One Final Thought on Passion (Well, maybe)

A few days ago we were talking about our need for Passion. The last I said about it was that we need to ask the Lord to grow your passion. It may seem like a strange thing to ask the Lord for, because that seems to be like asking your spouse to give you more love for them, but that’s what he told us to do.

I started thinking more about that idea and I felt I should give you some warnings, well, maybe I’ll just call it information. If you do start praying the prayer I gave you on a regular basis, passion for the Son of God will indeed begin to permeate your heart.

Ask For Passion

For the last few days I’ve covered several aspects of our pursuit of passion, but haven’t even mentioned probably to most obvious thing we need to do to increase our passion for the Son of God is to consistently ask for it, to labor for it in prayer. This is where John17:26 comes in. As I said before, I have paraphrased John 17:26 and turned it into my own personal prayer. I pray it like this:

“Father, help me work with your Holy Spirit to love your Son just like You love Him.”

Remove Barriers

I am still thinking about our need for passion and I forgot to address something else that is absolutely essential. What I am thinking of is the removal of any barriers between us and the Lord Jesus. Sounds obvious, but it’s something we don’t give enough thought to.

You probably presumed this already, but our sins create a barrier between us and Jesus so that we can’t come into His presence and grow in our love and knowledge of Him.

Is obedience enough?

Yesterday we discussed our need for “Passion,” and you may have misunderstood what I was talking about, but it’s an intense desire to actually know our Lord, or as Psalmist cried, “As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?” To quote Tozer, “This is deep calling unto deep, and the longing heart will understand it.”

Passion

Almost any Christian can tell you what the greatest commandment of all is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22 36-40). We all know this is the greatest commandment. But are we really taking it seriously? It is so easy to think that we are loving Jesus when in reality we are loving something else.