To be transparent, I have to be careful to not let the opposite happen. When I read 3:7-8, I have to fight off feeling embarrassed and even ashamed at what I haven't lost for the sake of Christ. I am blessed with a beautiful wife and family, have all my physical needs met, am surrounded by friends, and live in a country with more freedoms than most people in the rest of the world combined.
Because of these blessings, I have to constantly remind myself that I must be willing to lose them all in my own passionate pursuit of Christ. I don't want to lose any of them. I pray constantly that I will willingly give them up if called to.
Maybe it's because I've allowed myself to be blinded by blessings that I was compelled yesterday to confess to being guilty of each of these signs that my own passionate pursuit of Christ was fading at one time or another:
1. Studying God’s word is drudgery to you. (1:9-10)
2. You don’t want non-believers around you to know you’re a Christian. (1:12-13)
3. Lost people don’t matter to you. (1:18)
4. You are afraid of those who oppose the faith. (1:28)
5. Physically suffering for Christ is unthinkable to you. (1:29)
6. You often complain that “church” isn’t more like you want it to be. (2:1-2, 14)
7. You feel you’ve done way more for Christ than others and it’s time they step up and you step down. (2:3)
8. When other Christians aren’t around, your obedience to Christ disappears too. (2:12)
9. You feel that you’re not gifted enough to be useful in God’s kingdom so you don’t apply yourself to any spiritual challenge. (2:13)
10. You feel tithing is going to really hurt you financially. (3:7-8)
Paul, (as the verses in parenthesis clearly indicate), teaches and demonstrates that passionately pursuing Christ is the opposite of these things. In one sense, I know I must pursue pursuing Christ when my passion for him is beginning to fade. I have a long way to go and this side of Heaven will never fully arrive. But I desire the passion that Paul describes in 3:10-14.
I too want:
to know Christ - more fully and deeply than I've ever known him before
to live in the power of the resurrection - unyielding to anything death and his master throw at me
to experience full fellowship with Christ - to the point of suffering as he suffered if called to
to die having given my life to the will of God - confident of the resurrection he's guaranteed
to press on, straining forward - focusing on the future, forgetting the past, finishing strong to the end
"God, grant me the grace to think and live this way. Teach me to correct wrong thinking and wrong living."
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