Passion for Jesus

– Oswald Chambers

“Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.” These words of our Risen Lord (Acts 1:8) were spoken just before His ascension. We have to be careful lest we make the passionate watchwords, “a passion for souls” and “a passion for Christ,” into rival cries.

The great passion that the Holy Ghost works in us, whereby He expresses the redemption of our Lord in and through us in practical ways, is the passion for Jesus Christ Himself. “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me”—not witnesses only to what Jesus has done or can do, but witnesses who are an infinite satisfaction to His own heart wherever they are placed. The danger in the modern form of Christianity is its departure more and more from the great central figure of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Christian experience does not mean we have thought through the way God works in human lives by His grace, or that we are able to state theologically that God gives the Holy Ghost to them that ask Him—that may be Christian thinking, but it is not Christian experience. Christian experience is living through all this by the marvelous power of the Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost working in me does not produce wonderful experiences that make people say, “What a wonderful life that man lives.” The Holy Ghost working in me makes me a passionate, devoted, absorbed lover of the Lord Jesus Christ. Passion is a wonderful word—it is all that we mean by passive suffering and magnificent patience, and spiritually, all that is meant by human passion is lifted to the white, intense, welding heat of enthusiasm for Jesus Christ. God grant that we may be possessed by the Holy Ghost in such fullness that we may be witnesses unto Jesus Christ.

John 7:39; 14:16; 20:22, all these references to the Holy Ghost are anticipatory. The Holy Spirit's influence and power were at work before Pentecost, though He was not here. It is not the baptism of the Holy Ghost that changes men, but the power of the Ascended Christ coming into men's lives by the Holy Ghost that changes men.

The baptism of the Holy Ghost is the evidence of the Ascended Christ. The Holy Ghost works along the line of the redemption of our Lord, and along that line only. The mighty power of the Holy Ghost brings back to God the experiences of saved men and women, and ultimately, if one may put it so, will bring back to God the experiences of a totally redeemed world, a new heaven and a new earth.

“When He...is come...He shall glorify Me.” May God bring straight home to us that no human heart can love the Lord Jesus in the degree that He demands (Luke 14:26). There stands the claim of Jesus, tremendously strong; our love for Him must be overwhelmingly more passionate than every devoted earthly relationship. How is it to be done?

There is only one Lover of the Lord Jesus and that is the Holy Ghost. When we receive the Holy Ghost, He turns us into passionate human lovers of Jesus Christ. Then out of our lives will flow those rivers of living water that heal and bless, and we spend and suffer and endure in patience all because of One and One only.

It is not the passion for men that saves men; the passion for men breaks human hearts. The passion for Christ inwrought by the Holy Ghost is deeper down than the deepest agony the world, the flesh, and the devil can produce. It goes straight down to where our Lord went, and the Holy Ghost works out, not in thinking, but in living, this passion for Jesus Christ in any setting of life any human being indwelt by the Holy Ghost can get into, until Jesus can see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied.

God does not ask us to believe that men can be saved; we cannot pull men out of hell by believing that we can pull them out. When we see a man in hell, every attitude of our souls and minds is paralyzed; we cannot believe he can be saved. God does not ask us to believe that he can be saved; He asks us whether we will believe that Jesus believes He can save him.

The facts of life are awful. Men's minds are crushed by the terrible facts of evil all around. When the Holy Ghost indwells us, He does not obliterate those facts, but slowly through all the features of crime and evil and wrong, there emerges the one great wonderful Figure, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the men possessed by the Holy Ghost, and having the redemption of Christ inwrought in them, say, “Lord, Thou knowest,” and the saving work goes on.

Galatians 2:20 is not a theological statement; it is a statement of Christian experience wrought by the Holy Ghost. “I am Christ's and He is mine.” It is the language of real passion, and it is not too strong an expression for stating the wonderful experience of oneness with Jesus Christ. Paul is so absorbed with Jesus that he does not think of himself apart from this marvelous identification with Jesus Christ. It is closer than a union; it is a oneness illustrated by the vine and the branches. “I am the Vine,” not the root, but the Vine, “ye are the branches.” The oneness is as close as that. “One, even as We are one.”

Paul had one volcanic moment in his life when all his stubbornness was destroyed by the dynamite of the Holy Ghost. Some folk go through tremendous smashings and breakings, but there is no need for them to go that way. The great crashings and upsets and disappointments come because of stubbornness. Our great need is to ask for and receive the Holy Ghost in simple faith in the marvelous atonement of Jesus Christ, and He will turn us into passionate lovers of the Lord.

It is this passion for Christ worked out in us that makes us witnesses to Jesus wherever we are, men and women in whom He delights, upon whom He can look down with approval; men and women whom He can put in the shadow or the sun; men and women whom He can put upon their beds or on their feet; men and women whom He can send anywhere He chooses.

God grant that our watchword may be a “passion for Christ,” and that the Holy Ghost may work out in us the experience of Christ being all, so that He may do exactly what He likes with us.