Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Passion and Work
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

This psalm we just recited and sang is a reminder of one of the basic functions of work in the world. Just as God cares providentially for his creatures, feeding them, caring for them, and so on, he makes us his ministers to feed the world. He uses all of humanity as his servants to accomplish this providential care. This nature of work was stressed so much by Luther in the Protestant Reformation. There was a line there about how he makes his ministers flames of fire, and this is probably speaking of angelic ministers, but as we’ll see today, if we understand we’re all ministers, this fire is significant.

From our sermon text today, we also sang a song at the beginning of the service that we normally sing on Palm Sunday. If you noticed, it mentions the word passion. Palm Sunday is the beginning of Passion Week. Our sermon topic for today is passion as it relates to our work.

We’ll draw that passion at some point in the sermon to the Lord Jesus and his passion that led him to the cross. That’s the appropriateness of the song normally reserved for Palm Sunday—to remind us and put us in mind of Passion Week, the passion of our savior, as we think about our passion relative to work.

To discuss this passion as it relates to our work, we’re going to turn to Romans 12. I’m going to focus particularly on verse 11. There are three phrases there, but I’ll read the verses just before and after it. So we’ll read Romans 12:10-12 from the New King James Version. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

**Romans 12:10-12**

Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another. Not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for our work and we thank you for our jobs that we go to, or the work that we have in our homes, in our communities, in the civil arena. We thank you, Father, for work. Six days we’re to do this work and to labor, and it has tremendous significance as image bearers of you. We work as you work. So bless us, Lord God, now with a consideration of passion as it relates to our work, that we might, whatever tasks we go about tomorrow morning, approach them with passion in Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen. Please be seated.

Passion is a major topic these days of vocational calling and what we do at our work. I think it’s somewhat unique to—or certainly not shared by—generations gone by. Work is work, and your passions are more often your hobbies. I think this emphasis on passion in the workplace is actually a very good thing if we understand it from a biblical perspective.

So I’m going to talk about passion today. What kind of tent maker do you think Paul was? If Jesus was a carpenter’s apprentice prior to age thirty, how did he go about that work? You ever thought about that? I mean, was Paul just excited and passionate about his work as an apostle, or did he just sort of dog paddle while he made tents through life? I don’t think so. I think the writings of Paul are clear, including the verses we just read, that whatever he did, he did with passion as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

My goal today is that we would see this idea of passion as it relates to our work—that it would, like the rest of the sermons we’ve been talking about, alter our conception of work just a bit, maybe challenge us and encourage us, and become power to us for our work by looking at passion as the Bible talks about it in relationship to our work.

So I have six points I want to make. You can jot these down if you’re taking notes, or if you don’t want to take notes, that’s fine. Each point will become a little bit shorter, so if we get long in the first couple of points, don’t worry—we’ll move through the last ones quickly.

**First, we’ll talk about passion’s mandate.** Passion is mandated. It’s a command. What we read here could be seen as a description, but these are commands. This is what we’re supposed to do. So there’s a mandate for passion, particularly thinking of it today in this series on work—there’s a mandate for passion about our work no matter what it is.

**Secondly, we’ll talk about passion’s counterfeits.** There’s a lot of counterfeit passion going on in the world today, maybe in your life and my life as well. We’ll talk about imitation passions that aren’t really focused on who we are as God’s redeemed image bearers.

**Then we’ll talk about passion’s focus.** What’s the focal point of passion? Of course, what the text tells us is that it’s serving the Lord. So that’s the focal point of our passion.

**Then we’ll talk about passion’s freedom.** How passion, properly understood, gives us a great deal of freedom in several different directions. We’ll talk about that freedom to engage in our vocations or not, as the case may be, in terms of what Christ is calling us to do. It frees us from an over-reliance on vocation or some of the reasons that we’re engaging in vocation that may be counterfeit passion. There’s tremendous freedom that comes from passion biblically understood.

**Our fifth point will be passion’s source.** What’s the source of this passion? It will be such a great source of power for our work. So passion is mandated, passion has counterfeits, there’s a focal point for our passion, and that frees us. Our passion has an element of freedom, and so it’s really important that we know the source for passion.

**And then finally, we’ll make a comment or two about passion as power for our work**—that it energizes our work. So that’s the direction we’re going to go. This first point will be primarily talking about the text itself.

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## Passion’s Mandate

The verse before us that we just read, particularly verse 11, has a triplet structure. If you’re looking at your Bibles or just listening to me, either way, that’s fine. **Not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.** So there are three aspects to this verse.

The context for this is that in Romans 12:1, we have a transition point. Paul argues for us to become living sacrifices in all that we do. Based on the mercies of God as described in the first part of his epistle to the Romans, we’re to then self-consciously take up this task of being living sacrifices. We’ll return to that a little bit later in the sermon. But the point is that Paul is telling us what that looks like.

