Passionate About Serving Jesus
August 24th, 2010Passionate About Serving Jesus from Essentials Church on Vimeo.
At age five, little Jeffrey attended his first football game with his father. Do we have any football fans here this morning? Do we have any Brett Favre fans with us today? I didn’t think so.
Anyway, beforehand, Jeffrey’s dad gave him careful instructions about behavior at the game. He said, “You will have to stay seated, be quiet, and act like an adult.”
Not long after kickoff Jeffrey noticed lots of people jumping up and down, screaming, and shaking their fists in the air. He turned to his dad and asked, “Dad, did you talk with these other people before the game?”
* The Best of Grandparents’ Brag Board, Judy Pregel & Robin Riley, 1993, p. 33
It’s amazing to me how passionate we can be about our sports, but, how little enthusiasm we can show sometimes for serving Jesus.
For those of us in the church, this can produce an undercurrent that hinders reaching others for our Saviour. Sometimes we may appear to act out of obligation rather than the love and commitment that should exemplify our commitment to Christ. Satan actually uses our lack of passion to serve Jesus in his arsenal of weapons and he uses it to turn the selfless into the selfish.
So here is a working definition for us today defining spiritual indifference in the church.
“Spiritual Indifference: The seeming lack of personal interest, support, and enthusiasm for the work of the church.”
While most Christ-followers would, it seem, assume God intends for us to have a vibrant, alive, passionate faith — the question remains, how can we be the hands of Christ in the world if we lack a heartfelt passion and faith in our lives? How do we transition from a casual observer to a fervent participant?
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