Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. -- A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

The history of our faith is a history full of people who changed the world: Paul, Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Zinzendorf, Edwards, Spurgeon, and more. The list could go on and on.

It's also a history of people whose fire for God burned with such an intense passion that their legacy has stayed strong through the centuries and decades, encouraging millions. I think of people like Billy Graham, our beloved C.S. Lewis, John Wesley, and Jim Elliot, to name a few.

Ours was the faith of 4th century church father Jerome, whose passion to flee youthful lusts kept him buried in his work of translating the Bible into Latin, which, unbeknownst to him, would be used by the church for the next 1,000 years.

The light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ guided Jerome's contemporary, Gregory of Nazianzus, who stubbornly held to idea of JESUS' full humanity, stating that "whatever has not been assumed has not been fully healed." In other words, if our Lord did not assume full humanity along with His full divinity, then the Gospel itself is threatened.

Christianity was the faith of the 17th century Jesuit, Pedro Claver, whose love for ill-treated slaves compelled him to meet incoming slave ships in Columbia, carry out and bury the dead bodies, and then return to the living cargo to tend their wounds and minister his understanding of the Gospel to them. When he took his vows in the Society of Jesus, he added an amendment to his name, Petrus Claver, aethiopum semper servus. Pedro Claver, forever a servant to blacks.

And like Claver, our faith was (and is) the faith of innumerable saints who considered the riches of Christ far greater than the passing pleasures of sin. Their stories may only be known by some, but their legacy has endured in the lives of their family, friends, and anyone else they have interceded for before His throne.

The one thread I have always found when learning about life-changing saints is this: they desired God. They had a passion for Him that compelled them, forced them, to spend an unmeasurable amount of time seeking His face in prayer and meditation. They had to have Him.

George Mueller was obsessed with prayer. Brother Lawrence attempted to live each second of his waking day in the presence of the Father. Mother Teresa desired "only all for Jesus."

That's the kind of passion that counts everything as loss for the sake of the Gospel.

"Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ" (Philippians 3:8 ESV).