Passion. Just reading that word can spark a fire within us, but the idea isn’t easy to define. According to the dictionary,passion has four synonyms: “fervour, ardour, enthusiasm, zeal”; and it has as one of its meanings “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction.”

Jesus certainly comes to mind when one thinks of passion, but so does another person in the New Testament: the Apostle Paul. He was a man with intense, driving convictions. His enemies would curse him, beat him, and stone him nearly to death, and he’d keep on preaching the gospel. He refused to run scared, to take it easy, or to play it safe. As long as there was breath in his lungs, the name of Christ would be on his lips, and the passion of God would throb in his heart.

Four particular periods in Paul’s life, like four photos in an album, reveal the fire in this man’s passionate spirit.

1 Corinthians 9:16–24

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