Pursuit and Passion

Recently, I have just gotten back from a much needed vacation in Atlanta. Because of the inner frustrations that I was dealing with while living in Colorado, it was very much enjoyable to go home and to visit my loved ones. While on this vacation, I had the time to do a lot of thinking about my life, my walk with Christ, the ministry that God has entrusted me with, and my relationship with other people and what I've discovered is that there is something that is missing in my life. For the first time in my adult life, I was faced with the dilemma of not enjoying my work, and what has troubled me has been that I wasn't sure why my work is enjoyable.

From an outsider's perspective, I have everything that a person could want as a young man: high quality friends who continue to keep me accountable, a great family that support my endeavors, great prospects for a future career as I pursue my doctorate in one of the top institutions in the country, and having a growing relationship with Christ that is producing fruit. In spite of all of this, there was much restlessness and a strong lack of enjoyment and fulfillment in the work that I have been given to do. I have begun to see my passion and desire for things to wane significantly: my desire to study Austrian economics and political theory has become nonexistent as well as my personal desire to play my saxophone. These two things have always been my core hobbies, and, at times, a source of relaxation for me, but they have faded much in my life. However, it is not very unusual that a person's hobbies change over time, but what has been most surprising has been that my passion for my profession, atmospheric science, has been rapidly declining over time. This has shocked me because to me, I've always believed that this would be a permanent interest of mine (after all, I've been interested in this field since I was a child).

So at this moment, I began to seek after God and asked Him: have I lost the joy in my profession willingly or is God systematically removing certain desires from me? What desires are God exchanging for my own? At this point, I would describe this meditation as a groaning in my heart. On one hand, there's a great desire to passionately serve Christ and throw myself on Him completely and to have the walk that is fitting for a believer...much like how Adam walked with God before the Fall, where he heard the voice of the Lord walking beside him.However, on the other hand, I feel like the majority of the work that I'm doing is unfulfilling and the motivation is quickly leaving me. In my heart, I believe that many believers can relate to this experience: what do you when God places you between two different realities- the reality of your current dissatisfaction and the reality of His calling?

As always, whenever we ask God anything in faith, He always provides an answer and in my situation, it was answered in two ways- through my girlfriend and through the words of C.S. Lewis. I described this to my girlfriend first and she mentioned several things that brought clarity, but one statement stuck out the most. She stated that:

"...God has withheld the satisfaction you received before from the things that you used to do and He is releasing satisfaction for the things that you don't always get a chance to do, like minister directly to others and now your desires are aligning with your calling or better yet, your passions are aligning with your purpose."

This is a very true statement because before any person can walk in their calling, their heart, will, and passion must align with the heart and passion necessary to complete their calling. In Christianity today, there are too many individuals who complete the work of God without having God's heart; there are many individuals who do God's work out of obligation and duty, but not out of the passion and joy that God desires for us to do. As a result, we see very spiritually dry ministries where the power of the Holy Spirit is absent. For me personally, when I accepted my calling as a pastor, I was grateful for being called to do such a work, but since that time, God has continued to reveal to me that I do not have the heart of a shepherd yet. My heart still has a number of other passions that are not in line with my calling, and until all of these other passions are counted as less than nothing, my heart will continue to groan for something that it cannot reach. 

After hearing this from my girlfriend, I continued to meditate on these things and search my own heart to determine what other passions are conflicting with His calling for my life. After these meditations, I asked a more fundamental question: if God is my supreme delight and treasure, then why am I unsatisfied at all? This question fell in line with a book that I'm reading named Desiring God by John Piper. In the introduction to this book, Piper quotes C.S. Lewis:

"If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

To me, this is a profound statement which lead me to repent for my attitude towards Him. It is not that my passions are dissipating, but rather God is drawing me in pursuit of a higher and complete satisfaction only found in Him. My problem is not that I have so many interests and passions, but my problem is that I'm satisfied and comfortable with my surroundings to the point that it has caused me NOT to pursue Him as my highest satisfaction. This is the marvelous work of God: He draws our heart to the point where we begin to desire a satisfaction in Him and His work to a measure that we never could experience previously. Our heart craves Him and can only be satisfied with Him, but for whatever reason, I was more concerned with being satisfied with my ambitions. As John Piper writes in His book:

"...it [the pursuit of joy in God] is the key to breaking the power of sin on our way to heaven. Matthew Henry, another Puritan pastor, put it like this: “The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.” This is the great business of life—to “put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.” I know of no other way to triumph over sin long-term than to gain a distaste for it because of a superior satisfaction in God...God remains gloriously all-satisfying. The human heart remains a ceaseless factory of desires. Sin remains powerfully and suicidally appealing. The battle remains: Where will we drink? Where will we feast? Feast on God."

I believe that my experience speaks to the current circumstance of many. If you feel your heart and your passion drifting away from your current way of life, know that this is the work of God, pushing you to never be satisfied with anything outside of God. He will continue to place frustration in your heart until you seek Him as your reward and your treasure. Remember that in His presence, there is fullness of joy and only in Him (not His gifts) will you be satisfied. Know that He longs for you to delight in Him fully as your portion and that everything else is secondary and inferior. Know that your delight in Him reaches its consummation as your fulfill His will for His life and everything else leads to frustration and vanity. The words of Isaiah says it plainly:

"Everyone who thirsts come to the waters; and you who have no money come, buy and eat... why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good and delight yourself in abundance." Isaiah 55:1-2

If you come after Him with this mindset, you will find that nothing can compare to Him and the peace that you have in Him will erase your previous frustrations. You will realize that your only true possession is Christ. I leave you with this quote from A.W. Tozer:

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. They are `poor in spirit.' They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word `poor' as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. `Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'