The Passion of the Christian

Usually, when I am asked to bring a message, I have to find something that God has put a passion in my heart about to bring. I find that God is a very passionate God, and so, when I am following Him, and near Him, I start getting passionate about things too.

Well, when I was asked to bring a message this week at my church, I wasn’t feeling passionate about God much at all. I had been on holiday, and I was just kind of drifting, not really doing anything useful, and I guess not really serving God much at all.

But when I started realising this, that I needed a passion for God to bring a message from God, it blew me away. The first passage that God brought to mind in that moment was Acts 2:46: Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts…

Wow! Isn’t that incredible? We meet together once or twice a week as believers, or maybe three times if we go to a Home Group, and yet these believers met daily. How could they cope? Didn’t they get ‘bored out of their gumtree?’ I mean, you have to realise that when the believers met together, these were not short meetings. Remember in Acts 20, where Paul brought a message to the believers in Troas? It says in verse 7, “On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept talking until midnight… verse 9: Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead.”

Sure, Paul raised Eutychus from the dead straight after this, but the point remains he talked for so long he bored one member of the audience to death! So I ask again, how on earth could the believers cope with meeting together every day? Not only that, but they did so ‘filled with awe’ (Acts 2:43), and ‘with glad and sincere hearts’ (Acts 2:46).

I think one of the best ways to understand this is to look at what these daily meetings in the temple courts were actually about. If you have a quick read of that passage (Acts 2:42-47), its actually quite weird. They were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching, they were having fellowship, breaking bread, praying, praising God etc. and were meeting in the temple courts. What could they possibly have to do after all that? Part of it would probably have been listening to the apostles teaching, but I believe that the most important thing they were doing is not specifically stated here, but is instead the final commandment given by Jesus before he ascended.

Acts 1:8 : But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Here we see that the source of passion for the believers is the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit enabled them to do the most important thing they could do: be witnesses for Jesus. The temple courts were one of the main meeting places in the city of Jerusalem, and so the best way to be a witness would be to meet there and discuss what was happening.

One definition of witness I heard recently is that of ‘someone who hears something, and talks about it.’ It is not enough just to see something. If you don’t tell someone else, you’re only doing part of the job. These believers were seeing wonders and miraculous signs, seeing people added daily to their numbers, and they were witnessing to that. But that is not all that witnessing entails.

The word that is translated as ‘witnesses’ in Acts 1:8 is a very interesting word. Martys means ‘witness, testimony, martyr (witness unto death)’, and is used 35 times in the New Testament, to mean witness, witnesses, testimony, testify, martyr, and bore testimony.

Remember, we are called to be martys for Jesus.

I believe that being God’s martys is a very important part of being a follower of Christ, but I also believe it is one that we are often guilty of not living up to. The saints of God are those who martys to Jesus, and we all have the chance to be God’s saints. Paul wrote letters to ‘the saints in Ephesus’ and Philippi, and talked about the saints in Achaia, greeting the saints, praying for the saints, washing the feet of the saints, having a love for all the saints….

The interesting thing to realise from all of this is that the saints were just ordinary people. They were living everywhere. They didn’t have to perform three miracles and be canonized by the pope - they were shown as saints by how they lived. And we are called to be saints as well.

Saints live for God, and saints are willing to die for God.

It really hit me how lightly we take the call of God, when I started reading on two subjects: church history, and Christian biography. The powerful thing is that there are still saints everywhere, living and dying for God. And we are called to do the same.

A letter I got from Voice of the Martyrs, an organisation that deals with persecuted and martyred Christians worldwide, has these statistics:

Even in 2005, there are more than two hundred million Christians who live each and every day in fear of harassment, persecution, imprisonment, torture and even death because of their faith and witness to Jesus Christ. They are known as the PERSECUTED Church because, despite danger and discomfort to their own lives, they choose to love and obey God in countries that are hostile to the Gospel. Safe in New Zealand, it is often hard for us to believe that this could be happening in the world. Yet more than 160,000 Christians die each year because they live as followers of Jesus Christ! That means - 438 Christians TODAY ! And they are all members of OUR CHRISTIAN FAMILY.

I would never support the idea of suicide bombers, or actively seeking to kill people, as both are completely opposed to Jesus’ teaching, but one thing I admire about those who do is their total devotion to their cause.
One of the most powerful messages I have ever heard was a message by Christine Caine at Get Smart, where she talked about how suicide bombers are trained from kindergarten up, and by the time they reach 11 or 12 years of age, they are willing to die for their cause. And, although she again stressed that this was not to be taken literally, and that suicide and murder are both completely contradictory to Christianity, she challenged us personally - are you willing to be that devoted to Christ? Not to blow yourselves up, but to forget about your own lives, to not care whether you live or die, and to be absolutely public with your faith.

I think that one of the points to meeting in the temple courts was to witness to what was going on in the faith. To hold each other accountable to lift each other up, and to refill their passion for God by sharing their faith with one another. I think that if we spend time finding out about what God is doing or has done in other peoples lives, it can inspire us, challenge us, fire us up, and prepare us for more service.

It’s certainly something I have to think about.