It is no fun to live a passionless, worried life. Living
without passion is very dull. Living worried is exhausting. I know, I have done
it. Trying to please a God that you are afraid of will make you worry. Believing
that God is just waiting for an excuse to crush you, will make you crazy with
worry. Beliefs like that cause you to lead a passionless existence.
As I look back on that time in my life, I realize my
feelings and positions then came from incomplete information about God. The
lack of passion came from not having the fire of God fill me. I grew up
understanding you could measure your own or any other person’s Christianity by
measuring them with the your church’s manual and your church’s interpretation
of the Bible. I could not have been more wrong. Each person must allow Jesus
Christ to measure him or her, because His measurement of you is the only one
that counts.
Since my teenage years I had felt there should be more to
Christianity. There had to be more than status symbols and judging each other,
right? What about the things where there seemed to be a gap between the church manual
and the Bible? Why did there seem to be so much movement of the Spirit of God
throughout the Bible and so little in the Church today?
I still remember the night many years later when Jesus
opened my mind to who He really is and what He wanted when He said, “Follow
me.” His desire was not to make my life miserable and rigid. He wanted to show
me that He loved me. Jesus wanted to put His fire in my heart. Fire that gives
life meaning. Fire that gives Christianity purpose and passion. Fire that makes
a person willing to be a channel for the Holy Spirit to flow through.
I seek to enhance the relationship with Jesus and try to
avoid anything that would hinder or damage that relationship. Today I do not
consult the Church manual to find out if something is considered sin. I now
analyze my actions with the question, “Will this help me pursue the fire of
God’s Spirit in my life or will this thing or action put out what fire is
there?” My goal is to have the fire within burn brighter and brighter
illuminating those around me and causing them to hunger for the fire enough to
seek the God who gives the fire.
So the idea behind this blog is to challenge others to
passionately pursue God, to be filled with the fire of His Spirit. To challenge
each Christian to live out Christianity so passionately that it illuminates the
community around them. To challenge every
reader to be such a passionate example of Christianity that both the
un-churched and the lazy contented churchgoer become curious enough to
investigate what makes this person so different. Curious enough to totally
dedicate themselves to God. Curious enough to want to become usable vessels for
God. Do I have it all figured out? No! I must repeat the words of Philippians
3:12 with the Apostle Paul, “Not that I have already obtained this or have
already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own.” (NRSV)