Zeal and Ability

I have noticed that zeal can become activated as the result of a perceived ability or opportunity. If you try your hand at some new endeavour and find that you have an unexpected flair for it – the soul can take this as being evidence that it is something you were born to do.

When the soul is hurt, desperate and needy – it will be on the lookout for something that will make sense of the pain in your life, something that will meet all your needs, something that will define you and something that will somehow compensate for the shame of your past. But this makes your fulfilment, wholeness and respect of others – conditional on your ability to perform.

If we love someone then we will accept them just as they are; we will accept the choices they make about how they live their life. This does not mean that we have to condone and agree with what they do, but it just means that our love for them does not fade due to circumstances. We need to be able to love and accept people just as they are without judging them and without basing our love for them on what they can do for us or how well they perform. This unconditional acceptance is incorporated into the longsuffering and kindness aspects of love.

I believe that this performance mindset is formed during childhood when we somehow feel rejected by other people. We see those children who are loved, respected and appreciated just the way they are. Then we see those children who have an ability of some kind, which seems to attract the positive regard of other children, teachers and parents. So we reason that if we had ability and were to perform well for other people, then people would appreciate us. But this is not love - because love appreciates a person even when they do not have a great deal of ability and even when they fall short of what was expected of them.

We must realise that God loves and accepts us, just the way we are - not because of our performance and behaviour - but because of Christ's obedience right up to His sacrificial death upon the cross. Now we can approach God the Father with boldness, as if we were His only child. Therefore, we should never feel the need to put on a performance in order to please God. I have noticed that when people serve in church, a lot of the time it can be out of a want for approval: both God's approval and other people's approval.

Children need to be shown unconditional love by their parents, if they do not; they will grow up to be obsessed with ability and performance. Such children can become obsessive about what they do to the point of becoming workaholics. This is something that was noticed in the work of the Psychologist Carl Rogers.

In Rogers’ studies, he contrasted what he called conditional positive regard and unconditional positive regard. Rogers noticed that some of his clients were workaholics. The reason for this was that they were not given enough unconditional positive regard by their parents – they were only shown love and approval in response to their behaviour. *

I have established a formula regarding ability: ability or opportunity minus love equals pride, greed and zeal. The opposite of love is fear. Fear in the broadest sense is not just despair and timidity: fear can also manifest itself as anger, greed, lust and pride. A perpetual state of fear will always be accompanied by lust, which can include envy, jealousy and greed, because the soul that fears, will be devoid of the love and life of God.

The perception of opportunity or ability to the wounded soul will have the result of effectively turbo-charging zeal in that person. Such zeal will not be that which comes from God by His love, it is not the God-kind of endurance that only hupomonē (G5281), which is an aspect of love, can provide. For this reason, zeal or lust can only last a short period of time. This kind of zeal usually runs-out when the mind begins to realise that it cannot gain the sense of approval (we could also say “positive regard”), and the sense of security, that it is seeking after.

This kind of zeal will be created purely by the soul for its own selfish purposes, even if it drives a person to behave in a way that is to the detriment of the other person. In other words, zeal that is conditional on ability or opportunity alone – is anger, greed, lust and pride, and therefore, is not of God.

* You can find out more about Carl Rogers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers