Passion · Week 1 · Monday

Is This Even Available?

Her son came home from camp lit up like a bonfire, and the first thing she felt was not joy. It was envy.

He prayed out loud in the car on the way home, unprompted, the way fifteen-year-olds do when something real has happened to them and they have not yet learned to be self-conscious about it. She gripped the wheel and said amen and felt something twist. Because she could not remember the last time she had felt anything about God at all. Not doubt, exactly. Not anger. Just flat. Level. The spiritual equivalent of a room-temperature glass of water.

She had decided the burning belonged to somebody else.

The Quiet Decision Nobody Announces

Somewhere along the way she had made a decision she never actually said out loud, and most of us have made some version of it. The decision goes like this. The burning kind of faith belongs to teenagers at camp, to people with microphones, to the ones who were built with that sort of wiring. Adults like me get the maintenance version. Show up. Serve when asked. Keep the kids in church. Be a decent person. Do not expect to feel much, because feeling much is for a different category of Christian than me.

It is a tidy little theology and it is completely unsupported by Scripture. So it is worth walking straight into the text and seeing who is actually described as burning.

Two Discouraged Adults on a Road

Consider who is speaking. These are not teenagers coming off a mountaintop weekend. They are not the inner circle of the disciples. They are two ordinary adults walking a road out of Jerusalem, discouraged enough that they were leaving town, disoriented enough that they had failed to recognize Jesus while He walked beside them for miles. If ever two people had a good excuse to be flat, it was these two. And their hearts burned anyway.

This is not an isolated case, either. The Lord spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. The word Scripture uses there is panim, the ordinary Hebrew word for face, the same word used for looking someone in the eye across a table. Not a vision. Not a formal audience. A face.

Why This Sounds Suspicious to Some of Us

For a certain kind of person, and there are a lot of us, this whole line of thinking creates real discomfort. We are perfectly comfortable with God as holy, sovereign, other, and utterly above us. Tell us the plan and we are in. But friendship language makes us flinch, because it sounds like it is going to cheapen Him, and we have watched people cheapen Him with it. So we retreat to the safe side, and we build an entire spiritual life out of principles and duty and correct information.

Here is the trouble with living there. Principles can sustain a passion, but they cannot generate one. A person generates it. We can hold flawless theology and be dry as a bone, and most of us know somebody who proves it. Knowledge on its own has a way of making people arrogant rather than warm, and our kids can spot the difference across a dinner table without being able to explain what they are seeing.

Which makes Paul’s prayer for an entire church worth reading slowly, because of what he does not ask for. He does not pray that they would get their doctrine straight. He does not pray for better information, better arguments, or a firmer grasp of the material. He asks for something closer than that.

In the knowledge of him. Not about Him. That is the order of operations for this entire week, and it runs the opposite direction from how most of us try to fix a cold heart. We attempt to generate passion directly, by effort or by attending something, and it works for roughly six weeks. Paul assumes passion is downstream. Get close to the Person, and the heat is what follows.

The Decision Is Ours to Unmake

Our culture reinforces the whole misunderstanding by outsourcing spiritual intensity to specialists. We have professionalized it. There are people whose job is to be passionate about God, and the rest of us are the audience, and the arrangement is comfortable because it asks nothing of us but attendance. Meanwhile the actual text keeps handing the burning to farmers, fugitives, shepherds, tax collectors, and two nobodies walking home on a bad afternoon.

If we have quietly decided that this is not available to people like us, that decision was ours and not His. It can be unmade this morning, in a car, on the way somewhere completely ordinary. This is also where peace begins to look different than we expected, because peace is not merely calm. It is being whole, complete, lacking nothing. A person who believes they were excluded from the warmth of God is not lacking a personality type. They are lacking something they were always invited into.

Burn long, not just bright.

Tomorrow · The Love You Had at First