The Passionate Preacher

Just a little thing that struck me when I was reading 2 Corinthians 11 today. Paul in his defense against the super apostles, compiled a list of his weaknesses from 11:23 to 11:27. It’s really a full on inventory of sufferings, if you think about it. If I have that list of sufferings to endure, probably all I can think of is: when will the Lord return or can I just die?

I can imagine after listing all of these, Paul would say “But wait! There’s more!”. See on verse 28 – he is daily anxious for all the churches! Pause and think about that verse for a moment. This is a person who daily faces persecutions and hardship, and yet he still have time to think about other people?

I don’t know about you, but this is what I call passion.

Chocked

What a timely reminder today, when Charles explained Mark 4 at GKP – in that passage Jesus was giving his Parable of the Sower (or perhaps more accurately Parable of the Seeds) and its interpretation.

For me personally, at this moment of time I do feel like I am a seed that grows and then gets chocked by the worries of life. And I know I need to repent from that. It just seems that the older you get – there just more and more temptations that will push Jesus to the fringe of your life and one day you wake up and suddenly you realize why do you believe him in the first place? Temptations can come in the form of money, career, security, bad relationship ( marrying unbeliever, lust, unfaithfulness ), the list goes on.

For me personally, I do find that my passion for Jesus is slowly being pushed away by passions in life. For instance, I am really passionate about programming and development and it can be so consuming at times – I’ve spent so many hours reading programming blogs, trying new programming languages, coding etc2. I am also passionate about physical fitness and hence I am committed to go to the gym at 6am on alternate days. I know in themselves none of these is wrong or sinful – but I need to examine my motive in doing them – do I try to achieve “balance” in life? Regardless of whether or not I have the right motivation – I know the result – Jesus got squeezed out bit by bit.

What do I need to do? I am tempted to answer, well I need to start my praying and personal bible reading again, I’ve got a feeling that’s a wrong answer – because that will still me trying to balance things out (as if giving Jesus few hours in a day is enough). I think the answer is making Jesus the Lord of all that I do and all that I am – I need to think more how does it look like concretely.

All of these, sounds so good and easy in a blog post – but I know it’s going to be tough.