A Prayerful Appeal for Christian Zeal

Have you seen it?

Can you attest to it?

You may be a part of it?

What is it?

It is a fake and a fraud. It is something that isn’t the real thing. Tragically, it is something that doesn’t seem to trouble many of us, but it should. It displays our modern carelessness and indifference. What is it?

It is a culture, and a Christian culture at that, which lacks true Christian Zeal!

Over the next couple of posts, we are going to diagnose and address the lack of Christian zeal. Then, we hope to lay out what we mean by Christian zeal and offer a way forward to a more stunning zeal in your life and home in Part Two. Are you ready?

Let’s get our zealous on!

When zeal is missing, everything we do becomes a “have to” rather than a “get to.” The lack of zeal produces drudgery rather than joy. It dulls our senses to the world around us, even the parts we should be enjoying. When you take zeal away, apathy and lethargy seep into the very fabric of our lives. Finally, suspicion creeps in upon us in two harsh ways.

First, and most dangerous, we begin to suspect our own motives and doubt our will to live. We begin to carry a weight of guilt that is unbearable. We start to think of ourselves as a fake or a fraud. The worst part is we’d be right. Without zeal we are a mere shell of ourselves.

The second way it creeps in upon us is by causing our lives to become suspicious. What I mean is that the world around us notices our own doubt and guilt. They notice our lack of joy and our dullness of life. For Christians, this is particularly damaging because we are called to be the light in a dark world. Without true Christian zeal we are merely candles with wet wicks; being no different than the rest of the world.

Most of us would never want any of this for ourselves or for our loved ones. Yet we find it a trap that is so easy for us to fall into it time and time again. I know that has been true for me at different points in life. I’m sure you could say the same. It is part of being human in a fallen world.

So, over the next few minutes, I’d like to share a bit of my story with you. I want you to know how and when I began to notice the importance of true Christian Zeal. I will also share with you when I noticed Christian Zeal was waning in our world and how it has affected me.

My first real exposure to Christianity was around the age of ten. I was attending a local church’s Vacation Bible School event when I was scared out of my skin. The preacher was talking about Satan and Hell. He was describing how Satan wanted me to spend an eternity with him in the fires of eternal torment. He was very zealous about how horrible Hell would be.

Next thing I knew, he gave us a formula on how to avoid that hellish torment. He told me some magical words to say to a God I didn’t know. Then, if I said the words just right, repeating after him of course, then I’d be saved from the pits of Hell. Needless to say, I quickly repeated those lines very zealously. A couple of weeks later I was dunked in a pool they called “the Baptismal Pool.” Easy peasy right! Wrong.

Over the next few years, I started having nightmares. These atrocious dreams had me running from snakes and a fiery devil, but I could never escape them. Despite the preacher assuring me I had fire insurance that would protect me against Hell. I couldn’t seem to escape the feeling that something wasn’t right. Still, I banked my eternal destination on his word, after all he was the preacher. Whenever I doubted that the magical prayer had worked, I would say it again and keep going. The problem: nothing inside me changed. The fear was still there. I still lived for myself. I continued to walk in a life weighed down by sin.

Fast-forward eleven years, I was a new student at N. C. State University. My new environment would come to open my eyes to some new realities. I was studying to become a great research scientist. I wanted to discover ways to make our world a better place. I studied in a field where most of my professors were anti-Christian. Science isn’t exactly about science anymore. The lessons I was learning and the party scene is was discovering was anything but Christian. That’s when everything I knew came crashing down.

The nightmares I was having became more frequent. I had a nagging feeling I wasn’t forgiven and that I was in trouble of eternal torment. So, I did the rational thing. I decided to go to a small gathering of Christian students on campus. I was hoping to appease God and find mercy through my good actions.

Campus Crusade for Christ was hosting a weekly meeting they called, “Prime Time.” It was a small gathering of about 60-70 Christian students that met every Thursday evening. This was on a campus of almost 35,000 students. I had no idea what I’d find there, but I was open to searching.

I met a guy that night at Prime Time named, Allan. He asked me for my contact information and offered to grab lunch with me one day soon. A couple of days later, I had a knock on my dorm room door. It was Allan and a guy named Cary. I invited them in and we began to talk.

During their visit, they shared a pamphlet with me called, “The Four Spiritual Laws.” They asked me if I knew Christ and if I had experienced His salvation. I recounted to them that I was baptized and that I believed in God. They challenged me a little, but then left it alone. As they were leaving, they invited me to attend the Bible Study they were leading in my dormitory. I told them I’d consider it and they left. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but something was different about those two: they walked with Christian zeal.

Afterwards, I felt uneasy about what we had discusssed. It didn’t take much time before I decided to start going to their Bible study. I knew nothing about the Bible, so I thought I could learn more there. What I discovered was that C.A.P.S. (Note: C.A.P.S stood for Cary and Allan’s Power Study) was the right place for me to start!

