I hope you answered in the affirmative! But have you ever wondered how God actually defines being zealous?

Modern religion tells us to get busy. Go to church regularly. Serve on at least one ministry team (although more is better), pay your tithes, do a daily Bible devotion, and get regular prayer into your schedule.

If you are doing all these things, most people will consider you zealous. And you probably consider yourself zealous as well.

But God has a drastically different definition! It is “Pursue love and desire spiritual gifts.”

Both of these verbs are continous action words, which lets us know that we can never arrive at a place in our lives where we have attained the pinnacle of zealousness and can then coast on our achievements.

To get there, we must continue in an active relationship with God. Stop running and you will stop being zealous.

But why am I saying that this is God’s definition of what it means to be zealous for Him? Let’s dig in deeper!

Pursuing love AND desiring spiritual gifts are linked together with a conjunction that shows they can’t be separated in any practical way. This is going to be highly significant in just a moment

The word, “pursue,” means “to run swiftly in order to catch something.” And what we are told to pursue is God’s kind of love. Because this is something we must pursue, it isn’t possible to be operating in God’s kind of love if we are sitting still.

In context here, this refers to our ministry to one another within the church. If we aren’t actively chasing down ways to love each other, then we cannot say we are operating in God’s love.

But this is actively linked to our DESIRE for spiritual gifts. The Greek “desire” is where we get our English word “zeal.” We are literally being told to be zealous to have spiritual gifts operating in our life.

It is only through the manifestation of spiritual gifts in our lives that we can have any meaningful way to chase down God’s love and share it with others.

You cannot actually SHOW that you are zealous for God unless you are operating with spiritual gifts that make it possible for you to supernaturally communicate His love to others.

You cannot actually be zealous for God if you are only operating in your natural human capacity to do religious activities.

Only supernatural power can communicate supernatural love. And until we move away from self-reliance, we can’t actually be defined as being zealous for God.

Entire denominations teach that supernatural spiritual gifts are no longer in operation and that speaking in tongues ceased at the end of the apostolic age.

Those who teach this malarkey will define “prophecy” as the act of preaching. There are two problems with this interpretation. First, it exalts the preacher (usually the pastor) as the only one in the church who can be called zealous.

And second, it defines prophecy as something that it isn’t. Prophecy is not something that is prepared and studied for as a teaching sermon is. Rather, it is spontaneous and comes from the Holy Spirit.

New Testament prophecy always builds up and encourages the church. This does not fulfill the same purpose as a teaching sermon which may have an element of reproving and correcting error.

So what shocking thing are we actually being told here? A church that teaches against or does not see the operation of the supernatural spiritual gifts spelled out in chapter 12 cannot communicate the love of God to people adequately.

They cannot be defined as zealous for God, no matter how devoted they are to pursuing their religion.

Prophecy is a powerful tool to chase down God’s love and give it away to other people. Speaking in tongues coupled with interpretation of tongues functions like prophecy.

These can’t be optional because we can’t show God’s love without them!