Good Morning, I pray that you will be blessed in Christ and experience victory today and every day. You are not ordinary because you have been born from above. You are His child and that means you are more than an overcomer through Jesus!

True passion drives a person to want to know more about Jesus, to want to be with others who love Jesus and want to grow in their knowledge of Him. True passion yearns to gather with other believers where the Holy Spirit is allowed to be and do according to His own good pleasure because they know the end result will be a greater revelation of who Jesus truly is. True passion produces desires completely unlike those the world produces.

Passion lives the words of the song, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.” Those with passion believe the truth concerning Jesus. As a result, the things the world has to offer are as nothing compared to knowing Him and having His presence continually. In the Bible it reveals that the Galatians had began to think they lacked something and they were losing their passion for God’s presence as a result. Paul asked them, “Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?”

You cannot will yourself into a passion for Jesus. You don’t wake up one day and say, “Today I am going to be a person of passion.” Passion is rooted in right belief, and you either believe the truth about who Christ is, what He accomplished and how it is applied to you, or you harden your heart through doubt. James said it best this way, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”

Just hearing truth is not enough. You need to believe it and apply it as a natural part of who you are in Christ. Just hearing results is to go away and forget what you heard. That creates doubt in the heart. When the word of God is not taken to heart, the heart gets hardened. The practice of believing needs to be embodied as it is essential to spiritual growth. Believing is the “Work.” Don’t let yourself look into the law of liberty and then walk away and forget the new creation you’ve become in Christ. You will struggle if you do. When James speaks of not being a forgetful hearer but a doer of the “Work” (James 1:25) he’s talking about truly believing what you heard so that you are changed by it. He’s not talking about merely hearing it and then moving on to something else before you’ve allowed it to transform you. Meditate on that word until it is part of who you are. If you are struggling to own ask the Holy Spirit to help you own it fully. Don’t give up on it!

When Scripture speaks of the heart becoming hardened through the deceitfulness of sin it is speaking about the sin of unbelief. Hebrews 3 expounds on the danger of hardening the heart by not taking God at His word. What word? The word of His willingness to bring you into all He’s promised you and deliver you.

The Israelites passed through the sea, saw all the miracles, and yet they did not believe. They are proof that seeing something doesn’t produce faith. Faith does not come by seeing, it comes by hearing. With just one bad report from ten of the twelve spies the people were convinced that God was setting them up to experience bad things by promising them a land flowing with milk and honey that was inhabited by giants. They looked at things according to the natural and it caused their hearts to doubt God. They became suspect of God. As a result, they could not realize the possibility of entering into their God given destiny.

As soon as you question God’s willingness to do you good, you harden your heart. Then you look for your own solutions, that is how you reject His presence and power for your situation. You need His presence and His power. You need to be convinced in faith that He is enough. God has promised His presence and power to you through His Son Jesus. Jesus went to the cross to secure it for you. When the gift of His presence and power are enough, all else fades into the background. The freedom you seek is in Him, not apart from Him. It is in His presence that there is fullness of joy and life forevermore. Look to Him and live!

Always remember that you are loved with an everlasting love by a faithful God who cannot lie and you have everything you need in Christ. Go and enjoy the adventure that is yours when you live submitted to the Holy Spirit each day!