Faith Capsule: Maintaining zeal for God is to keep hot love for God.
Numbers 25, John 2:13-22
The level of a believer’s zeal is the driving force in how a believer seeks God. Invariably, how much you seek God will determine how much you can see in Him. Seeking God casually will not deliver same result compared to seeking Him zealously. Zealousness for God is a proof of man’s love God. Zealousness for God draws man to God. James 4:8 buttressed, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.” Zeal that is rooted in understanding and knowledge of God shall be fired up by revelation while producing result that is not of this world. Maintaining zeal for God is to keep hot love for God. The word of God that is fire is the source of maintaining hot love. (Jeremiah 23:29) Love that is not hot will grow cold because of the wickedness of the world. With cold love zealousness becomes punctured.
In Jesus, we see what it means to be zealous for the course of the kingdom’s business. The bible recorded, “Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” Then His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.” (John 2:13-17) The action of Jesus is a demonstration of Zeal for God. In Jesus’s action we see a principle of fighting a good course for God’s glory. Phinehas the son of Eleazar demonstrated zeal for God.
While on the journey to the Promised Land, the children of Israel provoked the anger of the Lord by joining to Baal of Peor while they were facing the wrath for their sin, “…Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose from among the congregation and took a javelin in his hand; and he went after the man of Israel into the tent and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her body. So the plague was stopped among the children of Israel.” (Numbers 25:7-8) The zealousness in Phinehas made him to see wrong act against God; it caused him to rise up and not be a part of the congregation that silently accommodated wickedness. His action provoked God’s blessing upon his life.
Prayer for today: Ask for the zeal of God to eat you up.