Nobody signs up for the refining fire
willingly.
You do not wake up one morning, stretch your arms,
look out the window at a brand new day and think to yourself, I really hope
something painful and difficult happens to me today, so that God can work on my character. That is not how any of this
works. The fire comes whether you are ready for it or not. The question is
never whether you will face it. The question is what you will allow it to do in
you when you do.
Malachi 3:3 gives us one of the most tender
and precise pictures of what God is doing when He allows the fire into our
lives. It describes Him as a refiner sitting over silver. Not standing at a
distance. Not watching from across the room. Sitting. Close. Attentive. The
refiner sits over the silver because the process requires that kind of
watchfulness. Too little heat and the impurities remain. Too much and the
silver is destroyed. The refiner has to know exactly what he is doing, has to
stay present throughout the entire process, and has to keep his eyes on what he
is working with at every moment.
That is God in your trial.
He is not absent. He is not distracted by the
millions of other things happening in the universe. He is sitting over you with
the focused attention of someone who knows exactly what is in you, exactly what
needs to come out, and exactly how much heat is required to accomplish what
only the fire can do.
Does that change how you see what you are
going through right now?
Zechariah 13:9 records God saying I will bring
that group through the fire and make them pure, just as gold and silver are
refined and purified by fire. They will call on my name and I will answer them.
I will say these are my people and they will say the Lord is our God. There is
a relationship being forged in the fire. Not just a character being built but a
bond being deepened between a person and their God that could not have been
formed any other way. The fire is not just purifying you. It is drawing you
closer to Him.
Think about that for a moment. The hardest season
of your life might also be the closest you have ever been to God.
Peter understood this better than most. He was a
man who was absolutely certain of his own strength right up until the moment he
discovered he did not have any. He told Jesus in Mark 14:29 that even if
everyone else fell away he would not. Hours later he was standing by a fire in
a courtyard denying he ever knew the man. Three times. And the third time, Luke
22:61 records that Jesus turned and looked at Peter.
Not with condemnation. Not with the look of a
teacher who has given up on a student. With a look that broke Peter open
completely. Peter went out and wept bitterly. That weeping was not the end of
his story. It was the beginning of his refining. The pride that had made him so
certain of himself had to burn away before the Peter who would preach at
Pentecost and turn thousands to God could emerge.
The fire does not take away who you are. It
takes away what was never really you to begin with.
That is one of the most important things to
understand about the refining process. The impurities that are burned away are
not your identity. They are the things that attached themselves to your
identity over years of living in a fallen world. Fear that dressed itself up as
strength. Pride that masqueraded as confidence. Self-reliance that looked like
faith but was really just a reluctance to need anyone, including God. The fire
burns through the disguises and leaves what is real.
And what is real in a child of God is worth
far more than what the fire takes.
1 Peter 1:7 says the genuineness of your faith
is more precious than gold. Gold is one of the most valuable substances on
earth and it still has to go through fire to become what it is meant to be.
Your faith is worth more than that. Which means the process that produces it is
worth more too, even when it does not feel that way in the middle of it.
Have you ever come through a hard season and looked
back at who you were before it and who you were after and noticed the
difference? Have you ever realized that the compassion you now carry for
someone else going through something painful only exists because you went
through something painful yourself? Have you ever found yourself able to trust
God in a new situation because you watched Him come through in the last one?
That is the fruit of the refining fire. And
it is irreplaceable.
Isaiah 48:10 says I have refined you but not
as silver is refined. Rather I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.
God is honest about what the furnace is. He does not dress it up or make it
sound less than what it is. It is suffering. Real, costly, difficult suffering.
But it is suffering with a purpose and a Refiner who never takes His eyes off
of you while you are in it.
Job is perhaps the most well known example of a
life put through the refining fire in all of scripture. He lost everything. His
children, his health, his wealth, his sense of stability and normalcy. His
friends sat with him and offered explanations that sounded theological but were
completely wrong. And in the middle of all of it, in chapter 23 verse 10, Job
said something remarkable. He said but He knows the way that I take and when He
has tested me I will come forth as gold.
Job did not know how the story ended when he said
that. He said it from the middle of the fire. That is faith. That is the kind
of trust that the refining process produces in a person who keeps holding on.
You will come forth as gold.
Not damaged beyond repair. Not emptied of
everything that made you who you are. Not smaller or weaker or more broken than
when you went in. Gold. Refined. Purified. Reflecting the face of the One who
sat over you through every degree of heat and never once looked away.
The refining fire is not punishment. It is
preparation. It is God getting you ready for something your unrefined self
could not have carried. It is the process He uses to make sure that when the
blessing comes, when the assignment comes, when the moment comes that He built
you for, you are ready to hold it.
Stay in the hands of the Refiner. He knows what He
is doing. He has always known what He is doing. And when He is finished, what
remains will be worth everything the fire cost you.
To God be all the glory for every fire He has used
to make His people more like Him. For every impurity He has burned away with
patience and with love. For every life that came out of the flames more
refined, more surrendered, and more deeply His than it was before.
The fire is not your enemy. In the hands of God, it
is one of the greatest gifts He gives.
Trust the Refiner. Trust the process. Trust that
what He started in you, He will complete.
Philippians 1:6 promises it. He who began a
good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
He is not done with you yet.
Posts