After those verses, he talks about the giftings that God gives us. Then he talks about, as I read in verse 10, our relationship to people, humanity. Remember, relationships are central to our work. The point of all work is love—the loving care of God, God providentially taking care of his created order is what we enter into when we work.

I thought about this yesterday. I was at the supermarket buying some things for our Super Bowl gathering together. Yes, I’ll try to work in at least one other reference to the Super Bowl today. I don’t know that I’ll actually talk about the topic of conversation the last two weeks in terms of the controversy, but at least the Super Bowl. You know, this grocery store clerk was selling us the stuff we bought. And I thought to myself, you know—and I know that for some people this is a bridge too far. That’s okay. If you don’t get it, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

But for me, when we think of the providential character of God being displayed through his hands, through all kinds of people doing work that produces rejoicing, life, and love in the world, this grocery store clerk was adding to our enjoyment of the Lord’s day today and getting together with friends and watching the Super Bowl. You know, it’s that kind of impact of what we’ve been discussing about reconstructing our vision of work. It changes how we consider people. They’re not just cogs in a machine selling stuff at the supermarket. They’re people who, whether they know it or not—and frequently they don’t—are being used by God to bring life through food, drink, and rejoicing at that.

So Paul talks about this in verse 10 as part of being living sacrifices—our relationship to people. And then in verse 11, I think he gives us instruction that is about everything that we do. So he’s not just talking about employment or vocation. He’s talking about everything. But because he’s talking about everything, of course that involves our work. What he says here in this triplet of statements or clauses relates to that. And I think verse 11 leads to verse 12: **Rejoicing in hope.** I think that’s a result of the passion that we have for our lives, including our work. It eventuates in hopefulness. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes as well.

Now, the actual way these verses read in the King James or New King James—there’s maybe a more accurate or easier way to remember what he’s saying. He’s discussing certain topics. He talks about diligence, spirit, and then the Lord Jesus. You could almost see a trinitarian kind of structure here with the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus the Son. But in any event, there are three things. And he gives a particular word in relationship to these three things.

So here’s one translation: **As for zeal, not slothful. As for the spirit, on fire. As to the Lord, servant.**

So we have this first phrase: **Not lagging in diligence.** That word “diligence” is translated in the King James as “zeal.” But what about our diligence? We’ll talk a little bit about that word in a couple of minutes. And what we’re not supposed to be in terms of that diligence is slothful. Not lagging, not slothful. Okay? Not lazy, not slow, not distracted.

And then in terms of our spirit—and this has a reference beyond our spirit to the Holy Spirit who indwells us—but our spirit, the way we go about doing things, right? The emotional side we could say in terms of our spirit: **fervent.** The word actually means to boil. As your spirit boiling. It can also mean metal in a fire, a forge that glows. So a glow with the spirit. How’s that? You know, boiling in terms of your passion. This is a defining aspect of what passion means for the lives that God has called us to do—in terms of spirit glowing, or bubbling, boiling.

**As to the Lord: servants.** Servants of the Lord. Okay, so these are the three things that I think are correctly delineated as a single verse, and they’re addressing what I consider to be this topic that overall informs us about how we approach our work, all of our life, but how we approach our work specifically.

So when Paul went to be a tent maker, he would apply these truths no doubt in his life to his tent-making work as well as his preaching and epistle-writing work. And that’s the way we should have—not some kind of divided, segmented life where one aspect of us is Christian and another where we’re just sort of workers in the world. No, everything is to be informed, I think, by the characteristics described in these three verses.

So first, he says: **As to zeal, not slothful.**

By the way, there’s one other verse—and only one—where both these characteristics are described apart from the service to the Lord. That’s in Acts 18:25 when we read about a man who had been instructed in the way of the Lord and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord. So here he is being fervent in spirit, and he’s teaching accurately—and that would mean diligently. The word “diligently” is translated the same in our first clause of our text.

These two words—fervent in spirit and diligence—is the only place in the rest of the New Testament, and as I understand it, in any Greek writings where these terms are brought together. It helps to inform us about what this means. He’s fervent in spirit. Okay, so he’s got passion. He’s boiling, and he teaches accurately, right?

This word for “accurate” or “diligence” might also be translated in the King James as “zeal.” You know, that first word “diligence” has a couple of different things going on to it. So when we read “not lagging in diligence,” how could it be translated accurately? Because it has a couple of different aspects to it.

