For the next 3 days, Phil Carlson, one of our campus staff, will be guest blogging for SMUPulse.  Enjoy!

Protecting the Passion; Staying on Fire for Jesus

Part 1 of 3: Dig Deep

There are many times in our lives when God teaches us something powerful and we get so pumped about it that we feel ready to take on the world! Then something happens. Time passes, life gets hard, worries creep up and we find our excitement waning, our passion failing and the world crashing down around us.

Yet the problem is not that God’s Word is not effectual. The issue is us.

Though we may be very excited about a new and powerful teaching from God’s Word, we don’t put it into practice and so ensure that we will lose whatever we thought we gained in hearing Godly teaching once testing comes.

Jesus explained this in Matthew 7:24-28:
“Therefore whoever hears theses sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock; and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.
“But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.” (NKJV, emphasis mine)

Notice that both houses experienced the intense storm of testing, but the house of faith built through doing the hard work of digging deep to the bedrock of putting Jesus’ teaching into practice stood strong. Putting God’s Word into practice is rarely easy, but when we make the choice to take what God has taught us and start teaching it to others, to start actively applying it directly to our daily lives; we ensure that when the storms of our lives come we will stand strong, staying passionately in love with the God who saved us.
           
Jesus emphasized this understanding further in Matthew 13:20-21 when He told the story of a plant that grew quickly but died just as fast because it had no root and withered the moment testing came.

So what has God been teaching you? I have to ask myself as well. What has He been teaching me? No matter how excited we may be about this teaching, the only way we can know it will take root in our lives is if we do all we can to immediately put it into practice. Let’s join forces and dig deep together by applying what God is teaching us, keeping each other accountable to do so. It’s one of the most powerful ways we can make sure we don’t lose our passion for God and stay on fire for Jesus.
-Phil