It was an all guys Bible study, and Cary and Allan seemed to know their stuff. All the guys in that group welcomed me and befriended me. I didn’t know anything about the Bible, yet they didn’t seem to care. They were so passionate about the Jesus in the Bible, a Jesus I didn’t yet know. They had a Christian zeal that I didn't yet understand.

Awakened to Revival

Surprisingly, the Lord gave me, a new believer, the honor of serving in leadership with Crusade. I served on a team which they called “the Servant Team.” My responsibility was to co-lead a team that publicized our events around campus. God blessed our prayerful work and over the next year Campus Crusade grew by leaps and bounds, not because our publicity. God did it all! God grew our little movement from 60-70 to approximately 2000 student believers. God relocated us from a basement classroom to Reynold’s Coliseum. Reynold’s was the home of the Wolfpack men’s basketball team. God was truly on the move doing a remarkable work in our midst. Students all over campus started noticing the Christian zeal that was overflowing on our campus.

Awakened to Be a Witness

Life was good. I was full of Christian zeal! Everyday I was looking for opportunities to drop “J-bombs” everywhere I could. (Note: J-bombs were our way of saying, “sharing Jesus with others”). Everyone who knew me saw a drastic change in my life. It was all by His grace, not of my own merit. Unfortunately, some who knew me started referring to me as a, “Jesus Freak.” While I wore that label as a badge of honor, it grieved me that they didn’t know Jesus Christ in a way that made them equally zealous for Him.

Awakened to Serve the Church

Those days in Campus Crusade for Christ were amazing. Looking back, it was like living in a miniature spiritual awakening. It was a true revival of Christian zeal in our little microcosm of the world. In those days, we accomplished a lot of great ministry work on campus. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced. It was during this time that I came to recognize true Christian zeal. It permeated everything we endeavored to do. Toward the end of my college days, God used that Christian zeal to call me, ever so clearly, to serve Him in pastoral ministry. At first it was scary and I resisted, but eventually the biologist obeyed and became a pastor.

After my days ended at N.C. State, I couldn’t afford to go straight into the Master’s of Divinity program at the Seminary. So, I began to work full-time as a Chemist at a local pharmaceutical company. During the next four and a half years, I worked and saved every penny I could. When time allowed, I helped my church work with their youth and college ministries. At this point in life, I began to notice a major problem. Something was missing in the churches.

Now, the church I was serving in was a large and growing suburban church. There were a lot ministry activities happening within the church. Yet, the problem that I began noticing already had a name in church circles. It was called the “20/80 Rule.” What it means is that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work and 80 percent only do 20 percent of the work.

In the past twenty-six years, I have attended and graduated from Southeastern Seminary. I have ministered in nine different churches, several were smaller rural churches. I have also gotten to know scores of other churches through associational ministry. In the last twenty years, I have seen that “20/80 Rule” morph into what could be called, the “10/90 Rule” in many of our churches.

There are many reasons why this decline is taking place. We can point fingers in a lot of directions. Personally, I believe the heart of the problem is the heart. The biggest reason for our decline is our growing lack of Christian zeal. Our lack of Christian zeal is surely seen by the culture at large which most assuredly has affected the way they respond to us. But here is the thing that has me the most troubled, but also the most optimistic.

Over the years, I have noticed that I often allow the lack of Christian zeal in others to affect the zeal in my own heart. Remember I earlier said, that no one wants to, but it is so easy to fall into this trap. That is what has troubled me. But it is also what gives me great hope. I have fallen into the trap more times than I can remember. If God can awaken me from my stupor and refill my soul with Christian zeal through His Holy Spirit (and oh boy did He ever). If God can do that, and He can, then there is hope for all my brothers and sisters in Christ, present and future, to live lives overflowing with Christian zeal!

Join our Zealous Nation! Let’s begin to offer up a collective prayerful appeal for Christian zeal to begin to permeate our lives, our families, and our churches.

Finally, It is our hope that this article has helped to give you a renewed sense of Christian zeal. So, if our content has added value to your life, please help us out by subscribing to our Newsletter. Also, please share this article with your friends. It doesn’t cost you anything and it is a tremendous help to us as we seek to grow and spread God’s Word far and wide.

In our next post, PART 2 of this series, we are going to unpack what we mean by Christian zeal, and why it is an absolute game changer. If you want to begin igniting a stunning Christian zeal for your sensational journey, then be sure to check out our future posts. Until next time, live zealously!

#Bezealouschurch! #Christianzeal

Footnotes:

¹  Flickering Lamps: Christ and His Church . Henry & Richard Blackaby, ( Blackaby Ministries International ; Jonesboro, GA; 2015) (Forward)

²  The Holy Bible: English Standard Version . Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles , 2016. ( Titus 2:13-14 ).