Taking Your Pulse...In Messiah

by David Brickner |December 17 2021

Recently a friend and ministry partner told me, “One thing I love about Jews for Jesus is that you have stayed true to your calling to Jewish evangelism.” I told him that passion for the lost is one of our core values, and God has used it to protect us from drifting.

Understanding Paul’s Passion

Passion is focused energy that sometimes enables people to excel beyond their natural strength. Passion can blur fatigue and pain and even concern for one’s own well-being. Paul was speaking from that kind of focused passion when he wrote: “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh” (Romans 9:1-3).

Paul’s passion in this passage is clear, and it presents three pulse points by which we can measure our own passion for the lost: awareness, angst, and altruism.

Paul shows tremendous self-awareness when he says, “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit.” His transparency, his vulnerability, and the genuineness of his own feelings are in alignment with the joint witness of his conscience and the Holy Spirit. How honest are we about our passion for the lost? Our conscience, that inward sense of moral right and wrong, can be polluted by sin. But the witness of the Holy Spirit is always pure. So, when our conscience and the Holy Spirit are in agreement, then our awareness is clear, it’s clean, it’s reliable. But it takes prayer, introspection, and reflection to reach that awareness.

God calls us to experience a measure of emotional distress when we submit to the Holy Spirit’s desire to share with us His passion for the lost.

Second, Paul expresses great angst when he says, “I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart.” How’s your angst meter today? Paul’s turmoil over the lost was continual. God has called us as His people to care deeply to the point of real discomfort. Today’s digitally distracting and mind-numbing culture encourages us to pursue pleasure and avoid discomfort at all costs. But God calls us to experience a measure of emotional distress when we submit to the Holy Spirit’s desire to share with us His passion for the lost.

Paul’s third pulse point is altruism, promoting someone else’s welfare even at the risk of our own: “For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren.” Paul is sounding very much like Moses as he interceded for disobedient Israel: “Yet now, if You will forgive their sin—but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which You have written” (Exodus 32:32).

Sharing Jesus’ Passion

Moses and Paul, in wishing to substitute themselves as recipients of the punishment due to their people, are reflecting the very heart of our Messiah Jesus and His passion for the lost. That passion fueled the incarnation and the crucifixion of our Lord, who was cursed on behalf of others that they might be saved. When Paul says he could wish himself accursed for his brethren, he is identifying with Jesus, just as he does in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

I could wish along with Paul to take the punishment for my people so they could be spared—but my death would not produce even one person’s salvation. But I know the One who truly was cut off for the sake of my people. And because He was perfect, holy, innocent, and undefiled, death could not hold Him and the grave could not keep Him. Since I am crucified with Him, I could wish to be cut off, but I don’t have to because Christ has already done it. His passion for the lost accomplished its purpose, and enables us to have a passion for the lost that relentlessly pursues His plan of salvation for our Jewish people.

None of us can sustain that passion in our own strength. And so, we need to pray. We need to take our spiritual pulse and ask the Holy Spirit to renew our wonder over God’s grace in saving us, our anguish over the spiritual condition of others, and our identification with our crucified and risen Lord in His amazing passion for the lost.

*This article is adapted from a message David delivered to the Jews for Jesus International Leadership Summit held in Washington, DC in November 2021.