The main one that people think of is speediness. Okay? If you look at the Greek version of the Old Testament, it almost always is translating a word that means speedily, quickly, be quick at work. Okay? But it doesn’t just mean that. It doesn’t mean that he spoke quickly. It might mean that, but he’s speaking accurately because the other implication of this word for diligence is diligent—it’s careful, it’s in a disciplined way.

So it’s this combination. This word has these two connotations to it. One is speed—you get at stuff—and the other is discipline. And if you think about it, it’s really easy to have one without the other, right? So it’s easy to be disciplined but not really get at stuff, and you’re sort of plotting along all the time. You’re being disciplined about it, but you’re not really—you couldn’t describe that as passionate.

But on the other hand, you could be really busy about things but not disciplined. So now you’ve got a lot of frenetic energy going on, and maybe for a while you seem like your spirit is burning, but it’s that light bulb that’s about to burn out. You know, the old incandescent bulbs sometimes had a filament that would get real bright before it completely failed. So there’s this kind of frenetic work, and then there’s this kind of plodding, disciplined work. But this word says that passion—as we’re using the term today as it relates to your work—you’re supposed to be quick and you’re supposed to be disciplined. So bring those two things together, and this is what the first characteristic of passion is telling us to be.

And it’s kind of interesting because if you think about it, as quickness, it’s sort of like in your quickness, don’t be slow is what he’s saying, right? So you know, don’t let trials, difficulties, lower wages than you think you ought to get, a lousy manager, difficult co-workers, difficult external circumstances, or maybe you have too much money and don’t really need the work that you’re doing—you’re just sort of passing your time there or something. You know, there are all kinds of ways that would prevent us from being either disciplined or speedy at what we do.

And so passion for work—you can tell tomorrow when you go to work if you’ve got passion or not. If you’re being obedient to this mandate here, you’re supposed to be diligent. Not slothful, but rather diligent. Okay? And are you doing things quickly in a good order? Are you getting at them, and are you doing them in a disciplined way so that you’re actually accomplishing good work?

So passion has those two characteristics to it. And this man who was teaching—this is what he did. He was fervent in spirit. He spoke in an accurate way about Jesus. So **as to zeal, then: not slothful.** Not slothful in business, not slothful in the things that you’re doing, in your purpose for the work itself.

Related to this is another way to translate this: **Never be lacking in zeal. Keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord. Don’t be lacking in zeal in quickness and diligence as well.**

So those are the two specifics of that first phrase of the verse. There’s an urgency and a discipline that we attack our work with, and that is part of a demonstration of passion for our work. Okay.

Now the second phrase is: **As to your spirit, boiling.**

You know, that would sound odd, but that’s a perfectly legitimate—probably the preferred—translation of this word that we translate as “fervent.” It sounds odd, so the translators put in words like “fervent,” but that’s what it means. It means, you know, on fire. On fire with your spirit. It means having a passion—again, that’s emotional. Not just a passion that is oriented toward speed and diligence in your work, but a passion that fires you up for that.

So in a way, what we’ve got going on in these three clauses is kind of peeling back the layers of the onion. What makes you diligent and quick in your work and disciplined? Well, it’s this fervent spirit. Okay. And then beyond that, the third layer in is that you’re serving the Lord. So the service to the Lord drives a fervent spirit, which then results in you being disciplined and quick in your work.

That’s kind of passion and its direction from these verses in front of us. So we’re asked—or maybe commanded is a better way to put it—we’re being commanded today by the Spirit to go about our work tomorrow in the power of the Spirit with desire. Like I said, I’m not sure this word actually is referring to the Holy Spirit. Maybe, or maybe it’s just talking about our spirit. It doesn’t have a definite article to it. But either way, it doesn’t make any difference. The Holy Spirit fuels our spirit. And when he fuels our spirit with a knowledge of what being a servant of Christ is about, then we have a kind of passion and emotional commitment to our work.

So we’ve got emotions, we’ve got discipline, and we’ve got urgency to get about with the task. These things are what’s being described in Romans 12:11 as components to what we can call today passion.

So as regards the spirit, then, we’re to be seething, boiling, glowing, on fire. And then the text goes on to draw into the next level, which is that all of this really comes from the relationship that we have to the Lord. Without a relationship to Christ, whatever emotional fire you have isn’t really coming from the right source and will be misdirected, and you won’t end up being both disciplined and speedy in your work.

The source of all this evidence of passion is a correct understanding of who we are—that as to the Lord, we’re servants. You know, it’s interesting this word “servant” because in our day and age it can be translated “slave.” It’s the same word that Paul refers to himself as in Romans 1:1—that he’s a servant of Jesus. You know, we think of that and we think of slaves and we think of the slave trade in America and all that stuff, but that really is not what this is in Roman culture.

