Whatever you are passionate about is what you will build your life toward. So it’s a good thing to ponder. What do we have when we are finished building?
Does my passion determine my reality?
- 2 Timothy 4:3–4 (ESV) For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
- Myth – n. 1. a. A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth)
What are you passionate about?
Is this too cliche for you? Maybe, maybe not? Let’s say we step up the discussion to
God’s world and God’s word, projecting the question onto the big screen of forever. Now let’s look at our lives as projected on the big screen through the lens of the Bible. Do you see where I am going with this? I am attempting to move our perspective past now to forever and past our speculation to specific words of God.
Maybe now not so cliche.
Could it be that this question has only been rendered trifling because we haven’t really ever asked ourselves the question? In other words, we have maybe played with the question but have never let the question penetrate the surface of our psyche leaving our soul untouched and unexamined, and the question unanswered. And leaving the question unanswered is a big deal.
I will in fact say that many of us do not dare to ask the question because we fear the answer. We cannot bring ourselves to look inside. And now we are past irony to tragedy.
So we do need to ask the question again: What are you passionate about?
Whatever you are passionate about is what you will build your life toward. If you build to suit your desires, then your desires, your passions, will be your goal. You may say it is God and religion and spirituality, but it is really all about you. And what you pursue, what you focus your life on, sets your ceiling on fulfillment. If you are passionate about the things of this world, then there you find your ceiling, maybe even extending to the uppermost regions of life on the planet, but still losing your own soul.
If your passion is God, then God is your ceiling, God is your limit. And he has none. And there you are, finite touching the infinite, temporal experiencing the eternal.
Look again at what Paul writes to Timothy in relation to passion.
- 2 Timothy 4:3–4 (ESV) For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
The hard words are often the good words.
After Paul’s exhortation to Timothy to “preach the word,” he informed Timothy that everyone would not be listening. And here is the thought that grabbed me. They will not endure or put up with the words of God because they are not passionate about knowing God. They have “an interest” in spiritual things but are not passionate about God. They still in fact desire spiritual teaching as they build a database of teachers to feed them information about God that fits the myth they have chosen to live.
The people that Paul describes here are people who will build an alternate reality which uses the words of God to actually help them avoid listening to God. And they will wander off into myths.
They are seeking to be passionate about their spirituality without being passionate about God. They cannot take, endure, put up with the very words that directed them to a passionate relationship with the King of all creation.
The hard words are often the good words. The words that we sometimes refuse to “put up with” are the very words that fire our passion for God and for life.
The great and sad irony.
They are pursuing spirituality but not pursuing God even as they seek to learn more about God and the Bible.
The dangerous irony.
Our desire to merely know about God snugly fits our myth, and we willingly confuse a pursuit of biblical knowledge with a pursuit of God and never come to discover the rationalization until standing before God in judgment.
If we are passionate for God, then the question may not be “What would we do for God?” but “What wouldn’t we do for God?”
Maybe even die?
- Matthew 16:24–25 (ESV) Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
