Committing to Growth - Part 2

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Please make your donation today at vision.org.au. Most people don't live or work in the spotlight. They spend their days largely unseen, which can make it hard to muster spiritual passion. If that's you, take heart. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah offers biblical assurance that you're never alone.

In fact, you've got an audience you should be passionate about pleasing. Listen as David introduces the conclusion of his message, Committing to Growth. And thank you so much for joining us today. We are studying Colossians chapter 3, verses 23 and 24. We're talking about living your life on purpose and living with passion. We're talking about whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not to men. And we'll get back to that in just a moment. We are moving toward the end of our series, The Life God Blesses, after today. We still have one week left, but then we're going to have a new study as we move into the month of February. Now, we're going to get started with this last part of our lesson on Colossians chapter 3. And open your Bibles to that portion of God's Word.

If you have a study guide, find the lesson. Let's talk about this as we conclude this week together. Now, this lifestyle has taken a hit in recent years as men and women of God had settled into a more comfortable zone.

I don't know if you've noticed it. We began to worry about burnout. And in the process, many of us have copped out or perhaps even rusted out.

But we aren't living out. When was the last time you saw somebody who was really on fire for God? On fire with vision and passion and excitement for the Lord. When we talk about passion, we're talking not about a brand of perfume.

We're not talking about the steamy nature of an explicit television show or a novel. We're talking about the burning drive that God puts within our hearts to change the world. We're talking about the motivation that we feel to go about the work of God.

The world understands this in their own inadequate way. If you look around in the business world, in the world of sports, you will find passion on display in almost every venue. Jack Welch, whom some of you guys in the business world know, built the GE Corporation into one of the largest and best run companies in the world in a book called Simply Jack, writes these words about passion. He says, for me, intensity covers a lot of sins. If there's one characteristic all winners share, it's that they care more than anyone else.

No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years, I've always looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn't mean loud or flamboyant. It's something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion. In another business book called Lessons from the Top, there is this statement, no trait is more noticeable in the leaders on our list than the passion they share for the people and their companies.

Quite simply, they love what they do. I believe real passion comes from God. I know that he hates apathy and indifference.

Did you know that? In the seven letters that were written to the Church of Revelation, the last letter, according to many, represents the church that's going to be on the earth when Jesus returns. This letter is written to a church called the Church of Laodicea. And in that letter, the Lord addresses that church in these scathing terms. Listen carefully.

Revelation 3, 15 and 16. I know your works that you are neither cold or hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm and neither cold or hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.

Whoa. Lukewarm attitudes make God sick. God says, I'd rather you be cold or hot, but don't be lukewarm. There are only three temperatures that are mentioned in the Bible for the heart.

In Luke chapter 24, you remember when the disciples were walking on the road to Emmaus and they began to understand what was going on with Jesus. They said, did not our hearts burn within us when he walked with us on the way? So there's the burning heart. That's the hot heart. And Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 24 that in the last days, men's hearts are going to wax cold. There's the burning heart and the cold heart. And then there's this heart Jesus talks about in Revelation, the lukewarm heart. You see, we have come to be so politically correct in what we do and so careful that we don't step over the line, that we have become in many ways like the lukewarm heart of the Laodicean church. We are so afraid of being on fire for Christ. We do not want to be labeled as emotionless or extremists, yet in every other area of life, we are wholehearted in what we do. We are enthusiastic about entertainment.

We're enthusiastic about sports and we're enthusiastic about life. But much of our Christian experience is dead and cold without any zeal and without any enthusiasm. So let's get back to our verses again in Colossians and listen to what they say. And whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Christ. And then let me add this Old Testament counterpart, which is kind of like the Colossians 3 of the Old Testament found in Ecclesiastes 9, 10.

Listen to this. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there's no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you're going. So if you're going to live life, live it with everything you have because when you die, you don't get to live in the grave. Your soul and spirit lives, but your work for God is done. As you go back through this verse, let me just remind you of what it says. Notice first of all, this verse is about passion and it begins by teaching us something about the scope of our passion. It says, whatever you do, do it heartily and whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

That means that nothing is outside of the boundary of this particular attitude, that God has called us as his people to do everything that we do with all of our heart, everything. You say, well, I teach school. By the grace of God, do it with all your heart. Well, I work in a factory. Do it with all of your heart.

I'm a business person in a business that I don't like. Do the best you can, but do it with all your heart. There's nothing outside of the scope of this.

Whatever you do covers a vast territory of activity. It means that nothing falls outside of this instruction to the believer. God expects and intends for us to live passionately, not passively. In fact, have you ever noticed that God incorporated this magnificent truth into what Jesus said was the greatest command that had ever been given. On one occasion, some people came to Jesus and they said, teacher, what is the great command?

And in Matthew chapter 22 and verse 37, Jesus answered. He said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Did you ever think about the fact that your relationship with God falls under the category of passion, that you should be passionately in love with God, that you should love him with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. And so many of us, we just slip into church on Sunday, conveniently pay our little dues and go back out into the world as if God were dead. While we claim to be Christians, we are practical atheists because we live as if God were not a part of our lives.

