-tonight we will be continuing our discussions on elemental faith. It feels a little weird to be here this late, like I should be at home in pain or something…
-we’ve already talked about earth and how sometimes living for Jesus can be a little messy, but we need to be growing. Then this morning we talked a lot about the Holy Spirit and who He is and what role he plays in our lives.
-tonight is fire, and for that we’re going to talk about passion.
-see passion makes everything bigger. [LIGHT CANDLE] take this candle, this one’s not scented. It’s a tiny little light. Honestly, if I hadn’t mentioned or held it up here you probably wouldn’t even have noticed it was lit.
-but then when you add passion [USE FLAME POWDER] suddenly things are a lot bigger and brighter and even scarier.
-there’s a difference between tiny little candle faith and passionate fireball faith. Honestly, if I was to ask you which one you’d rather play with right now, the candle or the flame powder, what would you choose?
-it’s what we all want, something bigger, crazier, even scarier. That’s part of why:
1. WE NEED PASSION IN LIFE
-think for a moment what life would be life without passion. No cheering at sporting events (“fan” short for fanatic). Dating and marriage would have no love, just hollow actions. No art or music with any feeling. No one loving their jobs, no movies or TV that invoke emotions, food just made to be eaten not tasted.
-so why does it seem a lot of times our faith lacks passion? We show up to church blah, we sing kinda, we don’t want to pray out loud, why does that happen?
-we’re supposed to be serving and living for God with everything in us. Winter Retreat two years ago:
**Mark. 12:30 -> 30“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ (NCV)
-all, all, all, all. That’s the way it is supposed to be. That’s how the church started. People with passion.
-because let’s face it, people with passion can’t be stopped. John Stuart Mill once said “One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who only have an interest.” (7701, Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations).
-life is meant to be lived with passion, our faith included.
-look at the great people in history with passion:
2. THOSE WHO HAD THE FIRE
-let’s just start with the ultimate example, His name would be Jesus.
-too often we make Jesus out to be a nice little man who walked everywhere, played with children and was just an all around nice guy. Since when? Jesus was passionate about God, obviously. If you were doing something that did not line up with God or would hinder people from following God, He would let you know!
-an example most people know:
**Mark 11:15-17 -> 15They arrived at Jerusalem. Immediately on entering the Temple Jesus started throwing out everyone who had set up shop there, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of the bankers and the stalls of the pigeon merchants. 16He didn’t let anyone even carry a basket through the Temple. 17And then He taught them, quoting this text: My house was designated a house of prayer for the nations; You’ve turned it into a hangout for thieves. (MSG)
-the first thing Jesus does in the morning is kick everyone out of the Temple selling stuff. They were cheating travelers and Jesus would not allow it in God’s house.
-something most people don’t put together though, this was the second time He did it! He does it in John chapter 2 at the Passover a few years before because the merchants are doing the same thing!
-what drew crowds to Jesus was His passion for God, He taught in a way that the religious teachers didn’t teach back then, dull and bland.
-what about someone else? What about David, a man after God’s own heart? How did he feel about God? The song “Undignified” is about David, about him dancing when the Ark came home.
-he wrote many songs about God, but here’s one he didn’t write but is in Psalms with it. One you all know.
**Ps. 42:1-2 -> 1As a deer thirsts for streams of water, so I thirst for You, God. 2I thirst for the living God. When can I go to meet with Him? (NCV)
-a lot of our modern worship songs are based on songs of passion from people in the Bible.
-I got one more for you, he’s not in the Bible. John Wesley.
-I will be perfectly honest, when I first thought about coming to this church, I was kind of worried. I didn’t grow up Methodist and to me, Methodists seemed kind of dead. They just went and did their thing and that was it.
-so I decided to go to the source. I found out a little about John Wesley. This guy, passion for God. He preached three sermons a day for fifty-four years, 44,000 sermons. He rode by horse 200,000 miles to preach the gospel, he wrote commentaries on the Bible, church music, Biblical language, at 83 years old he was upset that if wrote 15 hours a day it started to hurt his eyes.
-you know what made people want to read his stuff and go see his sermons? Someone once asked John Wesley how he got crowds to come hear him and this is what he said, “I set myself on fire, and the people come to see me burn.” He didn’t pretend to be passionate to get crowds, he was passionate for God and that drew people in mobs to come find out why and how they could get it.
-we need to have that fire. We need to be that passionate fireball. So:
3. HOW DO WE GET THE FIRE?
-well, first we have to start looking for God in a passionate way.
-if you do the bare minimum, don’t really worry about God, maybe hear something here and there, that’s the kind of faith you’re going to have. That’s not what God told Jeremiah to do.
**Jer. 29:13 -> 13You will search for Me. And when you search for Me with all your heart, you will find Me! (NCV)
-there’s one of the keys. If you search for God with all your heart, if you really want God, all in, then that’s how you will find God.
-it’s like anything else, if you want to be a true football fan, how you find out about the game, how much you put into learning it, how hard you try to watch the games, that will determine what kind of fanatic for football you will be.
-once we know God, hopefully we will discover what it means to truly love God, Agape God, that pure form of love not messed up by everything around us or what we want.
-because as you learn about God’s love you’ll realize, it’s not a half-way thing. God doesn’t want love that’s blah. He will have a full love that he guides and moves.
**II Cor. 5:14a -> 14Christ’s love has moved me to such extremes. His love has the first and last word in everything we do. (MSG)
-what if every single thing we did was formed and moved by God’s love? Earlier we talked about the Holy Spirit, what if we lived in such a way that He was evident in our lives, we did whatever He asked us to do? How passionately do you think we would love God then?
-it’s one of those things that snowballs. You do it a little and it grows a little. So you do it a little more and it grows a little more.
-that’s why serving is another way to get that passion, or in this case, that zeal. Here’s a verse I learned at a high school youth rally.
**Ro. 12:11 -> 11Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. (NIV)
-never be lacking in passion, but keep your spiritual excitement by serving the Lord.
**I Cor. 15:58 -> 58So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless. (NLT)
-work enthusiastically for the Lord. Mission trip forms are now out. If you want to go, sign up, the other spots are already taken up by the other church. But I say it every year, if you want something good for this mission trip, it all depends on how much you put into it. If you don’t care and give God a crappy job, yeah, it will be a crappy trip.
-whatever you put into your life with God, that’s what you’ll get out of it. If you don’t know what you don’t have a fireball type faith, ask yourself, have you given God a fireball type faith, or have you sat back and waited for God to show up first?
-that’s not how God works. That’s not faith. That’s reacting to a sure thing, again, not how God works.
-there’s a story of a boy and his grandfather sitting on a bench on the end of town. A car pulls up and says to the grandfather, “We’ve just moved to this area and are looking for a place to live. What’s this town like?” The old man asked, “Well, what was you last town like?” “Oh, it was awful. There was nothing to do, the people gossiped all the time, our neighbors were mean, it was just a bad place.” The old man said, “Well, this town’s a lot like that.” They drove off not happy. A few minutes later another car pulled up, same story, same questions. The old man asked again, “What was your last town like?” “Oh, it was great. People were friendly, we had neighborhood Christmas dinners, everyone was really nice, we were really sad to leave.” The old man told them, “This town’s a lot like that.” As they drove away the grandson asked how he could say the town was so different to those people. The old man replied, “It’s not the town that will determine if the people are happy.”
-that’s how it is with us. If you go to a football game and decide before you go you’ll have a bad time, you don’t like the teams or the players, etc. then yeah, you will have a bad time at the game. If you decide to play church and just show up when you want, not really try, decide you don’t like it before you show up, not try to be involved, not serve, not talk to God or talk to others about God, than yeah, it will be a passionless faith.
-but if you choose to live a life of passion, it won’t only affect you, it will affect those around you, and they will affect you back. You see:
4. PASSION IS INFECTIOUS
-think about it, have you ever been to a concert or movie that just sucked, and I mean sucked, but the people you were with or the hype or something made it all worth it? How does that happen? Someone’s passion.
-if we are passionate about God, that passion will overflow to others.
**Matt. 5:14-16 -> 14“You are the light that gives light to the world. A city that is built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15And people don’t hide a light under a bowl. They put it on a lampstand so the light shines for all the people in the house. 16In the same way, you should be a light for other people. Live so that they will see the good things you do and will praise your Father in heaven. (NCV)
-kind of meaningful for our fireball today, right?
-but it’s true. Did you know that a single match on a clear night in the mountains can be seen for 50 miles? I’m not making that up. 50 miles. You almost need a telescope to see it, but you can see it. I used to camp in the mountains and the light from the streetlights was so bright on the side of the mountain, but we were so far away you couldn’t hear anything. Now what if instead of a single match, you were a passionate fireball, how many people, how far away from God, would be able to see?
-if you are passionate about God, that will infect others. It will ignite a passion in them too. Why do you think everyone’s so fired up after a mission trip? Everyone should be tired on the way home but you’re all so fried up it just builds on each other.
-that’s how fire works. The more of it the more it makes and the stronger it becomes.
-even in Bible times, Paul was writing to the Corinthians about how their living for God affected others.
**II Cor. 9:2 -> 2For I know how eager you are to help, and I have been boasting to the churches in Macedonia that you in Greece were ready to send an offering a year ago. In fact, it was your enthusiasm that stirred up many of the Macedonian believers to begin giving. (NLT)
-do you see it? This is about giving money to the church, giving money to God, something it seems like no one is excited about doing. But the Corinthians, they were. They were excited to serve God by giving Him out of what they had. They were so excited about it and good at it that other churches started to hear about it and they were inspired to give by the enthusiasm, the passion, the fire of the Corinthian church.
-we can be that church. We can be that student ministry. We can be that Bible Study that we are a group of people so passionate about God and His work that we inspire others to live lives sold out to God because they saw you.
-fire spreads. Passion is infectious. The great part about that is the times when we are down and it’s hard we can feed off someone else’s passion, but you can’t live like that. You need to be passionate and be the fire, be the example, be the enthusiasm that spreads.
even this retreat, that’s why most of you are here. Most of you didn’t remember the cabin, you didn’t know what I’d be speaking on, you had no idea what we would be doing, but you remember past retreats, and you got excited, and that got others excited, and you signed up because of that excitement. What if we had that kind of excitement, that passion in everything we did for God? Sunday morning church, Sunday night, Bible Study, helping at the food pantry, whatever it is, what if every thing we did had that passion?
-don’t wait for it, live it out and spread it. See that’s when passion hits it’s highest, when we are living in such a way that our passion shows that living for God is necessary to us.
5. LIVING FOR GOD IS A MUST
-people are passionate about something because they have to do it. Try to convince a die-hard Colts fan they don’t have to cheer for their team. You can’t. It’s part of them. You and I both know they won’t die if they don’t cheer, life will go on, but somehow they can’t get that. It’s because they are so passionate that cheering for the Colts is a must.
-if you want to know if you are truly passionate about God, is He a must? Can you imagine your life without Him? Can you live your life without living for Him?
-but that’s how you do it best! If you want to do something well, nothing will work as a substitute for passion.
-Charles Dickens, when asked the secret of his success, answered, “Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well: whatever I have devoted myself to I have devoted myself to completely.” (7693 Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations)
-basically, that’s just another version of:
**Col. 3:23 -> 23In all the work you are doing, work the best you can. Work as if you were doing it for the Lord, not for people. (NCV)
-doing the very best you can for God. Why? Because you can’t help it. You have to. You are so passionate for God you can’t stop yourself from giving your best.
-like telling people about Jesus. Think back to the Colts fan, they can’t help but tell everyone how good the Colts are. When they have an undefeated season, everyone knows. If you are passionate for God, you can’t help not talking about all the great things He’s done for you.
-like Jeremiah. At one point in his life the priest in charge of the Temple of God, his name was Pashhur, Pashhur didn’t like what Jeremiah was saying so he threw Jeremiah in prison and told him to stop prophesying for God. But he couldn’t!
**Jer. 20:9 -> 9But if I say I’ll never mention the Lord or speak in His name, His word burns in my heart like a fire. It’s like a fire in my bones! I am worn out trying to hold it in! I can’t do it! (NLT)
-and he wasn’t the only one. Paul says the same thing hundreds of years later:
**I Cor. 9:16 -> 16For just preaching the Gospel isn’t any special credit to me—I couldn’t keep from preaching it if I wanted to. I would be utterly miserable. Woe unto me if I don’t. (LB)
-he loves God so much that if he didn’t tell others about God he would be miserable. Think about it, most people are miserable if we ask them to tell people about God. Paul was the opposite, he loved to tell people about God’s love so much that when he wasn’t doing it, he was miserable.
-or what about serving, another way we can live out God’s love? What if we were so passionate about God that it showed in how we served people and showed love to them?
**Tit. 2:14 -> 14He gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us, and to make us his very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds. (NLT)
-that phrase “totally committed”, in older translations, it was “zealous”, that word again for passionate. Passionate for doing good deeds. What if we lived like were passionate to do good things for others in the Name of Jesus?
-we should be serving with enthusiasm!
**I Cor. 15:58b -> 58Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless. (NLT)
-imagine if our thinking was like that. So many times people don’t want to do the little things like put away chairs because it seems useless. What if we were so passionate to serve God that nothing seemed useless, we took pride in doing the little things for God?
-I was reading the other day, a pastor said he could tell how passionate a church was by how clean the bathroom was.
-so this is my request. We’re away from it all, a chance to start new, a chance to spend time with God away from distractions. Why not take this time to turn that little flame into a fireball? Which would you rather be? [DO FLAME AND FIREBALL AGAIN]
-it’s up to you. The Holy Spirit, he’s here. He wants to be a part of your life. He’s the flame, you just have to decide how much of your life you’re willing to let Him burn.
