The title of today’s message is “A Driving Passion”. And, yes, I admit it. It is a play on what this weekend is about for the people in Indianapolis. It’s my playful attempt anyway. The driving passion is part of the reason that we are only having one service today and not having the 11:00 a.m. service: The driving passion for an automobile race, the driving passion for relaxation and fun. And so this driving passion has sent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds on the roads this weekend. Apparently, yesterday there was something like a wreck on I65 because I saw hundreds and hundreds coming this way instead of that way.
The driving passion on this special weekend of memorial is something entirely different. It’s the driving passion that has caused some to go in harms way to a foreign land and risk life and limb, to risk being misunderstood, accosted and abused for doing their duty. Now I have had the privilege of knowing a lot of military people in my lifetime. Many war veterans, too. And when you ask most military people “Why?” they will give you an answer something like this. They’ll say, “Duty and honor.” They will go where they are told to go and do whatever they are told to do even if it cost them their lives because of a sense of duty and honor to that flag and what it stands for because of a sense of duty and honor to obey their commander in chief. And you know, every time I hear a military veteran say that, I’m always struck with shame when I realize that my “commander in chief”, my spiritual supreme power, Jesus the Christ, asks no less of me and yet my loyalty is no where close to the loyalty of a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who would honor the command of a human who by his very nature is flawed. When I consider a driving passion that would cause someone to obey unconditionally commanders who may make bad decisions, I can’t help feeling a little ashamed that my commander in chief asks that I love Him unconditionally as He has loved me and to devote myself to loyalty and passion for His cause. And I don’t serve with the same commitment as others do for a lesser cause by comparison.
And I hear the words that we are going to share now from the Letter to the Hebrews and it puts things into perspective for me. And I wonder if this will happen for you? And so remain seated, but listen reverently to these words from the Letter to the Hebrews. The writer says,
“Unlike your ancestors, you didn’t come to Mount Sinai—all that volcanic blaze and earthshaking rumble—to hear God speak. The earsplitting words and soul-shaking message terrified them and they begged him to stop. When they heard the words—“If an animal touches the Mountain, it’s as good as dead”—they were afraid to move. Even Moses was terrified.
No, that’s not your experience at all. You’ve come to Mount Zion, the city where the living God resides. The invisible Jerusalem is populated by throngs of festive angels and Christian citizens. It is the city where God is Judge, with judgments that make us just. You’ve come to Jesus, who presents us with a new covenant, a fresh charter from God. He is the Mediator of this covenant. The murder of Jesus, unlike Abel’s—a homicide that cried out for vengeance—became a proclamation of grace.
So don’t turn a deaf ear to these gracious words. If those who ignored earthly warnings didn’t get away with it, what will happen to us if we turn our backs on heavenly warnings? His voice that time shook the earth to its foundations; this time—he’s told us this quite plainly—he’ll also rock the heavens: “One last shaking from top to bottom, stem to stern”. The phrase “one last shaking” means a thorough housecleaning, getting rid of all the historical and religious junk so that the unshakable essentials stand clear and uncluttered.
Do you see what we’ve got? An unshakable kingdom! And do you see how thankful we must be? Not only thankful, but brimming with worship, deeply reverent before God. For God is not an indifferent bystander. He’s actively cleaning house, torching all that needs to burn, and he won’t quit until it’s all cleansed. God himself is Fire! Hebrews 12:18-29 (Msg)
May God add His blessing to the hearing of this Word. The translation that I read is from The Message. It seems clear to me that what the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews is asking his readers and us is, “So what’s your hang up? What’s the problem?” If those people who lived in the mountain in fear served God with a driving passion, then why can’t the redeemed do so?
The only proper response to this rock solid, unshakable kingdom that Jesus has purchased for us with His blood is a driving passion. We must worship our Lord with driving passion. In the original text of the letter the word…now this word is even hard for me to pronounce—Latreuomen. Now whether I have pronounced it right or not, here is what it means. It means that we are to worship by applied service of all kinds. It doesn’t mean to genuflect in front of the altar periodically. It means to worship with our whole lives, to come together as we do on Sundays and Saturday evenings and worship heart fully and give to God all the attention and praise that we can muster. But it is also to do the same in the remaining hours of the week through our actions, through our words, through or thoughts our prayers so that there is no mistaking the light that shines from within us as others encounter us. This is the driving passion that we speak of. It is a reverent light always aware of God’s presence and always willing to worship God.
There was a woman who lived in a certain community who was known by her countenance to be a woman of great faith. There was another woman in the same community who wanted that desperately but couldn’t understand how it happened. And one day this second woman went to the home of the first and she said, “So, you are the one with the great faith I’ve heard so much about.” “No,” replied the first woman, “I am not the woman with the great faith. I am the woman with faith in a great God.” And that’s what makes all the difference right there. Can you say that? Do you know that this is a great God we serve? Do you know that as we worship the great God of all eternity in heaven, the universe, and earth and all creation, that it is an act that we do without reservation because we can’t help it because God is so great?
Max Lucado says this about faith. He says, “Faith is not a belief that God will do what I want him to do but rather it is a belief that God will always do what is right!” Now that’s faith in a great God. And that kind of faith is troubling to us because it is the kind of faith that puts us before the throne of a real person who’s will should be greater than our own and whose intellect is vastly superior to ours. So that we worship in the spirit of God seeking God’s will first. Don’t be tempted to say, “God, unless you give me what I want I’m not going to believe in you.” Then, more than likely, you are not believing in the right kind of God anyway. Rather, believe that God in God’s greatness will be with you in all things and will do the right thing at all times.