I guess it was more like indentured servitude, but in Roman culture, people with tremendous responsibilities over a lot of important people or areas or land or whatever it is might be servants. Okay. So really, the difficulty of the work and the lower class had nothing to do with being a servant. You could be upper class and still be a servant in that class. But the degree of work and responsibility you have may be quite significant. Okay.

So it doesn’t mean that you’re a demeaned person in relationship to your master. What it means is you’ve got a master, and the master might give you quite important work to do, right? But you’re never away from that relationship. That’s who you’re serving. Ultimately, you’re serving the Master, the Lord Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ, the Savior King, right? That’s what those words can be translated as well. And he’s the one we’re reporting to.

So in whatever we do, whether we’re in religious things like worship or whether we go off to the workplace tomorrow, or when we get with our families, or our recreation this afternoon, whatever we do, we’re to be servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. Singleness of focus, I guess, is the point here.

I said I would refer to the Super Bowl perhaps. This singleness of focus was used of people training for the Olympics. So they’ve got one thing to do, right? They’re supposed to compete in the Olympics and win. That’s their goal. And the singleness of focus is related to these phrases.

So if you look at today’s Super Bowl, these guys—at least the ones that are going to do well today—have had a singleness of focus, right? For that game and for the purpose that they’re being put into the Super Bowl for. And when it comes to us as Christians, our singleness of purpose is not serving the Olympics ultimately, or the Super Bowl, or whatever big thing you’ve got going on at work this week, or your wife, or your husband. Our singleness of purpose is in serving the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the gig for us. That consumes everything.

And if we understand that correctly, that drives us with an emotional passion for whatever the master has given us to do. Whether it’s going off tomorrow and making big corporate decisions involving millions of dollars, or whether it’s going off tomorrow and selling hamburgers or coffee at a coffee stand, or sweeping and cleaning up after people—it doesn’t make any difference. If the master gives you a particular task for the kingdom, that’s a task for the kingdom. Okay? And we approach it with the sort of passion that results from this singleness of focus of serving Jesus.

The gospel changes everything, and it changes our relationship to work. We’re not working now just to get some money so we can buy our own food. We’re not working just to change the culture. Those things are all important. We’re not working just to help other people. We’re working as servants—highly regarded servants—of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s what really brings about and undergirds, in terms of the progression of thought here in Romans 12:11, the significant kind of core that produces the passion that’s described in various ways here.

So as regards the Lord: slaving, serving, passionate about a singleness of focus in our lives of serving him.

So these verses and the three-fold way they move describe how we’re commanded to act and work as servants in regard to our master. We’re supposed to have speed. We’re supposed to have discipline. We’re supposed to have emotional intensity—this word of boiling or glowing. And we do this as servants of Jesus Christ. And when we do that, that’s passion. That’s the source and the evidences of passion in the Christian life.

Cranfield, the great one of the English Reformers, said this: “Paul is warning us against that attitude which seeks to get by with as little work and inconvenience as possible, which shirks from dust and heat and resents the necessity for any exertion as a burden and imposition.”

That’s what we’re left with if we forget these truths and if we’re not walking in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, fueled by the indwelling Spirit who changes our lives to make us focused servants of the Lord Jesus with emotional intensity, speed, and discipline in terms of our work.

So that’s passion. That’s what we’re commanded to do.

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## Passion’s Counterfeits

Well, there are counterfeit passions out there as well, right? Christine and I saw this movie, *The Imitation Game*, and you know, it’s an interesting reflection on some of the things. It’s about the guy Alan Turing, who invented the machine to counteract the German Enigma coding machine in World War II. It’s a very interesting story, and he ends up saving millions of lives, of course. But he also ends up convicted of a crime and ends up committing suicide.

So we’ve got a guy here, and the movie portrays him as exceedingly selfish. He is idolatrous about himself. Okay? And the movie seems pretty straightforward about that in portraying him that way. And so he abuses human relationships. He’s certainly not working out of motivation to love or to providentially care for his fellow citizens. He might develop some of that as he goes along, but that is not his gig. He likes to play puzzles and get the answers. He’s driven by that kind of deal. Okay?

So he’s got a passion that’s reflected in that, right? I mean, the guy never really wants to stop and do other things. He’s just driven to create this machine, this coding machine to combat Enigma—not because he’s driven by some great transcendent values, which come as he goes along, but originally it’s just a result of his passion that comes from his idolatry.

So idolatries can lead to what appears to be a form of passion. We can say that what Turing had, at least the beginning of that work, is a counterfeit passion. He’s trying to do things quick, and he’s a very disciplined guy, and he’s got that emotional heat going on of desiring to fix the puzzle, right? And to be the guy that does it and to challenge his mind and all that stuff. But it’s not a passion that has at its root, in terms of the Lord Jesus Christ, serving. He’s not doing that.

