257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105
(262) 763-3021
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We have purchased land on Highways A & W and are planning to build soon! Drive by and take a look at our future home!
“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Christian Friedrich Hebbel
November 1st, 2009
The creative force behind all great art, all great drama, all great music, all great architecture, all great writing is passion. Nothing great is ever accomplished in life without passion. Nothing great is ever sustained in life without passion. Passion is what energizes life. Passion makes the impossible possible. Passion gives you a reason to get up in the morning and go, "I’m going to do something with my life today." Without passion, life becomes boring. It becomes monotonous. It becomes routine. It becomes dull. God created each of us with the emotions to have passion in our lives and He wants us to live passionate lives.
Passion is what mobilizes armies into action. Passion is what causes explorers to boldly go where no one has gone before. Passion is what causes scientists to spend late night hours trying to find a cure to a dreaded disease. Passion is what takes a good athlete and turns him or her into a great athlete where they’re breaking records. You have to have passion in your life.
As believers, pleasing God must be our one primary consuming passion. But here is the amazing thing; in America it is okay to be passionate about virtually anything except God. It’s just not PC, even in the Church, to be passionate about God. I can be passionate about movies, sports, politics, fashions, etc., but I’m not supposed to be passionate about God. That’s a no-no.
Type in the phrase "a passion for..." into Amazon.com and you’ll find a couple of hundred books with that title. There are books like: A Passion for Birds, A Passion for Books, A Passion for Cactus, A Passion for Chocolate (that’s understandable), A Passion for Fashion, ... for Fishing... for Flying, ... for Gardening, ... Golf, Hunting. There’s even a book called A Passion for Mushrooms (hopefully, the author is talking about the legal kind). A Passion for Needlepoint, Pasta, Ponies. There’s a book called A Passion for Potatoes, for Roses, for Shoes. There’s even a book called A Passion for Steam. I can’t figure out what that one’s all about! I don’t know why you’d get passionate about steam. But in our culture it’s ok to be passionate about anything except your faith, except your relationship with God.
I can go to a rock concert, or a political rally or a football game, and I can shout my head off. I can get excited. I can get hoarse from yelling so loud. When my team loses I could cry. Nobody thinks that’s a big deal. When my team wins I can jump up and dance around and wave my hands in the air. If I do that at a game people go, "He’s a real fan!" If I do that in church people say, "He’s a fanatic! He’s a nut case." You don’t want to get too emotional about your faith. Its okay about anything else but not that.
Romans 12:11 says, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor.” That means we are to keep the spiritual fires going in our lives. Notice though, it’s not automatic. It’s a choice. It’s a discipline. It’s something you must maintain. You are not by nature passionate about God. It’s something that you must choose to do. You get distracted and everything in life conspires to keep you from being passionate about God. So Paul urges us to keep your passion going. Keep the fires going. It’s a discipline. It’s not just automatic. And this kind of thing - being passionate about God - has nothing to do with either your personality or your age. The
Church of Jesus Christ is filled with senior citizen believers who have walked with God a long, long time and are still passionate.
Everything in life conspires to keep you from being passionate. And it dissipates your energy. Ever gone to a birthday party and some of the helium balloons get loose and go up on the ceiling. If the ceiling is too high, you don’t have to worry about it. They’ll be down by the next morning. It often doesn’t take that long. In just a few hours they will begin to dissipate, lose their steam and come back down.
A lot of times we’re like that. When you first become a believer and you really understand what a good deal you’ve got, you get excited about it, “This is quite a deal! All my sins are forgiven. I now have a purpose for living, and I now have a future home in heaven. What a deal!” And you get excited about that when you give your life to Christ and you’re pretty passionate. But as time goes by you begin to lose your steam. You begin to lose your zip, your zest, your enthusiasm. What happens? Why does that happen?
The Christian life is empty unless we are consumed with something much greater than ourselves. God's blessing and pleasing Him must be sought above all else. Whether we succeed in business or not, whether we have material prosperity or not, whether we become well-known or powerful or not, what counts when it's all said and done is that we have God’s hand on our lives. True success is not where you are, but whether God is with you where you are. Worldly success is fickle. It's here today and gone tomorrow.
Don't believe me? A few Monday nights ago many Packer fans had mixed emotions as the Vikings led by Brett Favre played the Packers. Some despise Favre. But rewind to 1997 when Favre led the Packers to victory in Super Bowl XXXI. Worldly success is here today…gone tomorrow. Success with God is real. It lasts and is the only success worth striving for.
So why aren't we passionate about pleasing God? John Piper summed up our problem well with his statement, "The weakness of our hunger for God is not because He is unsavoury, but because we keep ourselves stuffed with other things." We are foolish to fill our lives with the temporal things that don’t matter. Let’s be passionate and invest our lives in that which counts, let’s be consumed with a passion for our awesome God!
