven later and the world now.
Jefferson’s warning, rightly read
Since we have spent this year quoting the Founders, let us quote one of them accurately.
Carved into the Jefferson Memorial, a few hundred yards from where this summer’s largest crowds gathered, is a passage from Jefferson’s writing on slavery — the national sin he called an inherent evil while, let’s not forget, continuing to participate in it:
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Thomas Jefferson
Notice the logic. Jefferson does not argue that a nation with strong institutions will endure. He argues that liberties detached from the conviction that they are given by God cannot be secured, and that divine justice does not sleep. A flawed man wrote a true sentence, that still resonates today.
Our national morality, whatever remains of it, was grounded in the Word of God — not as a vague direction but as the source of rights we did not manufacture and cannot revoke. Remove the conviction and you keep the vocabulary of liberty for a season while the foundation erodes underneath it. That is a civic version of the same disease. It is the aqueduct still running long after the water has gone tepid.
What repentance would look like
I am not writing to scold a nation or any individual. I am writing to examine a church, and I include myself in it. Christ’s word to Laodicea was severe, but it was not final. Three verses after the warning He says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” The Judge is also the One offering to come in and eat with us.
So let this be practical.
- Stop grading yourself on the wrong scorecard. Attendance, activity, and reputation are not the test. Jesus evaluates the heart. A person can have religious language, church membership, financial comfort, and public respectability and still be cold at the center.
- Name the neglect, not just the sin. Where have you stepped back from an assignment God gave you? What did you delegate that you were supposed to lead? That vacancy is where temptation moves in.
- Identify the foot that is still out. Everyone reading this knows which area of life has not been surrendered. Money. Anger. The phone. The career. The grudge. Half-in is not a category Jesus recognizes.
- Trade self-sufficiency for dependence. Laodicea’s problem was that it could rebuild without help. Usefulness to Christ flows from humble dependence, not visible success.
- Repent specifically, and out loud. Individually and nationally. Thank God for genuine blessing, ask forgiveness for real sin, and ask Him to forgive us for the particular sin of being lukewarm about Him while being passionate about everything else.
America’s 250th year was declared a “Year of Celebration and Rededication” by the White House. The celebration went off exactly as planned. The rededication is the part still open, and it will not be settled by a proclamation, a parade, or a poll showing that six in ten of us still use the word, Christian.
Cold water refreshes. Hot water heals. Tepid water gets spit out. There are 50 years before America turns 300. The only thing that will matter in 2276 is which type of water America will be.