The writer of this Letter to the Hebrews is burnt up with passion. And what’s interesting is as you read through the Letter to the Hebrews you not only see passion for the Lord but you see passion for passion sake. And this is a remarkable concept because it’s something we often overlook. But if you stop and think about other things that we are passionate about, we will form support groups, we’ll form organizations to share our passion with others in the hope of inspiring passion in them.
I’ll tell you a little story that occurred to me last night as I shared with that congregation. I have most of my life had a passion for trains. I love railroading. I think it is a fascinating thing. Who knows how these things get in your blood? Maybe it’s because I went to my grand parents house in New Albany every Sunday when I was very little and there is a place right by their house where trains would come and go constantly. I don’t know. Maybe I have coal soot in my blood, creosote maybe from ties. I don’t know. But it dawned on me that one day when I had the occasion to fulfill a passion that I had always dreamed of, which was to help fire a steam locomotive on the rail lines between Louisville and eastern Kentucky, I spent hours never really seeing the landscape go by because all I did was shovel coal from one place to another. I’d hear that air of cylinder blast as the doors to the firebox cranked open. I’d see that orange-red fire down in the firebox. And I knew my job was to keep it hot. And you could say that I spent that two or three hours shoveling coal devoted to keeping the fire hot. I didn’t really get to devote myself to anything else. And do you know what’s remarkable is that it is one of the few times in my life I can remember working that hard for free. Well, why would I do that? Passion! And then passion for the passion! Just spending so much energy and effort keeping the fire burning, occasionally looking overhead to see whether the smoke was black or white, and knowing what that meant about keeping the passion going.
Having passion for the passion within is the realization that this is a very personal relationship that we have between ourselves and God. It is expressed publicly, but God is interested within fire within and He is interested in how you produce something with the energy that that fire generates. Passion is illustrated beautifully in this poem by St. John of the Cross, who wrote these words after he had escaped from prison:
There in the lucky dark,
None to observe me,
Darkness far and wide;
No sign for me to mark,
No other light, no guide
Except for my heart – the fire, the fire inside!
You see, St. John of the Cross was alone in the darkness of the prison cell and he rejoices because there is fire inside him that kept him going. So many of our life’s sorrows and sufferings would be easier to bear if we would devote ourselves to keeping the fire inside burning brightly. What you produce on the outside for other’s sake, for the glory of God has everything to do with the fire inside. You are like that steam locomotive that I fired for a time one day in Kentucky. You depend on the amount of fire inside to produce the energy necessary to fulfill the task. And so you must devote yourself, as this writer has told us in the letter to Hebrews, to keeping the fire of passion alive in yourself.
So is there fire in your soul? What does give your soul passion? Is Jesus what makes your soul rejoice as you seek to magnify the Lord? Is Jesus the source of the liveliness within you, the lovingness within you, the livingness within you? I remembered last night as well, and the service was a little bit humorous because some things broke down in the midst of the service and once again I found myself fixing things and trying to lead worship at the same time. And I recalled that when I first started in ministry now eight years ago at little Laizeville and Crambell United Methodist churches, at Laizeville in particular there was a lot to overcome. And I can remember that the services were a lot of times very humorous. Now those who know me shouldn’t find that surprising. But they were funny because things always went wrong and I use to laugh and say, “You know, if I ever get this right they’ll move me to another church.” Well, that didn’t happen. But...I mean that I got it right. But I remember one of the old timers in the church saying something to me about halfway through my time there that meant the world to me. He said, “Oh, Reverend, we don’t ever complain to you because we just can’t get over your enthusiasm so we just keep going wherever you’re going because you look like you are having a great time.”
And what a compliment that was! How that made me feel, I can’t even begin to describe to you because maybe it isn’t so much about what you know, but how you do it. Maybe it isn’t so much about how much of an expert on the Bible you are, how much of an expert you are in church worship or whether you know how to sing well or not. Maybe it has nothing to do with that. Maybe it has everything to do with the fire of passion inside you. Maybe your greatest witness to the Lord is to be the vessel that you are but filled to overflowing with the fire of God’s passion pouring out all over the people around you with an enthusiasm for the Lord that is irresistible.
And remember this, this passage that we just heard from Hebrews does come with an admonition. He does say that God will cleanse with fire, but God is looking for people with passion and God intends to burn away the absence of passion. This translation that I read to you says that God will torch the unhealthy. I wondered for a minute what that might mean and then I remembered something I’d seen on some educational program about miners going in to the caves they had dug periodically with torches to burn out all the roots and various things that hung down and hindered them in their progress. They couldn’t go deeper because these roots and things would block their way and so they would take their torch and burn away the passage so that it was clear and unhindered and allowed them to go deeper. And it seems to me that that was a good way to consider this image of God burning away the things that hinder us in our deepening relationship with God. God desires a passion from you that requires an intimacy with Him. And the Hebrews writer has told us that God will burn away those things that hinder a deepening relationship with Him, a deepening passion.
So this morning, the question we have to answer is, “Will we open our hearts and allow God to throw some more coal on the fire? Will we allow ourselves to be stoked to our highest capacity and burn brightly with passion? And, then, will we devote ourselves to passion for the passion that God might be glorified through our lives, that our earthly faulty vessels would spill out with the spirit of God for the sake of those around us? Can you see yourself today as a passion-driven disciple of Christ?
Let us pray, “Oh, God, make it so. We have heard your Word now and we pray that those things that are of You and from You will be burned on our hearts and that anything not of You would be burned away. Oh, Lord, take away those things that hinder us in going into a deeper relationship with You. Help us to be filled with passion for you, Lord, a burning, overflowing with passion that spills out on those around us. Make our enthusiasm contagious, Lord. For Your sake and for Your glory we pray, Amen.”
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn