Dwell in the Fire

What comes to mind when you think of fire? Our brains immediately perceive that as danger to our bodies and property, so we steer clear of it. However, as we all know, fire bears gifts if handled properly. It keeps us warm, cooks our food, drives our engines, purifies our jewelry, the list goes on. But what if I told you that you can draw near and settle in a fire that far outburns and outshines any other in the universe?

Hebrews 12:28-29 tells us:

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.

We will get to the consuming fire soon. First, let’s break down the preceding statements. Being born again believers after professing our faith in Christ, we learn that we are no longer of a fallen world but of our Father’s kingdom. The old, loosely founded and destructive is gone and the new, unshakable, life-giving has come. Scripture further urges us to “have grace, by which we may…“. But…what is grace? The answers flying through your mind are unmerited favour, love, mercy and forgiveness. And you are right! Totally true, 100%. Though, there is a facet of grace that, lamentably, most believers don’t know about.

This is revealed in 2 Corinthians 12:9 when God tells Paul “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness [boldface mine].” Did you catch that? Grace is associated with His power! The power that enabled Paul to go beyond his weakness in his flesh! So going off of this, we can define Grace as God’s empowerment on us to go beyond our natural ability to do what truth demands of us! Isn’t this great? The Lord gives us the gift of grace to carry out the things in His word that are necessary, things we could never do on our own strength!

Now, equipped with this grace, we are to “…serve Him acceptably with reverence and godly fear.”

Stop and pay attention to those words as you read them again. “acceptably”? Yes, you read that right. Based on this text, we learn that not all service and worship is acceptable before God. You wonder, what kind of worship is acceptable before the Lord? Drawing our answer from the very same verse, we see that acceptable worship is characterized by reverence and godly fear; reverence and godly fear being the highest, utmost form of respect you can hold for the Eternal King of the Universe, not treating who/what is sacred as common. Allow me to contextualize this in our churches, in actionable terms. Irreverence manifests in our services in the form of us holding conversations in the middle of praise and worship, scrolling or texting away on our phones during intercessory prayers and even sleeping during the proclamation of the Word. It doesn’t stop there. It’s incredible when you think about it, really. What I am communicating here is: Two might stand in the same church building, sing the same songs, pray the same guided prayer and listen to the same sermon. But the one who knows the value of godly fear is the one whose worship acceptable, therefore more pleasing to the Lord.

Finally, equipped with this knowledge on grace and godly fear, we can approach the consuming fire. Not just a burning or flickering fire, but one that devours all. He is the fire that is approached before any other. The fire that is prioritized. He is the fire that is given undivided attention in the building on Sunday. He is the fire that declares “You shall not make for yourselves idols“. We may be idolizing our current relationships, jobs, hobbies. Heck, we may even be romanticizing the very idea of a potential romantic relationship so much that we put Him on the backburner. This aspect of God, the consuming fire, is what we must embrace to be loosed from this plague of unacceptable service to God.

When we dwell in this fire (and by dwell, I mean building your house here) I believe we are delivered from our idols in three phases. In the first phase, the apparent, lightweight idols are immediately consumed by the fire, as is the case with paper. In the second phase, the hidden, hardened idols gradually become evident and begin to wear and melt under the weight of God’s glory, for sin is not fashioned to take root in His presence. The longer we stay, the more purified we become. Come the third, we will have developed an intimate and strong relationship with the King of Kings and learned to pray for discernment and awareness on the things that threaten to replace God in our fire-filled lives.

To the Lord be all the glory,

Amen.