Passionately Purified for Service

 

By Cecilia Legister

Passion  –  strong emotion, an outburst of strong emotion, intensity, fervour, force.  Also the suffering and death of Jesus Christ

Purity – Morally good, free from evil or sin

How passionate are you in your walk with Jesus Christ? Do you know him personally and do you possess total, sincere, heartfelt devotion towards Him?   

Are you zealously intense about the things of God? And are you willing to suffer and die for what you believe as a Christian? 

This is the pure essence of the abiding passion that the Bible encourages when it comes to the Christian walk . In Mark 12: 30 – 31, Jesus spoke about the first commandment indicating that loving the Lord should be a passionate experience, where the believer surrenders self  and allows his mental, spiritual and physical faculties to become inflamed with pure passion for his Maker. “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and with all thy strength …”

The Psalmist David captures the essence of that passion in Psalms 42: 1 “As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee oh God.” There is no substitute for such passion. But what should that passion eventually lead to?

Jesus Christ speaks expressively about the kind of passionate service expected from the believer. It is not half-hearted, it is not a double-minded approach, neither is it lukewarm service.  In Luke 9: 23- 24, the Master declares: “ if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whosover will save his life shall lose it but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”

He also declares in Luke 14: 26- 27 : “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And whosover does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

No one can be so passionate about the Lord and remain impure, because the Holy Spirit is unable to dwell in impure vessels. 1Peter1: 15-16 says “But as He which has called you is holy so be ye holy in all manner of conversations. For it is written be ye holy for I am holy.”

And the Lord Himself  delights in the purification of His saints.  1John 1: 3-10 states: “ and every man hath this hope in Him purifieth himself as He is pure…”

The passion and purity of the believer now become inseparable and has the power to stir up sincere love among the brethren and ultimately the world. This is made clear in 1 Peter 1: 22-23 which states “seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.”

The purified passionate believer will also make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate, as according  to  James 1:27: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. To visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

 And so will the world be impacted and God’s Word be found true as John 13:35 will be manifested: “ By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to another.”

The Lord Jesus also commanded in John 15: 12-13 “ This is my commandment that ye love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  

This kind of love fosters perfect unity among the body of Christ and those who are without will automatically come to know Christ as Lord and Saviour.

We are therefore encouraged to make our walk with Jesus Christ passionately pure especially in these critical times. The Christian mandate is to “go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

The purified passionate saint will then discover that his work will be much easier as the Lord Himself is lifted up and all men drawn unto Him