Streams in the desert: he will sit as a refiner.

He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. (Malachi 3:3)

“Our Father, who seeks to perfect His saints in holiness, knows the value of the refiner’s fire. It is with the most precious metals that a metallurgist will take the greatest care. He subjects the metal to a hot fire, for only the refiner’s fire will melt the metal, release the dross, and allow the remaining, pure metal to take a new and perfect shape in the mold.

A good refiner never leaves the crucible but, as the above verse indicates, “will sit” down by it so the dire will not become even one degree too hot and possibly harm the metal. And as soon as he skims the last bit of dross from the surface and sees his face reflected in the pure metal, he extinguishes the fire.” – Arthur Tappan Pierson

Nobody likes having the heat turned up. When you realize the storms have come once again, you are left with nothing but to run or flee from the living God.

I loved this above passage on the refiner's fire, it was the best thing to intersect my thinking the other day as it struck me that God never leaves the fire. He will sit.... those words were so powerful to me as they brought all my fears and anxious thoughts to a screeching halt.
Sometimes we just need to be reminded that He is here.

He is here.

The more I am following Jesus, the true cost of what it means to follow Him comes into clearer view. It will cost you everything. The things you hold the closest will be the first to go. It will be painful. It will be messy. It will not feel good. It will not be certain. It will feel like everything around you is crumbling.

Until you allow the truth of God's word to intersect your conclusions and you find that there is not "some strange thing happening to you."

One of my mentors always tells me, I know how to stop all these things from happening to you, Mazvita. Stop pursuing a life of the gospel. Stop wanting to give your life to fight for the kingdom. Get off the frontlines. Take a backseat. Stop fighting even though nearly everyone around you is giving in, putting down their sword... stop living for what matters.

I told this person today that I just wanted others to fight with. I've been incredibly discouraged to find the road get lonelier and lonelier. To find the ones who were once running mates, giving up, stopping, choosing another path. It's heartbreaking. To see the ones I had left trading it in. For those things that will not satisfy.

It makes for a lonely journey. Some days you want to quit. Some days you wonder if there will be others fighting with you. Some days you wonder why you're seeing it differently.There is no life apart from Christ and He will crucify all the ways we try to find life apart from Him.

We all know nothing worth fighting for comes easy but living it is a different reality. In the face of God continually burning away the fields of thorns so there can be fruit, it is most critical that we lay our feelings aside and trust what we know of His character.

That we have favor with the Lord. That He is for us. Always. That He is faithful. These are the rich promises we must cling to in the face of adversity. Or else our faith is in vain. For we having a living hope. A living hope in Christ Jesus, that anchors us in the midst of the most violent of storms.

That sometimes God brings the storms in our lives so we can experience His grace and be freed of all the ways we try to make ourselves right with Him and find approval and worth from others.

Just like Jonah. God sent the storm in Jonah's life so he would experience the grace of God. So he would experience the incredible relentless pursuit of the God we love to run from.

Jonah's problem was not fear of failure. He was not afraid of going to preach to the Ninevites.

His issue was self-righteousness. He feared success more than anything, His anger and true problem with God is revealed in chapter 3 of Jonah, where God brings mercy to the Ninevites... Jonah says... I knew it, I knew you would do this... to people who do not deserve it... Lord... so that is why I did not want to come.

Yet, the storm comes and sets Jonah free from himself.

God sends the storms until he has our hearts.

God sends the storms to save us from ourselves.

God sends the storms and the earthquakes to loosen chains.

And to bring us back to Himself.

Where true life is found.

These [trials] have come [why] so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
1 Peter 1:6-8

It will cost you everything.

“Toys and trinkets are easily earned, but the most valuable things carry a heavy price.”

“The Cross of Obedience," an essay in A.W. Tozer's The Radical Cross

"Some people in reading the Bible say they cannot understand why Elijah and other men had such active power with the living God. It is quite simple. God heard Elijah because Elijah had heard God. God did according to the word of Elijah because Elijah had done according to the word of God. You cannot separate the two.

When we are willing to consider the active will of God for our lives, we come immediately to a personal knowledge of the cross because the will of God is the place of blessed, painful, fruitful trouble!

The Apostle Paul knew about that. He called it “the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings.” It is my conviction that one of the reasons we exhibit very little spiritual power is because we are unwilling to accept and experience fellowship of the Savior’s sufferings, which means acceptance of His cross.

How can we have and know the blessed intimacy of the Lord Jesus if we are unwilling to take the route which He has demonstrated? We do not have it because we refuse to relate the will of God to the cross.

All of the great saints have been acquainted with the cross—even those who lived before the time of Christ. They were acquainted with the cross in essence because their obedience brought it to them.

All Christians living in full obedience will experience the cross and find themselves exercised in spirit very frequently. If they know their own hearts, they will be prepared to wrestle the cross when it comes.

Think of Jacob in the Old Testament and notice the direction from which he cross came—directly from his own carnal self. It took Jacob some time to discover the nature of his own heart and to admit and confess that Jacob’s cross was Jacob himself.

Read again about Daniel and you will discover that his cross was the world. Consider Job and you will find that his cross was the devil. The devil crucified Job, the world crucified Daniel, and Jacob was crucified on the tree of his own Jacobness, his own carnality.

Study the lives of the apostles in the New Testament and you will find that their crosses came from the religious authorities.

