Are You Hot or Cold towards God? Jesus said: “I know your work: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot”! Which Are You? Ponder That . . . !

A Devotional Reading for Monday May 18, 2026

From the pen of John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress

Hot or Cold?

“I know your work: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot”

Revelation 3: 15.

“Strive to enter in.” By these words . . . the Lord Jesus gives sharp rebuke to those professors that have not eternal glory but temporal things in their eye—by all the bustle that they make in the world about religion. Some there are that make a stir, what a noise and clamor, with their notions and forms. And yet perhaps all is for the loaves; because they have eaten of the loaves and are filled (See: John 6: 26). These strive indeed to enter, but it is not into heaven. They find [their] religion hath a good trade at the end of it.

“Strive to enter in.” These words also sharply rebuke them who content themselves as the angel of the church of Sardis, did, to wit; “to have a name to live, and be dead” (Revelation 3: 1). [Consider] . . . the Laodiceans, who took their religion upon trust, and were content with a poor, wretched, lukewarm profession. For such as these do altogether unlike to the exhortation in the text, that says: Strive, and they sit and sleep. That [text] says, strive to enter in, and they content themselves with a profession that is never like to bring them . . . [there to the gate].

“Strive to enter in.” Further, these words put us upon proving the truth of our graces now. For if the strait gate, be the gate of heaven and yet we are to strive to enter . . . it now; even while we live and before we come . . . [there], then doubtless Christ means by this exhortation that we should use all lawful means to prove our graces in this world. Whether they will stand in the judgment or no[t]. Strive to enter in; get those graces now that will prove true graces then (Revelations 3: 18).