Replacing Complacency With Zeal

Put Off-Complacency

Revelation 3:15  I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot.  I wish you were cold or hot.

Put On-Zeal

Revelation 3:19  As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.  Therefore be zealous and repent.

I believe that before I started the Seeking Him study, I was at a level of complacency or at a plateau in my relationship with God.  And I maybe even had a stagnant heart.  Sometimes I opened up the Bible or write in my journal, but my heart really was not in it.

Even though it is very easy to worship or praise God if I am in a joyful or happy mood, I should also be worshiping him when I am going through physical, emotional or emotional pain.  There are times when I was feeling depressed and I sat down to read the Bible or to write an entry in my journal and my mind was relieved of the thoughts going through my head and replaced with more joyful thoughts.  Physical pain is a different story.  If I am in any type of pain, I only focus on the pain until it goes away.  I cannot concentrate on anything else.

TwitterFacebookLinkPrint

A Prayer for Zeal

Implant within my heart, O God,
the fiery zeal of a Jeremiah,
the conviction of a Ruth or Rebecca
and the zest of a Francis of Assisi.

Stir my slumbering soul,
that it might sing a song of passion and devotion,
drunk with dancing joy and desire for you,
my divine and loving Friend.

May my heart be as hot as the heart of Moses
for all your children burdened by slavery,
for all who feel oppression's steely heel
or suffer rejection in an alien land.

May I, like your son Jesus,
be consumed with zeal for you, Divine Beloved,
for life, for justice and for peace;
for all that I know in faith.

Fill me with zeal, O God.
Amen.

— Edward Hays in Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim