Shaken Faith And Shattered Hope Series

RENEWING YOUR PASSION FOR LIFE

“Shaken Faith And Shattered Hope”

Part 1

Today we start a series of messages entitled, “Renewing Your Passion For Life.” Jesus’ passion caused Him to go to the cross. Jesus had a passion that caused Him to leave heaven; it caused Him to come to this earth. He had a passion for you and for me. And you and I are supposed to live life with passion. God wants us to have a passion for everything that we do especially a passion for Him.

And many times we loose our passion for living. We begin our careers and we have a passion for our career. We want to do our very best, we want to make it to the top, we want to be the best, we want to achieve, we want to do all that we can but somewhere along the way, we loose that passion. And we find ourselves just barely getting by, just doing the minimum, and just doing the least that we can.

Sometimes we loose our passion for marriage. We find ourselves in our marriage not passionate, as we were when we first got married, we had that honeymoon love, we had that spark, and we had that passion in our marriage. We could not wait to see our spouse when we got home at the end of the day, we couldn’t wait to be with them but we lost our passion for our marriage.

But you know that passion can be restored. Many times we loose our passion for Christ as believers. When we first became Christians we had a passion for Christ. We couldn’t wait to serve Christ, we could do enough for Christ, and we could spend enough time with Christ. We wanted to pray, we wanted to teach a Sunday School class, we wanted to be in the word of God, but you know now we have lost that passion. No longer do we want to do those things and now we just sort of go through the motions of serving Christ. We come on Sunday morning but there is really no feeling in it, there is no fire in it, there is no passion in it, we just sort of do our duty and go through the motions. But it is really dull and monotonous and there is nothing really passionate about it. And you know, that is not very much fun. We really don’t like living life that way, but there is just something about life, there is something about things that happen to us in life as we go on our way that steals passion from us.

So I am going to be talking about restoring your passion for life. Now today in Luke 24 we find two disciples who had lost their passion. In fact they had “Shaken Faith and Shattered Hope.” They were followers of Jesus. These disciples had seen the miracles of Christ, they had great faith in Christ, they had committed their lives to Him, they believe He was the Messiah, they believed He was going to deliver Israel from the Roman yoke, they believed He was going to bring in the kingdom of God, they saw Him raise the dead and open the eyes of the blind and straighten the lame limbs. They saw Him do all sorts of marvelous things, but now Jesus had been crucified and they lost their passion.

Luke 24:13-17 “And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened.

And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?”

Now this is after the resurrection and Jesus joins Himself to their conversation but they don’t know it is Jesus. Maybe their eyes are filled with tears, maybe they are walking along and looking down at the ground because they are so downcast and sad, but any rate, they don’t recognize that it is Jesus.

Luke 24:18-21 “And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.”