In Australia, we can be passionate about all kinds of things. Some are crazy about sports. Others have a thing for reading great books. There are the guys who can’t talk enough about classic cars. Not a few are passionate about computers or electronic gadgets like mobile phones and ipods. Last week I got caught up listening to someone talk incessantly about their pets.
The remarkable thing about living in Australia is that it’s OK, even laudable, to be passionate about almost anything - as long as it’s not God. I can go to just about any sporting event and scream my head off, jump up and down, raise my hands in the air and express all manner of emotions when my favorite team wins or loses. People watching will simply say, “Now there’s a fan!”
But if I do any of that when talking about Jesus and His work in my life, people will say, “There’s a fanatic!” And they probably won’t mean it as a compliment. In the culture we live in it’s acceptable to get excited, be enthusiastic, have a passion for just about anything, as long as it’s not related to faith or religion.
That’s why following Jesus takes courage. He taught over and over that you can’t follow him incognito. He used word pictures like “light on a hill” and “salt of the earth” to describe the kind of passionate commitment required to stand up to the cultural pressure to leave your faith at the door.
One day a man walked up to Jesus and said, “What’s the most important commandment out of the whole Bible?” Jesus responded, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.” I like the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases this verse in The Message. “Love the Lord your God will all your passion, all your prayer, all your intelligence, all your energy.”
Being a Christian requires an all-out, totally surrendered, fully leveraged commitment to Jesus Christ and the values he taught. Anything less is just playing. If you really want to experience God in your life, you need to give him everything you’ve got. Nothing less than a passionate surrender will do.
