Oak Hill Baptist Church © 2008-
Every age has its genuine movements of God. Every age has its frivolous fads. God is always working in this world, and this world is always trying to imitate his working and thus to sidetrack his people.
In our age one of the genuine movements of God centers on the word passion. I hear it constantly in my younger, fellow pastors. They say, “I have a passion for _____,” and fill in the blank. I read it regularly in books and articles, with the word and its synonyms sprinkled throughout the literature. I listen to it in the contemporary Christian music scene. The very style of the songs is meant to communicate passion.
Dr. John Piper has tapped into the passion theme of our age in a mostly good way.
The purpose of the church he pastors, Bethlehem Baptist, is about spreading a passion
for the supremacy of God. His books all contribute to the theme. Don’t Waste Your
Life warns people not to “coast through life without a passion.” Any passion will
not do, of course, for “God created us to live with a single passion to joyfully
display his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.” He frequently uses words
like zeal, fervor, ardor, and blood-
Yet we must recognize that even the right use of passion language and passion music and passion methods rides on the back of a cultural phenomenon that has no connection to true Christianity. Indeed genuine passion is effective because it rightly reads a cultural fad, borrows its language, and uses the fad to point to Christ. This has been and always will be one of the tools of evangelism, winning a new generation by becoming “all things to all men.”
The cultural beginnings of passion can be found in the 60s. Passion grew against a background of people who lived through the depression and WWII, a people who believed in expressing passion with a whole different vocabulary than that of today. Words like “duty” and “commitment” were more important to them, resonated more with their hearts and minds. The youth of the sixties doubted the value of church and marriage and obeying the laws of the nation if you did not feel like it, and the seeds of passion were planted in our culture.
So while there is nothing wrong with genuine passion, we must recognize the frivolous fads that are in our culture and some that have grown up around the Christian passion movement. Perhaps the most dangerous of these is the temptation to accept passion itself as the goal of life, just be passionate about something, anything. Close to it is the temptation to substitute passion for Christian maturity. “As long as I display passion in my life about Jesus, I get a free pass on all that other stuff. Passion puts me at the head of the class.” Passion becomes a substitute for maturity, for wisdom, for humility, for disciplined Bible study, for lifelong mission commitments, for faithfulness, and a variety of other deeply important aspects of the Christian life.
How important it is to read culture! How important it is to borrow from culture
to package the gospel in a way that our neighbors will understand! Yet how important
it is to be grounded in Christ and his life for us! In our diligence (another synonym
for “passion”) we are to add to our faith in him both love for him and people. Then
we will have a firm hope for eternity with him (2 Peter 1:3-