Since the summer, I have burnt out a passion I once had, and have plodded through the New Year on a ambers.

I have been overwhelmingly disconcerted with my lack of drive and motivation. I have little get up and go about the things I was once enthused about.

I used to be so passionate and motivated to do anything and everything for my church plant, so passionate and certain that I was called for full time ministry. So certain and so willing to give up everything and lead up a full time young adult discipleship ministry. I was so excited to start a church plant myself one day. I wanted to find someone with that same passion for church planting and do life with him.

I spoke to a friend about my lost desires and the diminishing sense that I was called to anything. She suggested that it was possible because I have given it back to God, which I hope I have, and find encouraging, I was sure I was just depressed and have given up hope.

I was convicted of two things about my walk wit Christ that has aided and abetted in my lack of passion.

Lack of obedience

Today in my Life Journal reading was:-

I hear and do not obey; wretched man that I am. I think saying “no” to Jesus one too many times has been a factor, and the reason I say “no” is because I have been starving my Spirit. I do not fear God in the way I should and I do not listen to Him. He speaks, yet I pay no attention. Some times I rather, by choice, sit in my own self-pitying gloom and mill about like a wet lettuce than obey the promptings of the Spirit to worship and pray.

There are times where I am content to drive 10 km/h over the speed limit and break the law, than listen to the Spirit telling me to obey my ruling government who instilled such laws.

There are too many times where I would let my mind wander in to dangerous territories where I imagine and romanticize relationships with certain people in my head… Too many times I will let a curse word pass my lips and try to justify it.

Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. – C.S. Lewis

Lack of Faith

Faith comes from hearing the Word of God, and I do not hear because I do not spend as much time in the Word as I should. Much of obedience comes from the faith that obedience, even in spite of its difficulty, honors and glorifies God. Disobedience comes from doing things in our own strength were obedience comes from doing things in God’s strength that He might be glorified.

Abram did not believe God when He promised that He would give him a son, and thought to “help God out” by sleeping with his wife’s servant. There were the Israelites who by a lack of faith in God, did not believe that God would help them defeat the Canaanites and thus inherit the Promise Land after they watched God part rain down locust, and frogs amongst others, part the red see and follow Him in the form of a pillar of cloud and flame for 40 days. In any case, most of my sin comes through a lack of faith that God will overcome in spite of the odds and in spite of our human wisdom.