A couple of months ago I was driving and a somewhat familiar song came over the radio. It was one of those songs that I’d heard at least 20 times, but it was white noise until this particular day. I wish I could remember what was going on in my life that day that left me in the emotional state that I was in, but whatever it was, it lead me to really hearing this song for the first time.

The song that I was finally hearing is called, “The Motions” by Matthew West. The main lyric in this song that connects with me is this, “I don’t wanna go through the motions, I don’t wanna go one more day without Your all consuming passion inside of me. I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking ‘what if I had given everything’ instead of going through the motions.”

One of the unfortunate consequences of serving in ministry is that my relationship with Christ can become something I’m doing as part of my list of things to do, because after all, it’s my job to love and serve Christ. You could say I’m a professional Christian.

So here is why this song connects with me so well. I don’t want my relationship with Christ to be seen as some guy who is sitting behind a desk, sipping a coke, eating a donut, preparing a video, and writing a lesson for a group of people who won’t remember anything I do or say past Friday. That is not why I’m in ministry and that is not why I’m a follower of Christ. I don’t want to just go through the motions of ministry without the passion of Christ burning in my heart and the passion of ministry burning in my gut (sometimes literally burning in my gut after eating some of the food that we serve in youth ministry). It’s one of my greatest desires to be able to look back at my life and be able to say that I left it all on the field, I have nothing left, I served, loved, gave, followed, and lead in Christ passionately. I want to be one of the people that returns a harvest back to Christ so that I will be able to hear my savior say, “Well done good and faithful servant,” instead of, “nice job but why did you not…”

Here’s the bottom line, I don’t want to go through the motions, but I want to have a passion for Christ and have Christ’s passion consuming me. How about you?