Welcome to Let’s Talk. Let’s jump right in.
I remember it was a hot day in May 1988. I was a sophomore at Chapel Hill North Carolina, and I was in the middle of finals. I had a 30-page paper due. I remember it was the psychobiography of Ernest Hemingway. I had stayed up for two days straight and was wigged out on Jolt Cola, coffee, and Pop-Tarts.
I was sitting in class after turning in my paper, and I was spent. I mean, I was just done. I got up in the middle of class, left, went to my dorm room, and collapsed on the bed. I had gone through the fire, and I had gotten burned.
Tonight, let’s talk about going through the fire.
At different times in life, we all have to go through the fire. This pandemic has been a fire for all of us. The big question is, how do we go through the fire and come out better than we were before?
Psalm 66:12 says this: “You’ve allowed our enemies to prevail against us. We’ve passed through fire and flood, yet in the end, you always bring us out better than we were before, saturated with your goodness.”
When we go through the fire of life and the flood of emotion that comes with it, without God, we come out burnt, bitter, unbelieving, and wanting to quit. But when we go through the fire and the floods in life with God, we can come out better than we were before.
It’s like Thomas Edison said, “There’s great value in disaster. All of our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.” He said this at age 67 after his factory had just been destroyed by a fire.
Or, famously, Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” He was basically saying, don’t stop when things are hard, keep going. You’ll get through it.
I want to look at two scriptures that help me when I am going through the fire.
The first is Zechariah 13:9. He says, “I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure. I will refine them like silver and purify them like gold. 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.'”
He says, “I will bring that group through the fire.” The first thing is, don’t go through the fire alone. It’s always better to go through difficulties with friends. Find friends, open up, share, reveal, stick with each other. We all know every team gets better having gone through the fire of adversity together.
We also can learn that fires are what make God personal, real, and what attach us to Him. That’s what’s happened in my life. God says, “These are my people,” and the people say, “The Lord is our God.” Don’t waste fires by not attaching to God. Use it as a moment to rewrite your relationship with God and get strong with him.
The fires in my life that I have gone through, they have made God personal to me. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. They are super hard, but they’re the most meaningful things that I’ve gone through in life, and they’ve attached me to God.
So with that backdrop, let’s focus on one more scripture to understand what happens when we go through the fire. There’s two things that happen when we go through the fire. One, some things in our life get burned up. And two, some things in our life get ignited. So when we go through the fire, some things get burned up, and some things get ignited.
First Peter 1:6. He says, “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
First, when we go through the fire, some things get burned up. But we need those things to get burnt so that we’re more focused and lean and mean. He says we all go through all kinds of trials.
So what are the different kinds of trials or fires that we are going through? One of them for me is just life expectations. For some of us, maybe we’re in school and it’s the SAT or midterms or papers, finals, there’s social demands. Or maybe it’s in our career, and we’re going back to the workplace now after this pandemic, or we have a good thing happening like a promotion, but now the expectations are much higher. Or it could be family demands, aging parents, or maybe it’s young kids and you’re not getting any sleep right now. There’s always sin challenges, where there’s guilt or hiddenness. And not to mention disappointments that we go through. Maybe dating has been difficult through this time, or marriage struggles, or we get let down by friends. Or it could be emotional health. We have all kinds of trials.
Going through these trials makes me feel a lot of emotions. The scripture says it’s grief. We feel grief when the fires of life burn us because we lose some things that we’ve been depending on, and that makes us feel a lot and kind of destabilizes our emotions. It does to me. But those are the things that we need to have burnt out of our lives.
I know these fires have burnt out pride in me, thinking I can do everything by myself, that I don’t need God or people. It’s burnt out insecurity, that caring too much about what people think. Some of it’s just burnt out bitterness. I’m wasting energy on regret instead of really changing. I’ve had a lot of fear of failure in my life. What if I fail? Well, when you go through a trial and you fail, that fear just gets burnt up. There can be compromise, areas that I’ve just glossed over or avoided because I don’t want to go through the fire of dealing with them.
So the first thing that happens when we go through the fire, things in our life get burnt. It’s hard, it’s destabilizing, but it matures us.
The second thing that happens when we go through the fire is some things in our life are ignited. The scripture says that we’re refined in the fire and it results in praise, glory, and honor.
So what are those things in you that need to be ignited in your life? One of the things is focusing on God, where getting back to where God is the most important thing and the most important relationship in my life. Going through a fire can ignite our passion for God. That’s what it’s done for me. It’s a hard time, but there’s a resurgence in my relationship with God as I’m expressing things that I haven’t felt before. It brings an electricity and an energy back into my relationship with God.
I want to know what He thinks. I want to understand what He feels. And my relationship with God gets ignited when I’m going through that difficulty.
Another thing that gets ignited is our friendships. With my pride stripped away, I’m free again to be close to people and just enjoy the relationships, have deeper talks, feel the need for my wife and my friends even more. Friendships can get ignited.
And then lastly, my purpose gets ignited. I’m reminded that I’m here for a reason, that God has me here to change lives, to help people, to use the fires as a purpose to help other people who are going through fires. When my life is changing, I’m excited to help others change their life, too.
So, we close out with three questions for us tonight to talk about, to help us come out of the fire better than before.
The first question is, what are the fires or the trials that you’re going through right now? Secondly, what in your life needs to get burned up? And then lastly, what in your life needs to get ignited?
So enjoy Let’s Talk, and remember, let’s not go through these fires alone.
