The Power of Passion
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.
Mark 12:30-31
Sayyid Qutb is not a household name. Yet even though he died 50 years ago, he has had a profound influence on your life.
Sayyid was an Egyptian educator who had a hateful passion against Jews, Christians, and the West. He communicated this passion in twenty-four books, numerous articles, and hundreds of speeches. Arrested for plotting against the Egyptian president, he was imprisoned in 1954 and ultimately hanged in 1966.
This would have been the end of Sayyid – except his brother, Muhammed Qutb, a university professor, embraced this hateful passion and began publishing and promoting his brother’s radical theories in Saudi Arabia. You probably haven’t heard of him either.
But the entire world has heard of his star pupil, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden took this hate to a whole other level. And because of that, we now live in a different world. We now live in an age of terrorism because of three men fueled by hateful passion.
Every time you have to take off your shoes in an airport, it’s because of their passion. Every time you have to go through a body scan or have your luggage opened, it’s because of their passion.
The power of passion.
A Passion for Love
It’s rightly been said that nothing of note occurs without passion.
Nothing of note occurs without passion.
Jesus knew this. He was clear about the importance of living with passion. In His case, it wasn’t the passion of hate, but the passion of love.
A man walked up to Him one day and said, in effect, “How might you summarize the Law…just give me the Cliffs Notes.”
Jesus responded, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
Can you feel the passion in Jesus’ words? Not a passion for hate but a passion for love. The repeated word is “all.” We are to love God with all we are and with all we have.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Lewis is giving a clarion call for passion.
Pastor and author Ray Johnston put it well: “It has never been the smartest, wealthiest, most educated or most beautiful people who have changed the world. The people who have made the biggest difference had one thing in common – they were people with passion.
The Apostle Paul warns us about losing our passion with this plea: “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor” (Romans 12:11).
The key word is keep. That is to say, passion can wane. It takes intentionality to keep your spiritual fervor.
Passion can wane. It takes intentionality to keep your spiritual fervor.
For Osama bin Laden and his predecessors, this meant ongoingly fueling the fire of hate. For Jesus, this meant ongoingly monitoring the level of love. If the former resulted in untold evil, the latter can result in untold good.
Let’s freshly commit to being people of passion. And let’s leave a legacy not of death but of life.
PRAYER
Lord, seldom do I use a terrorist as an example. However, in this case, it works. Help me to look at their passion and what it accomplished and use that as a motivator to deepen my passion and dream of what it can accomplish.
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