Hosea 7:6 NIV
Their hearts are like
an oven; they approach him with intrigue.
Their passion smolders all night; in the morning it blazes like a
flaming fire.
What Is The Source Of Your Passion?
A few weeks ago I was coming out of the church
parking lot and traffic on my side of the road was packed. Two lanes merge into one right at the
driveway of the parking lot and no one was moving due to the stop light at the
cross street on the next block. Normally
I just inch into the traffic and drivers let me through. After all, they aren’t going anywhere and I
am not trying to get ahead of them. I
just want to cross into the lane going the other way. As I began to work my way into the traffic,
the first car waved for me to come through and so I started but then all of a
sudden, the driver in the car in the second lane quickly lurched forward to
block my way through her lane. At first
I could not believe what I had just seen.
Why did she do that? What good
did it do her to not let me through? Was
she crazy? I did not recognize her and
when I stared into her head, she would not look my way. There I sat in my little car, blocking one
lane of traffic but unable to let that lane move forward because I was
prevented from going on into the other side of the road. As soon as the traffic light turned green and
the woman was able to move forward and clear the way for me, I wondered at my
temper. What had happened to it? Why didn’t I get mad at the woman for being
rude to me? More importantly, what if I
did get angry and try to retaliate. What
would I have done?
Unless you are a robot, you have passion. It could be blocked or stymied by your will
but you have access to passion, a treasure trove of it. What you do about your passion is up to
you. It can be poisoned by sin and
become a source of tremendous turmoil for you or it can be transformed by God
into a valuable part of your personality.
Many are afraid of the passion they possess and try to keep it in check
by either fighting against it or attempting to dismantle it. Others are controlled by their passions and
like Legion with his many demons, find themselves taken captive by their
passions and made a slave of them.
Perhaps you have known people who showed no emotions and although they
seem passionless, it is more likely that they live in constant fear of being
dominated by passions that scare them.
Shows like Star Trek romanticize the passionless person and yet that is
a mistake. Passion is a critical part of
who we are and how we have been made. To
discount or discredit your passion is like rejecting your lungs or hating your
blood vessels. What we need is an
approach to our passions that is not only reasonable but even beneficial. That is what we shall consider today.
Passions can be defined psychologically as the
ruling forces within the heart that drive our actions. They are the powerhouse
motors we possess that get us going. They
push us into actions that our will alone can’t initiate. Without passion we live and act mechanically;
just going through the motions of daily life without ever leaving our comfort
zone. Biblically, the heart is the
center of who we are. It is the root of
our thinking, our will and our passions.
Sometimes in the Old Testament a term which in the Hebrew is translated
kidneys or “reins” is used but it is essentially the same as the heart. When you read the term heart in the Bible,
don’t think of it as the pumping muscle in your chest but as the idea of you
and who you are internally. The heart
however, which is the source of the passions, is broken by sin. As we see in Jeremiah 17: 9, The heart is deceitful above all things and
beyond cure. Who can understand it? (NIV)
The question of course is rhetorical. Our hearts are a great mystery to us and
nearly unfathomable. Sin has corrupted
them to the core and whether it is the damage brought about by the sins we
commit or the sins committed against us, they are a wreck of what God intended
them to be. Each of us is stymied by the
heart we have. We may change a certain
behavior or alter some habits, but in the end, there are depths to the heart
that make a mess of our “good intentions”.
Paul, in speaking of the heart and its warping of passion said, “I do not understand what I do. For what I
want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7: 15 NIV) This a universal experience. Whether you are from Asia or Africa or
Australia, you have acted in ways that were unfathomable to you and maybe even
embarrassing. Why is that? It is because your heart is warped and
unpredictable.
Jesus has a strong take on how damaged your heart
is. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual
immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Matthew 15:19 NIV) You cannot count on a heart that is so
unstable and wrecked. Any sin imaginable
can come out of you and without warning.
Out of this pot come your passions; unpredictable and unreliable. It is possible though to not be dominated by
the passions coming out of your sin damaged and corrupted heart. The Bible says, So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of
the sinful nature. (Galatians 5:16 NIV) “Desires” is nothing more than
your passions as they flow out of the sin percolating in your heart. There is nothing laughable about what is
possible with a heart such as the one you and I possess. The worst that humanity has to offer is there
in your heart and my heart and the passions can drive them out of us like
dynamite.
Before we have been born again with Christ living
through us, all we have to rein in our corrupted passions is the
conscience. Depending on how strong or
weak our conscience is morally and how developed it is will determine what our
passions drive us to do. Of course, as
is hinted in Romans 7, the law also can constrain our passions. But when we have been transformed by the
power of Christ crucified into Christians, there is a new force working in
us. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the
Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each
other, so that you do not do what you want. (Galatians 5:17 NIV) The Holy Spirit wages war with the corruption
in the heart and this can have tremendous psychological ramifications.
Some of the most anxious and depressed individuals
are often Christians who struggle to accept the changes God wants to make in
them. Anger and stress manifest
themselves in believers who don’t want Christ to change everything in the
heart. Galatians 5:19-21 provides an
ugly picture of what comes out of the heart that is not converted fully by
Christ. The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity
and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of
rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy; drunkenness, orgies,
and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will
not inherit the kingdom of God. (NIV)
The only curb other than conscience against such behavior is the fear of
being caught for doing something bad. We
can hold back some of this ugliness but eventually anything we see in this list
of fruit produced by corrupted passions can come out of us without
warning. We find we are angry or bitter
or jealous and we say that isn’t us but it is us. All of this is floating about in the heart
unchanged by the work of Christ. This is
the fruit of passion developed in a sin corrupted heart.
We discover in Galatians 5: 22 what God can do with
our passions when He remakes them. They
can produce a lifestyle straight out of heaven.
But the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV) How can our passion begin to develop these
qualities? Romans 5: 5 gives us a hint
at the mechanism God utilizes for the transformation of our passions. And
hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our
hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (NIV) How can the passion in your heart be changed
into something that generates the goodness of God in you? It can only happen when God’s own love is
poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit.