"Your Name and Your Renown"

With spring comes a collage of sights, sounds, and sensations that flood the experience.  The green of spring is unlike that of any other time of year, the daffodils and tulips show their shy heads, and the buzzing of bugs begins its pre-summer drone. 

Of course, bugs are not the only things buzzing about.  The yearly phenomenon of spring sports also starts afresh, with the energy and zest that those too long in the gloom of winter’s twilight enthusiastically embrace.  As soccer and baseball in particular get underway, children and their parents (who are often feel much more passion about the games than do their kids) will line the fields and will then passionately cheer and jeer their way through the season. 

Passion… a word so riddled with various meanings that it can be used almost as a dirty word yet signifies that remarkable quality by which we summon up untapped energies, reorient our minds with new dreams and ambitions and then begin the whole-hearted pursuit of  our heart’s desire. 

Naturally, passion can be an amazing thing; amazingly fruitful when it rockets us towards helpful and fruitful goals; amazingly destructive and dangerous when it drags us into the pits of lust, greed and proud ambition. 

Christians must continually guard their own hearts in this regard.  It is easy for our eyes to be drawn by the activity of “winning teams” and the overly-inflated luster of “beating out” other kids (by which we determine that our own children are superior to others).  For several years now, it has repeatedly occurred that fans of sports react to losing (or winning) by resorting to extreme violence and destruction.  There may be nothing new in many ways, but I wonder sometimes if it continues to escalate, especially when I hear more and more incidents of parents assaulting other parents at their children’s sporting events.  What IS wrong with us that we would let it get that far? 

And it should be clear too that this is not a statement berating the playing of sports.  Athletics are a great source of exercise, fun and excitement, allow for the learning of teamwork, and can be a tremendous opportunity to develop initiative.  And while athletic events are sometimes an obvious forum in which some folks make ridiculous spectacles of themselves, this is really about anything that supplants God’s place of preeminence as Lord of our lives.  Things like career achievement, financial affluence, physical ecstasy, and social approval (to name only a few) too easily and too often become our hearts desires. 

Bear in mind that misplaced passions always reap bitter harvests.  Whether we are talking about getting swallowed up by the lightning-fast pace of the corporate world, keeping up with the Joneses into bankruptcy, chemical addictions, STDs or even co-dependent relationships that repeatedly fail and leave us heart-broken, whatever we allow to come before God comes to nothing in the end.  This is why it is time right NOW for each of us to seek God.  This is why it is imperative that we begin to passionately pursue the most important thing of all before the setting of another sun. 

“Remember this, fix it in your mind, take it to heart….  Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me.  I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.  I say:  My purpose shall stand, and I will do what I please” (Isaiah 46:8-10a). 

Are we willing to live with the “end in mind?”  I hope so.  It’s a shame to think that we might pursue all our own purposes, not believing perhaps, that only His purposes and plans will last for eternity. 

“The path of the righteous is level; O upright One, You make the way of the righteous smooth.  Yes, LORD, walking in the way of Your laws, we wait for You; Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts.  My soul yearns for You in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for You”  (Isaiah 26:7-9a). 

(Thom Mollohan and his family have ministered in southern Ohio the past 14 ½  years and is the  author of The Fairy Tale Parables:  Classic Fairy Tales Pointing to God's Love and Truth.  He is the pastor of Pathway Community Church and may be reached for comments or questions by email at pastorthom@pathwaygallipolis.com).