Awakening

Passion is one of those words that brings with it heaps of connotations. When I say passion several ideas come to mind, fanatic fans, a young couple in love, a person fiddling with his hobby, the athlete practising for hours in the rain and the preacher sweating and spitting behind the pulpit.
What is passion though? Can you measure it by volume, time or anything else? Often we think of passion as the person in front of church that during the sermon says “amen” the loudest, during praise and worship jumps the highest or attends the most amounts of services.
Passion though in its purest form of definition comes from the Latin word that is translated “suffering” or “pain”, which is why the last hours of Jesus are described as “the passion of Christ”. Why is passion, as we know it, linked with suffering though?
“What will you go through?”
I believe passion is, “what you are willing to go through, to get to that which you are passionate about.” Passion is not about how loud you get or how high you jump. Those can be side effect of your passion but at the end of the day, passion is a deep resolve in one’s heart. It’s a person sold out for a cause and who is willing to go through anything. Or if we are to use the definition of the word, it’s a determination that no amount of temporary pain or suffering will stop me from pursuing and getting to the object of my passion.
Look at the example of Jesus in Hebrews 12:2-3 (NIV)
“2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
Jesus was willing to endure such pain and suffering for the joy set before Him; for the passion before Him. This is why the cross shows our true value and is the perfect description of God’s love for humanity. So my first question when it comes to passion is “what will you go through?” If there is a limit to what you are willing to go through, there is a limit to your passion. Note: please don’t fall in the trap here and think suffering is only being taken hostage in some jungle where you are threatened with death if you don’t deny Jesus. Often it is harder to go through a mundane week at uni or work than the extreme situations, where everything is a high-pressure situation. I speak out of experience here.
“Then what?”
The second question I have for you is, what will happen once you catch, what you are passionate about? Then what?

So many people chase fame, fortune, relationships, a paycheck, a car, a ministry opportunity or something else but have you ever thought about life after the chase? Then what? So you get job, then what? So she finally gives in and starts to go out with you or even marry you, then what? The question, you must ask yourself, is what you’re pursuing above anything else, able to sustain you??? If the object of your passion can’t sustain you, you are wasting your time. All you have become is a man dancing around a golden calf.
Return the Passion.
Can I urge you, make Jesus your number one passion! How do you  get passionate about Him? You return the passion. He is so in love with you and He is so passionate about you! We love Him because He first loved us. If your passion has grown cold, then start your pursuit at the passion to have a passion for Him. He is found in the pursuit of Him. The beautiful thing is that when you seek Him, He is able to sustain you. You seek Him first and all the smaller passions in life will come as they take their rightful place in the greater plan God has for your life.

Bless you,
Thomas Hansen
Young Adults Pastor for Powerhouse Central, Hillsong

Where do i begin? Awakening 09....passion.alive.broken.blind.alive.FREEDOM.breathe...ok.exhale...alive.selfish.bitter.hearing.listening.crying.deeper.embarresed.intimacy.hard heart.shattered.soft heart.....still alive...wanting to run, wished i could hide...scared.MY GOD IS BIGGER...He will never leave me..born to cause change..VISION..determination..TRANSFORMED..still alive..smiling....AWAKE AWAKENED AWAKENING!!!! i felt....i fought....i lost the battle to keep my hearts walls up from being broken for this world.....God won my heart once again, he opened my eyes, my heart, my being to his perfect love and to the love WE MUST SHOW TO THIS WORLD...i didn't walk into every Awakening conference thinking id walk out the way i did, London,New York...especially Sydney all shattered the core of my walls that i brilliantly built up to stop me from seeing the pain and disfunction this world owns so well...but now i have a set of brand NEW eyes.....and before them the path God chose for me to walk.....NOW I SEE!!!
Lv Brooke Dillon

^{Matthew 22:34}Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. ³⁵One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

 ³⁶"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" ³⁷Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'^{[b] 38}This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'^{[c] 40}All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

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I sometimes wonder why I always complicate things.  My world and my emotions seem to be in a vicious cycle of confusion to clarity back to confusion.  I would like to say that as I write this first blog that I have figured everything out and that my life makes sense however this is not the case.  I am in a perpetual tension of faith and doubt, life and death, flesh and spirit, joy and sorrow, laughter and crying and a whole lot of other opposites.

This is the reality of my life, not sure if you can relate...

I tend to hang my future, my thoughts, my emotions and choices on things that cannot handle the weight of them and ultimately let me down everytime.

We all would like a more simple life, one filled with peace...I mean real peace not just the notion of it.

Jesus silenced the self righteous.

Then he silenced my fears.

Joshua....just do two simple things, love me and love people.  All the rest of that other stuff hangs on this.

Easy.

Revolutionary.

Life altering.

Now take a deep breath and live it.

No ifs ands or buts.

It is that simple.

As I was about to speak in Singapore this weekend I felt a voice in my heart say clear as day...

"Trust me Joshua"

It was the most simple and clear thing I have heard in a long time.

This is God.

Simple, clear, love, truth, joy, peace...

So let us not hang our thoughts, lives, decisions on anything else.

Ask yourself does this choice love God and love people?

Does this thought love God and love others as I love myself?

IT ALL HANGS ON THIS....LOVE

+jk

Romans 1:1-6 – BELONGING to CHRIST
The Gospel is introduced right up front. Quickly reveals and explains the overarching theme of this letter and the reason for this letter.
Paul - a servant of Christ Jesus – Belonging to Christ was something that Paul truly understood…before his salvation and his meeting of Jesus he was a devout Jew who believed he had a special revelation that the new Christians were deceived by following Jesus – so his belonging was defined by being well known in his religious circles. But once he meets Jesus, the people he would of belonged to disowned him and were now his enemies from their perspective. So where he once had a life defined by what he did and his status and belonging was dependant on being accepted by how many Christians he put in prison. Paul would of felt like an orphan, a child without a family, totally vulnerable and with no answers within himself.
His salvation experience was so full on he was even physically blinded by the light of Jesus. It’s like God wanted Paul to understand how much he now belonged to Jesus and no one else that he blinded him so he could see no one or nothing he used to belong to. All he could see was Jesus, nothing else, Jesus became his everything.
Paul gets radically saved by the sovereign will of God and his whole world is rocked, he loses all his old friends, his world is turned around 180 degrees and now he only belongs to Jesus. Even the existing Christians were not very accepting initially, understandably. So Paul has no option but to belong to Jesus. This is not a burden but Paul discovers that this is the greatest place to be in, to just belong to Jesus…a massive weight of pressure is lifted off of his shoulders.
If you remember when you first met Jesus and said you will radically follow Jesus you would most likely remember certain people in your world disowning you. Although this is painful it is also allowed by God so that we would learn to belong to Jesus and Jesus alone. Where before we belonged to the things and the people that surrounded us in our world we now belong to someone that is beyond this world, our heart awakens to our true belonging in our Father and creator through His son Jesus. Do not be afraid that when you meet Jesus that people that you used to hangout with disown you. Its not that you don’t love them or that they can’t also belong to Jesus it just means that you are no longer defined by people that love this world, but you are defined by someone greater. You may even go through a beautiful experience of being blind. Not physically necessarily but things that used to matter to you don’t anymore. It is not unusual to give away things, or give up things or quit things, because they just don’t satisfy anymore. This doesn’t mean all those things are necessarily evil, it rather means that the love of those things or belonging to those things are evil.
Therefore these first verses are not just good theology they are coming out of a heart that has experienced the feeling and reality of not belonging and then discovering true belonging to Christ. It reveals that Christ chose us before time began, we have been elected and now belong to Jesus. This changes everything. We live different if we understand that we belong to Jesus and not this world, we belong to someone who has paid the greatest price, he paid the price of Death for my sins, not his own sin, but my sin through shedding his blood. The penalty for sin is death so we must understand that through the death of Jesus we have been set free from the penalty of death and now belong to Jesus and has given us eternal life. Martin Luther calls this the ‘Great Exchange’.
What Paul is saying right up front is all we need is Jesus.
Romans 15:13 – May the God of Hope fill you with all Joy and Peace in believing…
It is believing that we belong to Jesus that we are filled with Joy and Peace.
We don’t need to try and belong to anything else but Jesus. We don’t need to prove our self in anyway. We can’t earn this belonging, we can’t prove to God that we deserve it by our good works, this belonging only comes through Jesus Christ.
This is freedom, this is peace, this is the great joy that we belong and we do not have to strive to prove ourselves any more, we can now live differently, we can serve with everything we have, we become humble through this revelation, we suffer and endure differently, the spirit of God gains access to our life through us belonging to Jesus.
This happens because Jesus lived the perfect Holy Life and gave his life up freely so now there is no separation between us and the spirit of God. This means we can now live out this belonging to Jesus through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit fulfilling the will of our Heavenly Father.
We now belong to the Family of God. This is not a family that will disown us, it is an eternal family motivated by true love, the head of this Family will never leave us nor forsake us. He will not divorce us, he will not disown us, he will not doubt us, he believes in us and eternally loves us. It is the greatest family that has ever existed.
Eph 1:4For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

So Paul reveals to us that this is the good news, the Gospel, that although we deserved to be separated from God for all eternity because of our sin we now eternally belong to Jesus through His Death on the cross. This is not sad news but the most freeing and joyous news. We can now enjoy this life that God has given us and freely give this love that we have freely been given.







BECAUSE WE BELONG:
• We can love our enemies
• We can love our Christian brothers and sisters as we are now part of the beautiful family of God.
• We can serve others and not ourselves
• We can bring justice to others because we understand we don’t anything else beyond belonging to Jesus
• We are righteous not through our own works but through Jesus
• We are therefore free from guilt forever
• We can live radically
• We are truly generous as we have been given everything we need through belonging to Jesus
• We are not takers in life but givers
• We can forgive others as we have been forgiven
• We can resist temptation because we have access through belonging to the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead
• We are victorious because Christ is victorious over sin and death itself
• We are fearless
• We are bold and courageous - because greater is he that is in me then he that is in the world
• We are secure
• We can live for His Glory, we can respond to this belonging and the amazing sacrifice of Jesus to give us access into the family of God by living for His Glory and giving all of our lives.
Food for thought and Discussion – Questions to Wrestle with this week and live out…

1) What does it mean to belong to Christ?
2) What security do we have in belonging?
3) How should we respond to this belonging?
4) How does our life speak that we belong to Jesus?

"Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants." - Exodus 12:24 So in chapter 12 of Exodus God explains to Moses how he wants the Jews to partake in the Passover festival. Moses then passed this commandment on to Israel in verse 24. This becomes Moses' legacy. 4000 years later there are 13 million Jews in the world that still partake in this festival to remember and worship God for delivering them from oppression. Doesn't matter if they are Orthodox, Reformed or Observant or the Jews that look like ZZ Top they all still agree and unite on one thing and that's Passover. What will be our legacy? Will it unite the generations to come? What we do and sew into now - our grandchildren are going to either reap or suffer. I love awakening because it stands to unite the church, from all denominations under the banner of Christ. How priveleged are we that God allows us to be a part of this great legacy!
Be Blessed, Joel.