Sin

...
Some of my fondest memories as a child involve the sears catalog.  

That thing was massive!  Every year, my mother would hand me a pen and instruct me to flip through and to circle anything I wanted and write my name next to it.  Dutifully and with excessive glee I would flop down on the floor in front of the fireplace and turn with trembling fingers to the toy section.  Oh the bliss of those afternoons searching for toys that I couldn’t wait to uncover Christmas morning.  It’s a shame that the sears catalog is no longer the behemoth it once was; clicking the wishlist on Amazon just doesn’t have the same tangible thrill to me today.  With the book fully marked and every toy page covered in circles I would wait eagerly till Christmas morning.  

Now to be fair, I did get some toys on Christmas morning but the assortment under the tree was always paltry compared to the selection in the catalog.  Hindsight informs me that my parents were both loving and generous but invariably Christmas morning would arrive not merely with a much smaller collection of things that I wanted but always seemed to include with it a passel of items I needed but did not necessarily want. Every Christmas I was certain to find things like jeans that covered my ankles and lacked the holes I was prone to putting in them, shirts to replace the ones I had outgrown and the most dreadful yet needful Christmas present of all: socks and underwear!
...

Introduction

Passion is nearly uncontrollable. When you are passionate about something it consumes you until you respond in a way that satisfies that passion. Of all the geeky things I could do on a holiday, one of those things was to watch through the video's on YouTube of Adam Savage from the Mythbusters describing his passionate fascination with the dodo bird, which lead him first to downloading every picture he could find of Dodo skeletons and ultimately to hand crafting every single bone of a dodo out of modeling clay and assembling it into a finished skeleton. Now, if you just ignore the relevance to the Bible question for a moment you might be prone to ask yourself, “what would cause a man to invest hundreds and hundreds of hours into researching and then accurately rebuilding a statue of an extinct bird just to satisfy his own curiosity?” The one word answer to that question is passion.

There's nothing wrong with passion. It's the objects of our passion that need to be checked. This morning as you open your Bibles to 1 Timothy 6:11-16 we are going to look at how to build a passionate pursuit of godliness into your life.

Instead of letting your life get wrapped up in things that are unworthy of your calling, it's time to shift your priorities and make following Christ the most important priority you follow. So how can you do that? How can you fan into flame a passion for Jesus Christ? The answer to that question is laced through our text in the form of a series of four imperative verbs, four extremely strong commands to Timothy.