When the great command God has given to us is this, love him with all your heart and soul and mind, love him passionately. Every part of who we are should be touched by that. I was switching the channels back and forth the other day, surfing the channels and I came across a Christian talk show. I don't know what it was, but they had Mr. T on this talk show. Do you remember Mr. T with all the gold chains around his neck and the A team? Well, Mr. T became a Christian.

I'm sure many of you know that. He's a Christian. I'm telling you what, I never saw an interview like that. I'm sure the interviewer never saw one like it either because when they introduced Mr. T, he said he had been preparing all afternoon for this interview. He came onto the set and he started talking a hundred miles an hour. I could hardly keep up with him. And he talked and talked and talked and you saw the interview trying to get a word.

No, no, he would never get a word in edgewise. Mr. T took all of the enthusiasm and excitement of his life and he poured it into that interview. And I was thinking about this message and I was going, yes, yes, do it. That's what it's all about.

The scope of it is it covers everything. Now notice the strength of your passion. It says, do it heartily and do it with your might. The word heartily is the word insuke in the Greek language. It means out of your soul. It means from the very core of who you are.

I love this. Have you ever read this verse with this in mind? Psalm 103 verse one. Listen to this. Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me. Bless his holy name.

Live your life for God and all that's in you. Bring that to the table. We don't do that. We've become proper. We've become polite. We've become politically correct. We've become to a sad degree, very passive. And our culture has pushed us into this category. And I speak primarily to men.

Men, I challenge you. God wants you to live with the same enthusiasm in your Christian life that you once put into sports when you were growing up. When you were growing up and it was go out and win. When Kefi was a boy, his greatest passion was football. And his favorite player was a running back for the Minnesota Vikings named Chuck Foreman. Kefi used to spend hours each day playing football on the streets of Stowe Village, a ghetto located in Hartford, Connecticut. On Sundays, Kefi watched the Vikings on TV and on Monday, he tried to do everything that he saw Chuck Foreman do on Sunday.

If Chuck Foreman did it on Sunday, Kefi did it on Monday. One day, Kefi and his brother were playing their usual game of street football and some of the neighborhood kids were there. And on one play, Kefi's brother threw a long pass and Kefi ran out for the deep bomb.

As the ball floated up in the air, Kefi could tell it was going to be too long. But his passion kicked in and he refused to give up. Summoning his courage, he put on a burst of speed and he dove to catch the ball at the last possible second, stretching his fingertips as far as they would go and never taking his eyes off of the pigskin. To the amazement of everyone, he caught the ball landing hard on the pavement and scraping the side of his face on the gravel surface. Did you see the catch he said as he got up?

That looked just like Chuck Foreman. His friends stared at him in wide amazement. Finally, one of them said, man, look at your ear. That is when Kefi felt something warm and wet on the side of his face and he touched and discovered it was blood. And his friend said, man, your ear's hanging off.

Scraping the side of his face on the gravel that actually ripped off a chunk of the boy ear, leaving it dangling precariously on the side of his head. But Kefi hadn't even noticed. He was so passionate about being a football player, just like Chuck Foreman, that nothing mattered. Well, little Kefi got medical attention for his ear and the next day he was back out on the same playground playing again. And as he grew into a man, his passion for football continued to grow, eventually carrying him to the National Football League. His inspired play not only sent him to the Pro Bowl several times, it helped the Green Bay Packers win a Super Bowl championship. Kefi, better known as Eugene Kefi Robinson, has shared a lot of mistakes to be sure.

Some have been very big and very public. But his example of passionate commitment to the game of football is second to none. Why is it then we hear a story like that? We feel almost like a vicarious blessing comes to us when we think of somebody wanting something so bad and trying so hard and working so diligently for a goal that's going to pass away. Man, you don't play football after you're 40.

You're not very much longer after you're 40. And yet that which God has given to us, which has eternal dividends, becomes so secondary in terms of the effort and the energy we put into it. Let me talk with you thirdly about passion, the secret of it.

The strength of it is to do it heartily and the secret of it is as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. That's really the secret of our passion, isn't it? You say, well, I work in a place where nobody sees me.

Oh, no, you don't. You work in a place where God sees you. You play your game out on a field with an audience of one and that audience of one is really the only audience that matters. He sees us and he sees what we do and the motive in our heart and the passion with which we bring our gifts to the table. And the secret of passion for a believer is to understand that when we serve, we may have the rottenest manager in our business you can imagine. He may be almost intolerable, but we have to see past that and recognize that our service is not for him, it's for Almighty God. We may be in a situation where the tension is so great every day when we go to work, we wonder how we're going to make it through the hours of the day. And I want to tell you something, if you see past that to the fact that God has allowed you to be in that situation, perhaps for your own growth and for your testimony before others, all of a sudden the dynamic comes into play that you can't imagine.

Your passion for work becomes not to please your manager, but to please your master. You do it as unto the Lord. And the scripture tells us that none of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. Romans 14. Colossians 3 17 says, whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father through him. First Corinthians 10 31 says, therefore, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Galatians 6 9 is the promise that if we do that, we should not grow weary for in due season, we will reap if we don't lose heart.