And so the passion frequently that we see in the world, and that can be described in the same sentence as the sort of passion we’re supposed to have in our work, can be a counterfeit passion that’s really based upon sin.

When Keller discusses this aspect—Tim Keller in his book *Every Good Endeavor*—he quotes at length from Dorothy L. Sayers. She had a book called *Creed or Chaos*. In that book, she addresses the seven deadly sins. I think I read it twenty or twenty-five years ago when I first preached on the seven deadly sins. She talks about acedia—sloth. That’s what we would translate it as. But the Latin word was *acedia*. You know, people frequently get that word wrong. I think its origins means “no heart.” So you don’t have a heart for the task that God has given you to do. Okay.

So acedia is this kind of—you know, it can be just exhibited by a slothfulness that’s evident, right? And we normally think of it that way. You know, the sluggard who can’t even bring his food to his mouth eventually, and we might call that today depression. But in a way, that’s not having a heart for the task that God has given you to do. So you no longer fuel your body for work to God because you become so involved in yourself. Your passion now is yourself.

It’s sort of like in that movie *The Lord of the Rings*. You know, when you put on the ring of power, it enhances your will to power, and the end result is you become completely selfish, in so far as everything around you seems not to be real. Everything is phantomlike around you. You are the deal, right? And a lot of us go through our lives with that sort of passion.

If you’re the deal, then you’re going to go about engaging in the other deadly sins to feed the—really, the sloth, the lack of heart you have for serving Jesus—has become perverted now. Now you’re serving all kinds of other things as it relates to work. Some men go to work because they want money. They’re covetous. Some men go to work because they want, you know, other relationships with other women, or women go to work with men. So work can serve, you know, lust.

Work can serve the seven deadly sins. It can serve our pride. It’s the way we’re going to define who we are and whether we’re good people or bad people is how well we do at work. That’s idolatry. At the end of the day, taking all these good things that God has given to us—and all these things are good—and exalting them above God, that’s what idolatry is.

And Sayers does a nice job of talking about the seven deadly sins. From one perspective—from one perspective—now that the church fathers look at pride as the root sin. But from Sayers’ essay in *Creeds or Chaos*, she looks at acedia as resulting in all kinds of other passions that are idolatrous. And so in a way, acedia—a lack of heart to be a servant of Jesus—is what produces all these counterfeit passions that we may see in the world around about us.

Alan Turing being an example of it—passionate guy. But is that biblical passion? No. So what is it? It’s a counterfeit passion, and it really doesn’t deserve the same title that we’re using to describe a Christian’s passion relative to his vocation or calling.

Chekhov was a Russian writer, and you know, he had a book called *Uncle Vanya*, made famous in a movie *Vanya on 42nd Street*—stage plays, etc. Chekhov wrote about sloth, and so in *Uncle Vanya* or *Vanya on 42nd Street*, that production of it, this professor comes to stay on this working farm where Uncle Vanya is kind of like the foreman of the work. The professor, you know, he’s always got a bustle of activity around him. But as you read the play or as you watch the movie, you realize there’s really nothing going on there, okay? He’s just busy all the time. But he is the emblem of acedia—no heart for the task that God has called him to do.

And he produces, you know, lust and illicit relationships. He produces covetousness. He produces some degree of pride. He produces despair. And Chekhov was trying to describe the sort of Russian villages that he was familiar with where the overarching sin was sloth—no heart. But no heart for what God wants us to do is frequently reflected in this busyness of activity that will burn you out or serve as some sort of justification for what you do or who you are.

So you know, there are counterfeit forms of passion. When we look at people around us and judge passion and say, “Well, you don’t have to be a Christian to be fervent about your business.” In fact, some of the most fervent people I know in business, some of the most successful Alan Turings of the world, have no relationship to Jesus whatsoever. But that would be a counterfeit passion, is Sayers’ point. And I think it’s true in terms of what these verses describe—that ultimately, that quickness, that discipline, that emotional fervency, if they’re to be truly those things, then they’re rooted in a service to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the world is filled with counterfeit passions. May the Lord God keep us from those counterfeit passions in our own life. Examine yourself this week. What is your passion, first? Do you have any passion for your work that drives the sorts of things we’ve talked about? And secondly, what is it? Why are you doing it? What are some of the ways you can discern—as someone beside you, your wife, a co-worker, a Christian co-worker—try to help you think through: what is my passion for work? Is it these things that are described in Romans 12:11 or not? Because there are certainly false passions.

Tim Keller said this: “Without something bigger than yourself to work for, then all of your work energy is actually fueled by one of the other six deadly sins. You may work exceptionally hard because of envy, to get ahead of somebody, or because of pride, to prove yourself, or because of greed, or even gluttony for pleasure. In short, acedia is the most subtle idolatry of all. It puts the cynical self at the center of your life, and when you do that, you release all the worst vices and sins to be the main animating energies behind your work.”

And I think I would say that our particular culture, where we’re at right now—and you can trace it back to Freud and some other things—but where we’re at right now as a culture, that is the definition of passion. Passion—when people talk about passion and work, more often than not, they’re saying, “What floats your boat? What do you want to do? Forget everybody else, right? What are you anxious to do?” It’s not having a heart for being a servant of Christ or of somebody else. Ultimately, you’re your own God. You have to fulfill yourself. You have to meet the passions that you have.

And that’s why, you know, that’s why this is such a dangerous topic today to encourage Christians to have passion toward work. We have to talk about these counterfeits in the world round about us, because that is what you will fall into if you don’t keep verses like Romans 12:11 in mind. At the root of the whole thing is this: being a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So passion is mandated. Passion has counterfeits to it in the world around about us. And passion has a particular focus.

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## Passion’s Focus

Okay. That’s really what I’ve kind of talked about already. This is my third point. What’s passion’s focus? Well, if you get down to this third of the triad here of these clauses, the focus is **serving the Lord**. That’s got to be the focus. That’s what distinguishes true passion for work and vocation and any other task from the counterfeit passions round about us.

We have to be serving the Lord. You know, in Luke 5, there’s this story of Jesus helping some of the fishermen who he was calling to be apostles. He tells them to fish in a particular way, to go out. They’re like, “Well, we know how to fish,” but they do it anyway, and they get this huge catch of fish—so heavy they need another boat to help bring the fish in, right?

They come in, and Peter recognizes this is God. He falls down at the feet of Jesus. He says, “Have mercy on me, Jesus.” Jesus says, “It’s okay. From now on I’m going to make you fishers of men.” And the text goes on to say they immediately left everything and followed him.

Now put this in the context of what we’re talking about today, vocation and work. These guys just had become—through the help of Jesus, but still—they were at the height of success in terms of fishing. They had a huge catch. They had a lot of money sitting there in those boats, right? They’re at the top of their career, we could say, albeit with the supernatural help of Jesus. But they’re at the top, and that’s what they leave.

The text wants us to recognize that the root, the focus of our passion has to be not how well we’re doing at work. It has to be following Jesus, right? So they’re going to follow Jesus. You should want to follow Jesus. And if your vocation gets in the way, you should be willing to walk away from it, no matter how successful you’re being. Don’t look for the guidance of the Spirit in closing doors. Look—sometimes he opens doors. You’re being successful, but it’s not what God wants you to be.

Now, how would you know that? Well, there could be all kinds of sin involved with your success, or temptations, or whatever it is. You could have a group of people that you have trusted advisors or counselors—your wife, perhaps—wanting you to do something different in how you’re going to serve Jesus. And you should then move your passion to another vocation.

Now, these same guys, you know, go back into fishing at times. So God—Jesus isn’t saying forget normal vocation. He’s saying I’m changing your job description, your basic job description. Now, in your new description of working with me to bring the world to rights, to save the world, to redeem the world, in that goal, in that task rather, you may well have times when you go fish again and you do your vocation.

Paul—you’re going to write some epistles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And if you’re so hung up on your vocation, and you’re really selling a lot of tents and won’t follow Jesus to do that, you know, the curse of God is on you. But Paul, sometimes you won’t be writing epistles, and sometimes it would be very useful for the kingdom and for the people that you’re loving to make tents and to provide for yourself and not ask them for money.

You see? And Paul, no doubt, was just as passionate emotionally, was just as quick to do the task, was just as disciplined in the task of making tents because he knew that whether he left a particular vocation for a time or he entered another vocation, he knew that his focus for his passion is serving Jesus. Serving Jesus.

Now that’s what the focus for our passion has to be. Folks, may the Lord God grant us tomorrow morning, hear the alarm clock, to hear it as another day to serve Jesus first and foremost. And may he give us the understanding and wisdom to at times walk away from very successful endeavors toward the purpose of following him. Following him.

So passion has a particular focus. The focus is the Lord Jesus Christ.

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## Passion’s Freedom

We have this relates to us by the way that they had a freedom to leave that huge load of fish and the success they were having, right? They were free to walk away from that. I mean, most people in the world can’t walk away from your vocation because you’re sort of tied to it. You’re tied to it because it’s your sense of identity. You’re tied to it because you need the money, whatever it is. But serving Jesus—that means that you’re free from work. And it also means that you’re free to engage passionately in the work that Jesus has given you to do, no matter how goofy other people may think it is, no matter how well you understand it or not. It gives you a freedom to work in whatever calling serving Jesus has brought you to.

It’s a tremendous blessing of freedom—freedom from work and freedom in the context of our work as well.

So the focus of our passion is Jesus. And I’ve already made this point, but we’ll talk about it a little bit more. Then I’ve got passion’s freedom.

One of the stories—and we’ve talked about it here before—about an interesting piece of text from the scriptures on work is the story of Naaman, right? So Naaman was the head of Syria’s army. He served Rimmon, who was essentially the divinized ruler of Syria. And so this was a very important man. He goes and talks to the man of God in Israel, and he becomes converted. Naaman becomes converted. He has leprosy. God cleanses him. You know, all of that stuff. And Naaman becomes converted. Now he’s a disciple of Yahweh. Now he’s a follower of Yahweh.

And what does he do? Does he give up his commission? No. He talks to Elisha, the prophet of God, and he says, “Look, when I go home, here’s my job—my job nine to five, or whatever it is—to assist the king to bow down before the idols in the temple of Rimmon. Okay. The state is divinized. The state is God. And the king serves that divinized state. And Naaman, what he does, is he helps his king get down on his knees. Then he helps him up from his knees, right?

So he helps his king to serve an idol, and he tells the prophet, he says, ‘I don’t know what to do about my work, my vocation.’ But can he have passion to do that anymore or not? And the prophet says, ‘Go in peace.’ The prophet says your relationship to your work has changed in essence, right? Now you don’t serve the divinized nation. Now you serve Yahweh, the King of Kings. But your vocation is still the same, and you can go about doing that vocation because you’re not being an idolater. This guy may be doing that, but your relationship to that religion, that idolatry, now has changed.

So it’s like eating meat sacrificed to idols, or buying meat from people that are selling this in their temples. You don’t worry about it. You’ve got a freedom now because of a focus on the kingdom, serving Yahweh, that allows you to go about even that task—that task that Naaman was doing—in his important task of advising the king in a new way. But you’re free to go about doing that task. He was told to go in peace by the prophet.

Now the story goes on, and there’s some stuff with Gehazi, but for our purposes today, the point is that this focus on serving Yahweh brings a freedom to work. It gives us a freedom not to work as well in particular vocations. So we have this example, and we have Jesus being the focus of our passion. The end result of that is that he gives us freedom both from our work and in our work as well.

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## Passion’s Source

Passion has a source, and we’ve already kind of alluded to this. Let me see—I was going to read just a minute.

Well, later in chapter 12, this is what Paul says, in verses 19 and following:

“Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath. For it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord. Therefore, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink. For in so doing, you will heap coals of fire on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

So what follows the Lord Jesus does is it gives us a freedom that’s based upon the fact that it’s not our vengeance upon other people that’s going to go about bringing victory to us or relief to us. Rather, it’s the person of Jesus Christ. This freedom is found in a focus on Christ, and actually more than that, the source of our passion, the source of our freedom through our passion, is the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

Remember, I said that as Paul starts this section in Romans 12:1, how does he start it? He says: “Therefore I urge you brothers by the mercies of God to…” and then he goes into the rest of the chapter. He says what you’re supposed to do is present yourself as living sacrifices.

So the point is that what Paul tells us here is part of this section that Paul introduces. He urges us to these things—to have passion, emotion, discipline, speed in our work—focusing in our service to Jesus. We’re to do this. Why? What’s the source of this? The source is **the mercies of God.**

Because of the mercies of God, I urge you to be passionate in your work in this particular way. Connecting verse one up with verse 11. What this means is he’s described the mercies of God, right? He’s described how we’re all sinners. We’re all, you know, born into sin. We’re all born in rebellion against God. That’s who we are in our fallen nature. And the mercy of God is that Jesus—he sent his only son, second person of the Trinity—and he has come passionately to serve the Father and to make you a new person, to rescue you and to redeem you from hell and from destruction and from a life with counterfeit passions.

So the mercies of God is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross for us—saving us, okay? Dying for our sins, being raised up for our justification, for our well-being, right standing with God, ascending to the right hand of the Father—so that we would rule in the context of our lives through this mercy and grace that’s been given to us, that we would demonstrate that to others.

The source of passion isn’t just saluting Jesus without some deeper source. We salute Jesus. He’s our—we’re serving him because he’s the one that bled and died for our sins. The more we increase our understanding of the mercies of God, the more equipped we will be from that source to engage in our work passionately serving Christ with emotion, discipline, and speed.

You see how that works? So the source underneath all of this is the mercies of God to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so it is the source that drives everything else. Jesus has given us everything through his mercies. And because of that, he tells us a little later in Romans 12 that we’re to be living sacrifices.

