Passion

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. Sort of using that kind of boating imagery, what people are looking for I think is a rudder, a purpose if you will, something that is going to guide their lives. An author by the name of Art Miller in his book, Why Can't You Be Anything That You Want to Be, highlights this survey result. Here's the statistics. Only 13 percent, only 13 percent of people in this country feel that the work that they're doing is meaningful. Thirteen percent. So that's close to nine out of ten people who are saying that they spend a major portion of their life in occupations and jobs that drain them of life and passion day in and day out, month in and month out, and year after year, decades, right? Now I will grant you that there are some things that we simply cannot control about ourselves. Things like our natural talents and abilities. For example, after playing high school football I really wanted to play football in college, only to discover that I was the perfect size for playing soccer, which I did. While serving at my former congregation we often joked that I had the perfect body for radio ministry. So obviously we can not be absolutely anything that we want to be, but what we can control brothers and sisters is the passion and the intensity in which we live out our lives in response to God's love and grace that He's given us in our Savior Jesus. That, that by the power of the Holy Spirit we can control. So let me ask you friends what puts excitement in your life? What causes you to lay awake at night, not just the caffeine you drank before that? What gives you energy? What are you passionate about? Now naturally I think you can tell what people are passionate about because, you know, they talk about it all the time, right? It tends to be the thing that they are the most excited about telling you about. But really what do we mean when we talk about and unpack this term a person's passion? Well if you look it up there are actually four definitions and the first has to do with our desire for a person of the opposite gender. The second is a zeal for some particular task. I mean we can be passionate about pursuing something. The third way we use that word is in reference to a musical composition. I don't want to get too deep in these weeds, but it's voices and orchestras telling a sacred story normally without costumes and scenery and all that kind of dramatic stuff. And then the last one, and after the release a number of years ago of the movie The Passion, which was done by Mel Gibson, we use the word passion in reference especially to the suffering and death of our Lord and our Savior Jesus who did that for you and who did that for me. But the word passion itself actually comes from a Latin word and it means suffering. Suffering. A Christian author by the name of Louis Gigliere has a wonderful definition I think for the word passion and it's this, quote, the difficulty that we're willing to endure in order to accomplish the goal. Our Lord Jesus said in John's Gospel, it's John 10 10 if you want to write it down look it up later, he says the deceiver has come, he's only going to want to do one thing, steal, kill and destroy you. But I have come, Jesus says, to give you life in all of its fullness, to give you life and give it more abundantly. You see my dear friends our Lord Jesus didn't come to give us some sort of just average, you know, whatever happened, sitting in front of the television kind of life, but a life that we could be passionate about. You see once our Lord Jesus took away our sins and covered that debt of those sins by his shed blood and then promised to never leave us and promised us a home in heaven one day, what was left in between all of that, that's life. And our Savior knew that that life could be an abundant life and so by God's grace he placed you into a fellowship, into a family that we call the church, and his dream was that we could become a passionate community, a place where passion is not quenched, it's not snuffed out, but where passion could be breathed into and stirred up by the Holy Spirit working through God's Word and that Word made visible in the sacrament. And so part of the adventure of living for our Savior is friends discovering and understanding how God in his grace by the power of the Holy Spirit has uniquely shaped you with spiritual gifts and abilities and passions and personality and heart and experiences. All of that is your shape and all of that can be used to serve God and to serve and love others toward Jesus. But we began by talking about passion so we need to kind of unpack that part of how God has uniquely made and shaped each and every one of you for ministry. By the way the Greek word ministry means serving, so just get that in the back of your head. God has uniquely shaped you for ministry, for serving both God to glorify him and...