Lately, my family has been going through some really tough times. I’m going through a job search after losing my job, and it’s been two months and I’m just now getting unemployment benefits, and some work doing data entry. God’s using this to really change and heal a lot of issues in me, which is so amazing. I’ve moved back in with my parents, and it’s hard because I see them struggling too. It’s hard seeing them struggling financially and with health issues and not being able to help them the way I would want to help. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins are all going through rough times as well, some harder than others.
The past couple weeks I’ve been reading TrueFaced, and this week’s chapter was all about “letting go and letting God”, as the cliché goes. It’s about trusting God with who we are and what we go through, instead of trying to mask our imperfections and striving to please God by working really hard at doing what’s right. Tonight at church, the pastor gave a message that was saying exactly the same thing. My heart started just breaking because of how amazing God is to teach me the same thing from two different places.
Still, I’ve really been struggling with not worrying about everything going on. I trust Him, I can’t help trying to plan everything out and think things through though. My heart has been so heavy this weekend thinking and praying about everything going on with my parents. During worship, we sang “Came to My Rescue” and one of the lines says that God is a God of mercy. Immediately I just collapsed in my chair and began begging God to show us mercy and bring us out of all these hard times my family is going through. Then I felt God asking me “What if putting you through these hard times is an act of mercy?” One of my friends recently said that “God cares more about our closeness to Him, than He does our comfort.” Which is more merciful, for God to let us continue to have an “easy” life and be far from Him, or for Him to bring us to our knees at the end of our rope to where we have to rely on Him?
Then I thought about Daniel 3 where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego were thrown into the fiery furnace for not bowing down to an idol that Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself. These men were thrown into the fire because they refused to bow down to any god other than the one true God. When these men were in the fire, they weren’t burned up, even though the guards throwing them into the fire were incinerated. In fact, when others looked into the fire, they saw four men, not three. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego had an encounter with God while they were in the fire, an encounter with Jesus. God does the same thing with us, He puts us through the fire so that we may have an encounter with Him, and become closer to Him.
So many times though, we become like Peter when walking on the water, and focus on the waves crashing around us, on the fire raging and consuming everything around us, that we take our eyes off of Jesus and we feel like the fire God is using to draw us closer to Him is consuming us completely, instead of seeing that it is refining us into a more Christ-like image.
Or we feel so connected with God while we see Him walking with us through the fire, and we desperately don’t want to lose that connection, so we try to prolong the time in the fire in attempts to keep God close to us. Because we think that if we’re this close to God during trials, that God will somehow be more distant when the water is calm. With our focus shifted like this, we begin to idolize the very tool that God is using to make us more like Him.
And sometimes, we know that the fire is God’s tool to make us more like Him, to burn away the dross so that we can be closer to Him. We want more than anything to be able to say, with these men, “…our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace…” (Daniel 3:17), but we feel like we’ve just been through so much that we can’t handle any more of the fire, so we attempt to shut down, and try to walk away. And God, being the loving Father that He is, pursues us, showing us infinite mercy by continuing to work on our hearts and make us more like Him.
Paul said that he considered His sufferings to be unworthy to be compared to the glory that would be revealed in us (Romans 8:18). Paul’s faith, his actively trusting God, made him able to endure imprisonment, being shipwrecked, being stoned and left for dead, and finally when he was in his last days, he pressed on in ministry while in prison awaiting his execution (2 Timothy 4:9-22).
Paul was able to endure all of this to the end because he had one focus: the cross of Christ. All of who he was, and everything he did had one purpose, to know Jesus and to make Him known throughout the world. Paul pressed through the hardships by focusing on the cross, and his Savior who redeemed him for the purpose of spreading the gospel.
Where is our focus when times are rough? Where is our focus when times are easy? Can we say that like Paul, our one aim is to “know nothing but Christ, and Him crucified” in all things (1 Corinthians 2:2)?
Do we really trust God with our lives, or is it all a show of “good works” to avoid being authentic and admitting that we have no idea where to go from here, and that we desperately need direction on how to begin trusting God and stop trying to “please God” out of our own strength?
3 responses to “The Fire”