You see, now what kind of sacrifices was he describing? Probably the burnt offering—the what we would call the ascension offering. And so what he says is you’re to be a living slain thing. What does it mean? Well, if we understood that burnt offering in Leviticus 1, it was the ascension, the transformation of the person. But the other characteristic of the burnt offering was that it was usually called the whole burnt offering in some translations because it was holy. The animal was totally consumed in the fire.

Well, I think they actually kept the skin for the Levites, but the rest of it—it represents total consecration, right? So Paul says that since Jesus—and if you understand what Jesus has done for you, the love, the sacrifice, the dedication, the personal sacrifice that he makes to accomplish your salvation—if you understand the depth of Jesus’s love for you, then what your proper response to that is serving Jesus in everything that you are, in everything that you do, including your vocation.

Of course, you’re a living slain thing. You’re united to the person of work of Jesus, so you can die to your old ways of doing things, your counterfeit passions, and you can be raised up with the new, correct passion in all of your life.

So the source of this passion is the mercy of God through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, Jesus was passionate, too. Remember we said earlier, we sang the Palm Sunday song because we’re coming up to that time of year when we think about Passion Week. It’s a focus of Christ’s passion. The church has correctly identified that passion as a passion to die for you, to take your punishment upon himself, to save you from your sins, to save you from the just punishment due to you for those sins. This is the passion of our savior—dying for our sins.

Okay, so Jesus had a passion. And why did he do it? Well, he tells us in John 17 that he sanctified himself for our sake, that we might be sanctified. Now, the word “sanctified” means to be set apart to a particular task. It’s related to this passion. Jesus said he had the passion to separate himself for this task of accomplishing the passion on the cross, paying for our sins, and to bring us salvation.

His passion—the reason he sanctified himself, the reason he served the Father in that way—was for what purpose? It was for you and I and for our well-being. Now, if that isn’t the power of God for having passion in living a life in response to that great love, I don’t—you know, there’s no other place to look for a motivation greater than responding in love to the one who for our sake passionately set himself apart for the task of dying for our sins.

That was Jesus’s Super Bowl. That was what he trained and was disciplined. That’s what he did. Okay? That’s the race he ran, and he accomplished that race. And he did it because he had the kind of passion that we have.

Now, Paul earlier in Romans, in Romans 12, talks about how we are in Jesus. That we’re all members of the same body. We’re all in Christ. Whether we know it or not or experience it or not, we have union with that person, Jesus Christ. That means we have union with his passion, his desire to serve the Father, his dedication, himself setting himself apart as a servant of the Father.

So that every morning we set ourselves apart as servants of Jesus. And then we go about doing what he tells us to do with speed, with discipline, and boiling hot, with passion, because we’re united to him.

The source for our passion is our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s the indwelling Spirit, right? As the Spirit, hot, the Spirit brings us union with Christ. It brings us Christ’s passion so that we can live that out in the context of our workplace. Now that is power.

You know, the world looks for power in lots of places. This is the source of power for us. This is why the text goes on to say we can rejoice in tribulation. We have power to face the most difficult circumstances, including our own deaths, because we have the passion of Jesus Christ that we’re in union with. We know that he’s provided all things necessary for our salvation.

So no matter how bad it is at work tomorrow, rejoicing in tribulation—put that in the context of your workplace. No matter how bad it may get in your workplace, because of your union with Christ, because of his passion in loving you so much, and because we respond to that with the desire to serve him and him only ultimately, then that means that no matter how difficult it gets, we can rejoice in tribulation. We are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us, through the mercies of God in Christ.

And he gives us then the capability tomorrow morning. No matter how tough a workplace we know we’re going into, how tough a domestic situation, he gives us the ability to rejoice in tribulations. He assures us that he’s working all things together for his will, for his kingdom, and for our well-being. And so we don’t have to then let the passion flow out of us in those situations. We stoke it up again with a recognition that we’re serving the one who served us passionately by dying for our sins and being raised for our justification.

We stoke it up in spite of difficulties. Our spirit gets flaming again. And we go about our tasks tomorrow in our workplaces quickly, and we go about them with diligence and discipline in our cast because we are followers of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

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Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the wonderful description we have in Romans 12:11 of the kind of lives we’re supposed to live everywhere, but including in our workplace. We pray, Father, that you would bless us this week. Help us not to forget these words of your scriptures. Help us by your Holy Spirit to enter into our work tomorrow in a way that’s consonant with what Romans 12:11 commands of us.

But more than that, what Romans 12:11 points as the obvious response to the savior who is indeed the one who saved us from our sins. In his name we pray. Amen.