Passion and Positive Attitude
Rom 8:37-39, 1 Cor 15:58, Luke 19:10, John 3:17
May 23, 2003
I. John Schnatter founded Papa John’s Pizza, it grew from one store to 46 in its first seven years, and from 46 to 1600 in the seven years after that. The reason that the company has grown so much is the passion that John has for what he does.
A. Success Magazine did an article on John of Papa John’s and they said, " Pizza is Schnatter’s life, and he takes it very seriously."
B. His philosophy is simple, "concentrate on what you do well, and do it better than anyone else."
C. He says, "Talking about my dreams for a Pizza Business at age twenty-two, people thought I was crazy"....Vendors, bankers, and even some friends just laughed when I told them I’d be opening five or six stores and month.’
D. Now he is opening thirty stores a month, that’s one new store every day of the year. And the reason is passion.
E. Experts spend a lot of time trying to figure out what makes people successful. Often they look at people’s intelligence, education, and other factors, but more than anything else the thing that makes the difference is passion.
F. Most effective leaders don’t fit into a stereotypical mold. Fifty percent of the leaders of Fortune 500 companies didn’t do above average in college, seventy five percent of US Presidents were in the bottom half of their college classes.
G. What makes it possible for people who seem ordinary to do extraordinary things? Passion! Nothing can take the place of passion in a leaders life!
II. If there are people who can have such a passion for things that are not going to last beyond this life, how much more should we as Christians have a passion for what we do to serve God, when what we are doing last for eternity.
(1 Cor 15:58 NIV) Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
A. PASSION IS A CRUCIAL STEP TO ACHIEVEMENT.
1. Your desire determines you DESTINY.
2. If you think about great leaders in the world the characteristic that stands out is their passion for what they did. Gandhi for human rights, Winston Churchill for freedom, and Bill Gates for technology.
3. Anyone whose life is beyond ordinary has a great desire, because desire brings results!
4. A small fire creates little heat and little change in the things around it. The stronger your FIRE and PASSION for what you believe in the greater your potential for accomplishing.
B. PASSION INCREASES YOUR WILL POWER.
1. It is said that a young man approached the Greek philosopher Socrates and casually said, "O great Socrates, I come to you for knowledge."
2. Socrates took the young man down to the sea and waded out with him in the water, and dunked him under for thirty seconds. When he let the young man come up Socrates asked him to repeat what he wanted.
3. Knowledge O great one he sputtered, Socrates put him under again this time for longer, after repeated dunkings and responses Socrates asked again what do you want. The young Man Yelled, "Air! I want Air!"
4. Good answered Socrates "when you want knowledge as much as you want air you will have it."
5. There is no substitute for DESIRE AND PASSION in seeing the things that we think are important, come to be.
6. Passion is the fuel for the will, and without passion the things that you say are important aren’t as IMPORTANT as you say they are.
7. If we say that God is important in our lives and we have no passion for serving Him and seeing His Kingdom increase her on Earth then He is not as importnat to us as we say He is.
C. PASSION CHANGES YOU.
1. If you follow your passion instead of other’s perceptions of what you should be, you will become more DEDICATED and PRODUCTIVE.
2. The passion you have for what you believe in will speak to others louder than anything. People will follow you when they see that you are passionate about what you say you BELIEVE.
D. PASSION MAKES THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE.
1. There is something about human beings that makes impossibilities vanish when they become impassioned enough about something to fire their SOUL.
2. A fire in your heart for what you truly believe in reduces the number of things that are impossible.
3. A leader with a great passion and a few skills always accomplishes more than a leader with great skills and LITTLE PASSION.
4. There is a saying that says, be more afraid of a 100 sheep led by a lion than a 100 lions led by a sheep.
E. Sociologist Tony Campolo says, " We are caught up at a particular stage in our national ethos (beliefs) in which we are not only materialistic but worse than that we are becoming emotionally dead as people. We don’t sing, we don’t dance, we don’t even commit sin with much enthusiasm."
1. When was the last time that you couldn’t sleep because you were so excited by an idea?
2. You can’t start a fire in those you lead unless you have one burning in you FIRST!
3. Jesus’ suffering between the last Supper and His death are called His passion. He came to save those who were lost, and he had a passion for what he was doing to the extent that he was willing to give His life, if only we had such a passion for proclaiming what He did.
(Luke 19:10 NIV) For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."
(John 3:17 NIV) For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
III. Something that has to work hand in hand with our passion for what we believe in is a Positive Attitude.
A. Life magazine has named him the number one man of the millennium He invented 1093 things and was granted at least one patent every other year for 65 consecutive years. His name was Thomas Edison.
B. Most people said that Thomas Edison’s ability was due to creative genius, but Edison once said, "Genius is ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration."
C. But it is possible that his success was due to a third factor: His positive attitude. Edison was an optimist that saw the best in everything.
D. He said, " If we did all the things that we were capable of doing we would astound ourselves."
E. When it took him ten thousand tries to find the right material to create an incandescent light bulb, he didn’t look at them as failures but as ways to eliminate the things that didn’t work and bring him closer to the solution. And, he never doubted that he would find the right one.
F. His positive attitude could be summed up in a statement that he made. "Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to SUCCESS when they gave up."
G. Maybe the best example of his positive attitude was the way he dealt with a great tragedy in his life. Edison had built a huge laboratory that was bigger than three football fields. From there he and his staff created inventions made the prototypes, produced them and sent them to customers.
1. Edison loved his lab and spent as much time there as possible. Sometimes he even slept on one of the lab tables. When he was in his late sixties, one day in December of 1914 his Lab caught fire, and as he stood and watched it burn, he was reported as saying, "kids go get your mother, she will never see another fire like this one."
2. He later said, " I am sixty-seven, but not too old to make a fresh start. I’ve been through a lot of things like this." And he kept working for another seventeen years.
3. Later he said, " I am long on ideas, but short on time, I expect to live only to be about a hundred." He died at eighty-four.
H. If Edison had not had the positive attitude that he did he would have never accomplished all the things that he did. And, if you will look at the lives of people in any profession who achieve great things you will almost always find that they have a positive attitude.
I. If we are going to be effective leaders in our families, and our profession, and in our service for God we have to do all that we can to develop a positive attitude.
J. A positive attitude not only determines your level of commitment as a person, but it affects the way that other people interact with you and what impact you can have on them.
IV. What does it mean to have a positive attitude?
A. YOUR ATTITUDE IS A CHOICE!
1. The average person wants to wait for someone to motivate them and thinks that their circumstances are responsible for the way they think, but which comes first the circumstances or the attitude? It really doesn’t matter!
2. No matter what happened to you yesterday your attitude today is your CHOICE.
3. Victor Frankl said, " the last of our human freedoms is to choose our attitude in any given circumstances."
4. And, he should know, he survived a Nazi death camp, and through out his ordeal he would not allow his attitude to become bad, if he can maintain his attitude we should be able to maintain a positive attitude too.
B. YOUR ATTITUDE DETERMINES YOUR ACTIONS.
1. Dennis Waitley, an expert in the area of family life says, The winner’s edge is not in a gifted birth, a high IQ, or in talent. The winner’s edge is in the attitude, not aptitude. Attitude is the criterion for SUCCESS."
2. What you are talented enough to do, is not nearly as important as what you THINK your talented enough to do.
3. In coaching baseball and football I have seen teams that have more talent than the team they are playing lose because they didn’t think they could win.
4. And it doesn’t take but one person that believes that they can’t win to convince the whole team.
5. As leaders we have to be the one that believe that we can accomplish, because if we are leaders others are going to follow our Que.
C. THE PEOPLE THAT FOLLOW YOU ARE A MIRROR OF YOU ATTITUDE.
1. It’s amazing to me the number of people that have bad attitudes and then expect the people around them and the people that follow them to have good attitudes.
2. It is also a fact that the people who have bad attitudes are the ones that are going to attract people who have BAD ATTITUDES.
3. If you look closely at the life of Thomas Edison you will find that his positive attitude not only fueled what he did but it inspired the people around him.
4. His attitude was reflected in a statement that he made to people who worked with him. He said, "If the only thing that we leave our kids is the quality of ENTHUSIASM, we will have given them an estate of incalculable value."
5. As leaders in our family, and leaders in our profession, and leaders in our service for God we can help determine the attitude of the people who follow us.
6. If you as a leader, in whatever area you are leading in, maintain a positive attitude about what you are doing and what you and those you lead can accomplish, then the possibilities are endless, but you as the leader will set the stage for what the attitude of the whole group is.
D. This may be the most important point about attitude. MAINTAINING A GOOD ATTITUDE IS EASIER THAT REGAINING ONE.
1. In " Earth and Altar" Eugene Patterson wrote, "Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble...[It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality...a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict."
2. If you have a positive attitude then you should do everything in your power to hold on to it, and if you don’t have a positive attitude then don’t worry, ATTITUDE IS A CHOICE, and you have the power to change it.
3. English heart surgeon Martin Lloyd Jones said, "Most unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself."
4. What he meant was what kind voices do you hear? When you meet people do you tell yourself they’ll let me down? When you try something new do you hear a voice in your head say, "you are going to fail."
5. The best way to hold on to a positive attitude or change a negative attitude is to give yourself mental pep talks, and refuse to let you mind go down any NEGATIVE forks in the road.
6. I have done a lot of things in my life that people didn’t think I could do, and a lot of things that I probably wasn’t smart enough or talented enough to do, and the only thing that has made it possible for me to do them, is the grace of God and refusing to believe that I couldn’t.
(Rom 8:37 - 39NIV) No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
E. That alone should allow us to hold on to a positive attitude.
V. I can’t tell you how much of a difference it will make in this church if the people in this church will get passionate about what we are doing and have a positive attitude about what it is that we can do with God’s help.
A. There are no limits to what a group of people can do who will put God first in their lives and consider themselves on a joint mission with Jesus.
B. If all of us who are a part of this church are passionate, about what it is that we are to be doing as a church we will be amazed at what God will do through us.
C. Christians in the New Testament were passionate about what they believed about God and their service for him, and they had a positive attitude in the face of terrible trials, but the bible says in the book of Acts that they turned the world upside down.
D. If only the people in this church could become passionate about what we say we believe. If only we could get that excited about the what God has done in our lives, we would be able to turn Parker and Wise County upside down with the things that God would do in peoples’s lives.
