Refiner's Fire

It's getting hot in Kuwait. Really hot. We are over 100 degrees every day now and next week we'll break the 110 mark. It makes me think about something Mikey sent me this morning. It was a short video about the process of refining silver. Yahweh tells us in Malachi 3 that He sits like a refiner and purifier of silver. A refiner of silver will hold the silver in the very hottest part of the flame to burn off the impurities. They have to be careful. If they do it too long, they can ruin the silver. How do they know it's just right? When the refiner can see their reflection in the silver. We love to talk about this image. I used to sing a song a long time ago called "Refiner's Fire." We say we want to be refined, but we don't really think about what that means, do we? We are asking Christ to hold us in the greatest heat possible to burn off the parts of us that are impure so that He can see His image in us. But what we often are asking is, "Lord, refine me, but not with too much heat. Purify me, but not too hard." Here's the problem: You cannot be refined without the intense heat of suffering. In my experience, we have a choice. We can put ourselves in the fire and allow God to purify us, or we can wait for Him to do it. Personal refining is doing as Jesus commended, "Deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow Me." It is the path of suffering. I don't know what that might look like for you. In the early days of the church, it meant being cast off from society. It meant hunger. It meant death. Sometimes people walked into the desert or lived in caves to refine themselves. All of that was giving up everything for the Gospel. That is refining. Am I doing that? God's refining is much more painful. CS Lewis said, "Pain is the megaphone God uses to shout into our lives." God has done refining in me that would have been much simpler if I had just chosen to do it myself. I was just sharing with another chaplain today how God had to run me through the wringer to teach me some level of humility. I'm not there, but now I try to practice it, to refine it, on my own because I don't want to have to do that again. In the end, I want to look like Jesus. I want people to see me and see Christ in me. And one day, I want to hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant." SONGS FOR SUNDAY Raise A Hallelujah Yes and Amen The Everlasting