Passion for Jesus

Nancy Leigh DeMoss is teaching through the seven churches of Revelation in her daily radio ministry which I keep up with through her manuscripts of the program. This is a part of what she said today. You may read the entire message here. This is on the heels of a conversation I had yesterday with one of our precious ladies in our church who was talking about passion for God and how it is missing in our churches. We see passion in the lives of church members for everything else except God. One of the driving passions of my heart is the manifested presence of Christ in our midst as a believing family of God. Read the following excerpt from DeMoss:

As I reflect back over these months of walking through this passage and these letters to the churches, I think you could summarize the concerns that Jesus has for His churches under three different headings. And I want us today and in the next program to just look at those three primary concerns as we review and overview this series.

The three primary concerns have to do with the church’s passion, the church’s purity and the church’s perseverance—passion, purity and perseverance. Let’s take those one at a time.

First of all passion. Jesus is concerned about the church having left its first loveas He says to the church in Ephesus, “I have this against you that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (2:4).

He says to the church in Sardis, “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is about to die” (3:1-2). He’s saying, “You have a form, but there’s no life. There’s no spirit.” He’s concerned about the appearance of things that is not consistent with the reality, a lack of passion.

He says to the church in Laodicea, “You are neither cold nor hot. I would that you were either cold or hot!” But he says, “You are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold” (3:15-16). Lukewarmness, half-heartedness, lack of passion.

You see, love for Jesus and an authentic relationship with Him is the heartbeat, the life blood, the spring of our faith and our service, our perseverance, and our purity.

If we don’t have an authentic relationship with Christ, if we don’t have passion for Him, then we’re going to grow weary in serving Him. We’re going to give up. We’re not going to persevere. We’re not going to have any reason to be pure in an impure world if we don’t have a passion for Christ. That has to be the source.

Your orthodoxy, your doctrine, your tradition, your history, your spiritual roots—none of that will carry you to the finish line, to the day of Christ if you don’t have a passion for Christ. It’s not enough that we have orthodoxy. That’s vital but it’s not enough.

It’s not enough that we have impressive statistics or that our churches have a glowing reputation. Lifeless, loveless churches are a heartache to Christ. He wants us to be hot-hearted, to be whole-hearted. So He deals with the issue of passion.