Listen to what he says, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of inheritance. And finally, let me run by you this thought that passion has a source. The source of your passion is God, for you serve the Lord Christ. Passion comes from God. Did you know that the word enthusiasm, which is kind of a synonym for passion, did you know that the word enthusiasm is made up of words en and theo, which means God in you. Enthusiasm is God in you. Passion comes from God. And I believe that passion is not something we develop as much as it is something we discover. God puts it in you.

You have passion in you. If we are believers, God has put it in us, because he gives you a spiritual gift and he equips you to be passionate about that gift. And I am more and more convinced as a pastor that we know what that gift is and we either accept the gift and give it back to God, or we let the opportunity go by and we can sign ourselves to live a life of joyless apathy.

When you know who you are in Christ and he's given each one of you a gift, and let me recommend Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, where all the lists are, you look down through that list and you'll be able to see immediately the gifts that aren't yours and you'll zoom in on the ones that are yours. The primary truth is that when God gives you a gift, he gives you the equipment to manage that gift with enthusiasm and passion. And even the secular leaders say it's not about developing passion, it's about finding the passion that's already there and then allowing that passion to bloom and become all that it should be.

I do not believe that we can once for all make decisions about passion, but I believe that the divine moments of opportunity continue to present themselves to us and we either seize them or we lose them. Once again, Erwin McManus has captured the thought, listen to his words, the more you move with God-given urgency, with passion, the more God seems to bless your life. The more God blesses your life, the more you have to lose, the more you have to risk, the more you have to risk, the higher the price of following God.

And in some twisted way, God's blessings to us can become our greatest hindrances to seizing our divine moments because God has blessed us so much. How can we leave all that to accept the next thing God wants us to do? How can I begin to live my life with passion? It starts with a small step of boldness and obedience to begin to do now what you know to do. You say, well, I wish I knew what God wanted me to do with my life. Why don't you start with maybe what God wants you to do today? And it's interesting that when you start there, a wonderful thing begins to happen to people when they become passionate about something, they become proactive and they start taking initiative.

And the reverse seems to work too. When you begin to take initiative, when you begin to do the good that you see needs to be done, you find yourself growing in passion. When you commit to just do something, you move in the right direction. Once you're moving in a direction that is aligned with the character in the heart of God, you find God's personal mission for your life begins to come into focus. So don't worry about what God wants you to do tomorrow or next year or what his calling on your life might be.

Ask God what you can do for him today and do it with all your heart. And when you take that step into that mission of doing the one thing God tells you to do today with all of your heart, something happens. You begin to sense a new passion in your heart that begins to open up newer doors and better opportunities.

And pretty soon that little bit of obedience and passion opens up into the wider path that God has for your life. When you move forward on what you know, things become clearer. When you refuse to act on what you know, all that you do not know paralyzes you.

Let me say that again. When you move forward on what you know, things become clearer. But when you refuse to act on what you know, all that you do not know paralyzes you. So it's time to just do it. It's time to begin today to commit this moment to follow God's direction in your life.

Follow him with all your heart and see if he doesn't set your life on fire. I don't know what God wants me to do for my life, but I got a good idea what he wants me to do today. So what he asked me to do today, I'm going to do with all my heart as to him. And that small step is the beginning of a journey that will take you into the most exciting adventure you've ever known in your life, day by day, in the adventure of a lifetime. Amen. Amen. I recommend that adventure to you. I've got over 50 years of experience with it, and I'll tell you what, it's not without its challenges, but it's also not without its blessings and joys. The greatest thing you can ever do with your life is to use it to serve the Lord Jesus Christ.

I encourage you to do that. As we head toward the weekend, let me remind you of the importance of going to church, if you indeed can do that during this time. Those of us who are back in church, we know how important that is. Recently, there was a study that proved that the one thing that causes better mental health is going to church every week. It was the only thing on the positive side of the list.

And I was so excited when I read that because I pretty much knew it all along. I don't usually get scientific support from my thoughts, but that was a great one. And I want to encourage you to do it. If you can't go to church, if you're not in a place where you can do that, you can get church online, which is certainly not the best, but it's better than not having church at all. So let me encourage you to get involved.

Don't forget to watch Turning Point on television. And if we're on when you should be in church, by all means, go to church, DVR us and come home and watch. But make church your priority. Encourage your pastor. A lot of churches that are back now are finding that not everybody's come back.

There's still a lot of fear out there. So if you're okay with going to church, be sure you do it. Make sure your pastor knows you're there.

Be an encouragement to him. And whatever you do, join us next Monday, and we'll see you then. Have a great weekend. I'm David Jeremiah. Our message today originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Dr. David Jeremiah, the senior pastor. Would you like to tell us how Turning Point ministers to you? Please write to us, Turning Point Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163, or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of Jack Countryman's new book, God's Blessings Just for You. It features 100 inspirational readings and reflections, and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your smart device, or search in your app store for the keywords, Turning Point Ministries. That's for instant access to our programs and resources. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details.

I'm Gary Hoopflit. Join us Monday as we continue the series, The Life of God Blessings. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au.