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What Does Passion Look Like?
Brian Mashburn
January 8, 2006
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What Does Passion Look Like?
If you and I were to ask Jesus directly, "What does passion look like?" I have an idea of what he would say.
"I AM."
You gotta hate it sometimes, but he often answers questions like this, doesn't he?...not being overtly direct. He likes, it seems, to give an answer that make you stop and engage with it so that you might actually engage with HIM. In this case, I don't think he'd pull out Webster's and give the dictionary definition, because that would only engage our minds. And, as you know, he is interested not just in our minds, but our heart, soul, and strength, too (Matt. 22: 37).
But neither do I think he's being clever. I think he is just being accurate. When we ask him something, it is very seldom that he can answer it totally and truthfully AND stay within the scope of what kind of answer we would expect. With Jesus, it seems, we must constantly adjust our thinking.
As we close out our mini-series on the Christlike quality that we call "passion," let's take one last hard look at what passion for Jesus ultimately looks like. Let us confront our own version of it one more time and measure it by his version of it. Let's measure it by HIM.
When I was a kid growing up in church Bible classes, we had a running joke that when our teacher asked us a question that we didn't know the answer to, we always said "Jesus!" because that was usually the answer for everything. We Christian kids got a lot of mileage off that joke.
The irony is, we were right. So this morning's question, class is this... "What does passion look like?"