Zeal

Zeal: eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something : FERVOR

synonyms see PASSION

Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary.

From time to time I need to remind myself of the radical nature of the gospel message.  I need to remind myself that God wants us to be fully and completely devoted to Him.  I need to remind myself that transformation should always be taking place in my life.  I need to remind myself that any worldly achievements I have attained mean nothing -- indeed are a loss -- "compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ."  Philippians 3:4-11.

There are, I suppose, a great number of reasons why we get off track sometimes.  One of the most common I think is that eagerly pursuing Christ is real work.  It is not always easy.  It requires a certain discipline.

Every Saturday morning around 7:30 I get together with twenty or so men at Heartland Church to worship, pray, study the Bible and fellowship.  Once in a great while I will lead the teaching, but most of the time I leave that to others.  It is not that I do not like teaching.  To the contrary, teaching God's word is a great passion of mine.

But, Saturday mornings have become a time of real refreshing for me.  I look forward to being in God's presence on Saturday mornings.  I am moved by the growth I see in the men who show up week after week.  I am excited about their zeal for Christ!  

Make no mistake about it, getting up that early on the one morning most of us have to relax or even sleep in is a sacrifice.  It requires a certain discipline, and more so a real passion for pursuing God.  And, there have been plenty of Saturday mornings when the sound of the alarm going off at 6:30 a.m. did not immediately result in great excitement for me.  In fact, on any number of those mornings I had trouble finding the will to drag myself out of bed.

But the other side of that coin is that in over a year of doing this I have never left church Saturday morning without experiencing God in a powerful way.  There has never been one Saturday morning when I left the church disappointed.  There has not been one time when we finished our time together and I thought it would have been better to sleep in.

You see, Paul was right in his letter to the Philippians.  There just isn't anything that surpasses the greatness of knowing Christ.  But the key is that to truly know Christ requires that we have a passion to pursue Him.  It takes work.  It takes sacrifice.