You might be familiar with the proverb, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Chances are, you are less familiar with this one: “Build a man a fire, he’ll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” Or, how about one of my favorite quotes that has been attributed to John Wesley? The quote has been widely contested that it originated with Wesley but it is still a charring quote, “I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.”
As followers of Jesus we are yearning for the thing that will “light our fire,” so to speak. We are desperate for purpose, belonging, and some sense of what our cruciform identity has done to us, or is doing to us. We are essentially searching for some kind of meaning. We see and hear stories of great followers of Jesus that have come before us and you know what? We want that. We want passion, adventure, and something worth dying for.
May I offer a correction? The discipline in finding our true passion and the thing that gets us going is not in what we want, but is rather in what God wants. The key in igniting our passion is aligning our heart to God’s heart. The beloved African theologian Augustine said, “our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him,” and I think most would find no issue in agreeing with the notion that our hearts are in desperate need of alignment, and tapping into the fervor given to us by God no matter where we are, and living out our identity that we were created for.
In the early days of the church there was a passion ignited, supernaturally, that has carried the church into what we see it as today. In the book of Acts the church explodes by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, which, as you’ll notice in the Bible, comes after they’ve spent massive amounts of time together in prayer and fasting, awaiting on the next word from God, which was as they had expected, the arrival of the promised Holy Spirit. In short: want your faith to get hot? Want your life to burn with passion? Then get close to the Source.
Let’s make every effort to burn white hot, preparing our lives as a bed of coals so the Holy Spirit can turn up the heat. Add fuel to your fire by staying close to Jesus. We stay close to Jesus to become like Jesus, which is what we were created for. That’s where our passions get red hot!
Below is an excerpt I wrote for a 52 week preaching lectionary several years ago on how the church ignites their passion:
Throughout history there have been many things that have been set ablaze from a tiny spark. To cite a literal example, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as legend tells it, was started after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, resulting in the death of 300 people, destroyed over 3 square miles of Chicago, and left 100,000 people homeless. It only took the spark of a lantern to set a city on fire. Other, more frequent, examples would be that of wildfires in wooded, mountainous, regions where a number of fires have been started from motorists throwing lit cigarettes into the ditch which ignites dry kindling, which travels up the mountain and burns all in its’ path. Fire actually travels faster uphill because of ambient winds, and preheating caused by rising smoke and heat. The greater the incline, the more intense the fire.
The greatest fire in the history of the world, a fire that even captured more lives than the Great Chicago Fire, is the fire at Pentecost. As followers of Jesus awaited the arrival of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, they were waiting, praying, stoking their faith, in expectation of what Jesus had promised, and the Bible tells us that when the Holy Spirit came upon them, it happened all of a sudden (Acts 2:2). God’s presence was made manifest in noise and flame, flaring up what would be the start of revival for those who had known Jesus, and for those who were unsure of what to do next. In a glint of bewilderment and excitement, the Holy Spirit speaks through Peter, and Peter retells the story of Jesus and reminds all those present that the blood of Jesus didn’t go unstained but was on their hands. Convicted, they ask, “What now?” and Peter preaches a message of repentance, a plea to be consumed by baptism, and the promise that the spark of the Holy Spirit would be added to them, and this same promise was also for all of God’s children. It only took a spark from the Holy Spirit to capture the lives of 3,000 souls, setting them on fire for Jesus, forever.
May we be a people whose hearts burn for more of Jesus.
Thanks for reading Shine Like Stars, a series of essays and publications from Brandon Morrow! Want to know where the phrase “shine like stars” comes from? Read Philippians 2:15!