Passion · Week 1 · Saturday Recap

Passion

I spent this whole week reading about passion and thinking about the fact that my sons can tell.

The Week in Review

We started on Sunday with the six-week fire, the one that comes home from a weekend genuinely lit up, announces a new era, and is under a stack of mail by the end of the month. We put a flare next to a boil and admitted which one we admire and which one Scripture is actually describing.

Monday we asked the question a lot of us have quietly answered wrong, which is whether the burning kind of faith is even available to ordinary adults, or whether it belongs to teenagers and to people with microphones. Two discouraged men walking a road out of town, who did not even recognize Jesus while He was next to them, would tell us it is available.

Tuesday was the hardest one. Doing everything right with the first love gone out of it, and Jesus telling a church with a genuinely impressive résumé that He had one thing against them, and it was not a behavior.

Wednesday we watched a house get cold by degrees, with no decision anywhere to point to. Thursday we looked at what shame and disappointment actually do to us, which is send us behind a tree, and at the fact that God’s first question in the garden was where are you rather than what did you do. And Friday we ended on the ember that goes out alone on the hearth, and the couch that had to get moved on a Saturday morning before a man felt anything again.

I can enforce a lot of things. I cannot fake heat.

What Got Me This Week

I have four sons, thirteen to twenty-one. I can get them to church. I can enforce a great many things in my house, and over the years I have enforced most of them at one point or another, some of them well and some of them badly.

I cannot fake heat.

Whatever temperature I actually am is the temperature they are reading, and they have been reading it their whole lives without once mentioning it to me. That is what Tuesday’s lampstand was really about. The risk was never that God would stop loving that church. The risk was that they would keep doing all the right things and slowly lose their pull on everybody watching. In a house, the people watching are four boys who have never asked me a single question about my devotional life and know exactly what it is.

They will not remember most of what I taught them. I have given them thousands of words and I have watched the majority of them slide right off, the same way words slid off me at their age. What they will remember is whether their dad seemed like a man who loved God or a man who complied with Him. Those two men can look almost identical on a Sunday morning. They do not look remotely alike across twenty years.

The Invitation Is a Knock

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of week that can turn into a guilt trip, and a guilt trip has never once produced passion in anybody. Thursday said as much. Shame sends us into hiding, and hiding is where fires go out. So this is not a call to try harder or to feel worse about the last six months.

It is a knock. And the detail I keep coming back to is who it was written to.

Most of us learned that verse as an invitation to people who do not know Jesus yet, and it certainly works there. But it was written to a church. To people already inside the building, already in the family, already doing the right things. He is standing outside a door held by people who would tell you with total sincerity that they belong to Him. He is not asking to be admitted to our theology. He is asking to be let back into the room.

That is a door I can open on an ordinary morning without a conference, without a new plan, and without announcing anything to my family. Which is probably the point. The fire that lasts is not the one we launch. It is the one we let Him back into, again, and then again, for as long as we get.

Burn long, not just bright.

Let your lifesong sing.

Passion · Week 1 Complete · The series continues