As the wife of an evangelist, most evenings I find myself sitting in a church service somewhere in this wonderful country of ours. I often tease that the Lord let me marry my husband because He knew that I needed to be in church every night! Because we’re in church so often, I’ll tell you a preacher’s wife’s secret; sometimes my mind wanders. (Insert gasp here!) It was one such evening, that the thing that caused my mind to wander was a word--fervent! I’m not even sure why I gave the word a second glance, but later that night, I grabbed my concordance app to see how many times the word was mentioned in Scripture. The answer is seven. Seven times the word fervent is mentioned in God’s Word--fervent in spirit, fervent mind, fervent prayer, fervent heat, fervent charity. It’s such a descriptive word, it just evoked a mental picture to me, so I looked up the dictionary definition.

Fervent - adjective

1. Having or displaying a passionate intensity

2.(archaic) hot, burning, or glowing

Stick with me for just a second, and I promise I’ll make my point. It just seemed especially poignant to me that the Lord uses the same word to describe the heat with which He is going to one day burn up this earth, 2 Peter 3:10-12, as He does the charity I’m supposed to have for my fellow man. As I sat there pondering fervent heat, my mind wandered back...

You see, I grew up in southeastern Washington state, and I remember May 18, 1980, the day Mount St. Helens erupted. I was eleven years old, and St. Helens had been the main story on the news for days. We heard the story of the guy who lived up on the mountain who refused to be evacuated. We watched all of the projections of what would happen if the mountain blew, and on that Sunday morning in May, it did! My hometown of Pasco, Washington is 275 miles from St. Helens, and by that evening that erupted volcano had left a layer of ash over our whole city, and it ultimately traveled to the central United States and beyond. One explosion on one mountain blew the top off of the mountain and left devastation for miles, so much devastation in fact, that one can go to St. Helens today and still see some of the aftermath of that explosion that occurred 42 years ago!

As I looked back at my concordance app to see the times that the word charity was mentioned, I saw that 1 Corinthians 14:1 tells us to follow after charity. 1 Corinthians 16:14 tells us to let all our things be done with charity. Colossians tells us to put on charity, and 1 Peter 4:8 says, “And above all things, have fervent charity among yourselves...”

Here’s the truth. There will be people in our lives who hurt us. Some will do it accidentally; some will do it on purpose. There will be wounds that only the Father can heal, but what if?

What if we followed the command in Scripture to HAVE fervent charity? What if Christ’s charity poured all over every single person with whom we came in contact? What if not one action or word was wasted in anger or bitterness or insult? What if Christ’s love became the rule, rather than the exception in our lives? What if, instead of devastation, charity left the opposite impact, a positive, cultivating impact that lasted far longer than 42 years? What if it lasted an eternity? This has become the prayer of my heart. Let others see Christ in me--not my will, but His. Oh, He still has a lot of work to do in me, but He has promised to perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. Until then, let me have FERVENT charity.