Stop Trying to Be Passionate...it is killing your faith
It is the season of the World Cup and it is not unusual to see packed bars and restaurants full of people screaming, jumping up and down, or, just as often, looking entirely dejected. Exuberance and despair appear in equal measure these days.
What we are seeing is humanity fueled by passion, and unfortunately, we don’t have to look far to find Christians trying to fuel their life with passion as well. It turns out that passion feels powerful but leaves you feeling consumed. If you fuel your Christian life with passion, you will wake up feeling empty and wondering why things are no longer working.
When we think about Christian faithfulness one of the important historic distinctions is between passion and affection. This is something we talk about in When God Seems Distant that people have found helpful [here is a podcast I did with Preston Sprinkle on this theme]:
I realize, however, that distinctions like this might seem nit-picky. Some, no doubt, just roll their eyes at these sorts of distinctions. But I want to show you why this really, really matters.
Remember 1 Corinthians 3:1:
“But I, brothers and sisters, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.”
There are a handful of key things I want you to notice about this passage. First, Paul assumes what we call a developmental spirituality in When God Seems Distant. In other words, just as we physically mature from infancy to adolescence to adulthood, so too do we mature spiritually in like manner.
Second, in our infancy we were met with milk because that is where we were developmentally. God meets us where we are. If we are infants, he meets us in our infancy. But here, Paul notes that while the Corinthians are still on milk, they shouldn’t be any longer. To use language that was often preferred by many Puritans, it is time for the Corinthian church to be spiritually-weaned.
Third, and most importantly for our purposes here, the season of infancy is a fleshly sort of season. We all know this of course. Infants are total narcissists. They are utterly self-centered. But they are supposed to be. A good infant is a self-centered infant, whose needs, demands, and troubles are met in love, abundance, and kindness.
But infancy is not the goal.
We need to grow up. Infants need to leave these things behind them. Infants need to be weaned off of more than milk in other words. As Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” So too must we.
While we develop this much more in the book, here is a quick cheat-sheet:
Passions begin in your body and often work against the integration of your person, causing you to be carried away by your bodily desires (think of rage, lust, etc., and how they can almost take you over).
Affections, rather, begin in your heart and bring order and integration to your person.
Importantly, passions are not bad. Passions were meant to be awoken by your affections to help animate your life (particularly through difficulty). But, nonetheless, passions make good servants but bad masters.
In our infancy we are carried along by our passion and we begin to judge our Christian life by how passionate we are. Passions feel really powerful but they aren’t. Passions burn hot and quick but do not light a life on fire.
Infants need to realize that they (and their desires) are not the center of the universe. So Paul notes that while the Corinthian Christians were infants in Christ, even in their physical adulthood, Paul could not treat them like spiritual people (that is, like Christians), but he had to treat them like fleshly people.
As an aside, this is an interesting use of fleshly. Paul is writing this to a church he claims are saints who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus. But they haven’t grown up. They are stuck in infancy.
It is my contention that much of American Christianity is still on milk and need to be weaned so that they could be on solid food, but instead of being weaned, we simply pumping passion into people’s wills.
But weaning is not solely rebuke, although rebuke must happen. We have to offer paths of maturation. Paul doesn’t hesitate to rebuke, but he still offers them milk while telling them that they must be weaned. Central to our rebuke, therefore, and the developmental path of maturation that follows it, is that we have to stop serving our passions and must lead others into the deeper waters of affection.
Those Christians who are tossed by the waves of their passion in worship and faith are trying to fuel their Christian life from the same fountain fueling their lust, greed, and envy.
So here is the point: In your infancy you were met by God and others in your passions. Passions were employed to get you moving and to wake you up to better things. But passions are not meant to be served, and no adult should be seeking to awaken passion in themselves. To do so is to once again function like an infant - like a fleshly person - and not like an adult in Christ.
Passions are movements that begin in your body and often move against the integration of your person. Passions burn hot and they burn quick - they feel really, really powerful - but they do not end up lighting a life on fire. The deep and abiding movements of a life are ultimately oriented by affections and not passions.
Consider a handful of texts about how passions work:
Romans 6:12: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.”
Romans 7:5: “For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.”
Colossians 3:5: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”
2 Timothy 2:22: “So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.”
James 4:1: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?”
Now, admittedly, we later developed more clear distinctions about these things using language that helped us to explain the difference between passions and affections. Many use the term “passion” in such a way that it could be either. But these texts help us see how the distinction we made between passions and affections can help us understand our lives. It also helps us see why we long to be faithful and to stop sinning, while still being tossed by the waves of our longings.
But as we saw in 1 Corinthians 3:1, there is a tendency to try to stay in infancy as a Christian. The things that used to wake us up in our youth - passions - felt stronger to us than affections, and so we seek to use resources that cannot carry us into maturity.
Because of this, when we find ourselves in the desert, when the Lord is showing us what is in our hearts (Deut. 8:2), instead of abiding in him, we imagine he is calling us to become passionate. Instead of turning to the Lord, we can easily imagine we are supposed to awaken passions in us. But serving passions is a very young approach to life. It does not provide what it promises, but leaves you tossed by the waves of your emotional life.
This is why so many give themselves passionate to worship who are also passionately captivated by their lusts. “Flee youthful passions,” Paul warns.
Affections are deeper and more abiding dispositions of the soul that are not always felt sensibly like emotions, but that govern and guide a life. This is why our tradition focused so much on religious affection.
Watch your passions. As you watch the World Cup pay attention to how you can go from never caring about a team to being devastated at their losing or ecstatic in victory. Be watchful of what passions seek to take you over to make you obey them (greed, lust, ambition, etc.).
For my paid subscribers, I want have a video below with some pastoral reflections on the role of passion in spiritual disciplines in particular. I want to consider the nature of spiritual practices and the passions of our life. I hope this will help provide a bit more practical guidance to what we are talking about here.
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