Likewise in Church history we look at Luther and note that his cross came from the Roman Church which makes so much of wooden crosses, while Wesley’s cross came from the Protestant Church. Continue to name the great souls who followed the will of God, and you will name the men and women of God who looked forward by faith, and their obedience invariably led them into places of blessed and painful and fruitful trouble.

I must point out here the fallacy of thinking that in following Jesus we can easily go up on the hillside and die—just like that! I admit that when Jesus was here on earth, the easiest and cheapest way to get off was to follow Jesus physically. Anyone could get out of work and say good-bye with the explanation, “I am going to follow Jesus.” Multitudes did this. They followed Him physically, but they had no understanding of Him spiritually. Therefore, in that day the cheapest, easiest way to dispose of the cross was to carry it physically.

But brethren, taking our cross is not going to mean the physical act of following Jesus along a dusty pathway. We are not going to climb the hill where there are already two crosses in place and be nailed up between them.

Our cross will be determined by whatever pain and suffering and trouble which will yet come to us because of our obedience to the will of God. The true saints of God have always borne witness that wholehearted obedience brings the cross into the light quicker than anything else.

IDENTIFIED WITH CHRIST

Oneness with Christ means to be identified with Christ, identified with Him in crucifixion. But we must go on to be identified with Him in resurrection as well, for beyond the cross is resurrection and the manifestation of His presence.

I would not want to make the mistake of some preachers who have never gotten beyond the message of death, death, death! They preach it so much that they never get anyone beyond death into resurrection life and victory… I was greatly helped by the radiant approach of Dr. A.B. Simpson to the meaning of the cross and death to self. He took one through the meaning of the cross to the understanding that beyond the cross there is resurrection life and power, and identification with a risen Savior and the manifestation of His loving presence.

The old fifteenth-century saint whom we have quoted declared that “God is ingenuous in making us crosses.”

Considering that, we have to confess that when some Christians say, “I am crucified with Christ by faith,” they are merely using a technical term and are not talking about a cross in reality. But God wants His children to know the cross. He knows that only spiritual good can come to us as a result of our identification with the Lord Jesus. So He is ingenuous in making crosses for us.

The quotation continues:

'He may make them of iron and of lead which are heavy of themselves. He makes some of straw which seem to weigh nothing, but one discovers that they are no less difficult to carry. A cross that appears to be of straw so that others think it amounts to nothing may be crucifying you through and through.

He makes some with gold and precious stones which dazzle the spectators and excite the envy of the public but which crucify no less than the crosses which are more despised.'Christians who are put in high places, Christians who are entrusted with wealth and influence, know something about the kind of cross that may seem dazzling to spectators and excites the envy of the public—but if they know how to take it, it crucifies them no less than the others.'

It seems that he makes our crosses of all the things we like the best so that when they turn to bitterness we are able to learn the true measure of eternal values..."

Anchored

(originally written 10/29/08)

It’s been a really good week. I feel it has something more to do with God continuing to strip more and more impurities from my heart and from my life and deepening my dependence on Him and being anchored in Him, than anything that has actually happened.

Somehow this is coloring everything.This hope thing and being secure in the Lord.

Had a really hard conversation with someone I love dearly last night, yet had a couple other meetings planned after that and was joyful. I was teary in the car but it didn’t wreck my mood or my day.

The joy of the Lord is not contingent on circumstances.

I am experiencing what can only come from the grace of God, the security of knowing and being intimately known by Him. This week and a current theme in the last few months, I have been brought to a place of more and more freedom and peace each day.

I feel lighter.

I am happier.

I am excited.

Things that once bothered me now give me an opportunity to trust God with it. I am not tossed from side to side. He is grounding me. And I'm learning how much I don't have to do anything alone or in my own strength. He is the source of all I need.

My heart is hopeful. My heart is learning to trust and find rest in that security. I feel I’m undergoing a conversion of sorts. Learning what it truly means to live loved.

Hope and the certainty of God’s promises

Hebrews 6:9-20

"A small boat on the ocean rocks and bobs on the tide. When dark storm clouds roll in, it pulls and twists in violent winds. If it is not secured, it can easily drift away in calm waters, or suddenly be dashed in rocks in turbulence. Its anchor, however, holds it firm and keeps it safe. It may not be free from distress, but it is held by a deep and reliable source. So the soul, we now learn, is “firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19) in the hope God has given to hold it steady."

9Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. 10God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. 11We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. 12We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

The Certainty of God's Promise

13When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14saying, "I will surely bless you and give you many descendants."[a] 15And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.16Men swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. 17Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. 19We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, 20where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek. - Hebrews 6:9-20

Our Hope: the seed will produce fruit

“Progressive sanctification, that slow process of change into Christlikeness, means, in its simplest form, that we’ve already been made to be in Christ (our justification), we are growing to be in our practice (our sanctification).

This sanctification is nothing less than a guaranteed blossoming of the gospel seed that has been implanted within the soul of every born-again believer (1 Peter 1:23-25). It is not imitation of a personality alien to us, but rather it is the inward renovation of our souls by the power of the resurrected Christ who resides within us. Imagine a natural seed within your heart invisibly germinating, and then extending its tender roots, branching out and growing stronger, becoming more and more entrenched until it finally fills your entire soul. That’s what the seed of the gospel is like within you; it will reproduce the image of Jesus.”

- Because He Loves Me, Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

stop and look

“Stop tinkering with your soul and look away to the perfect One.” - A.W. Tozer

(originally written 10/22/08)

So I wrote this this morning in bible study and am wanting to post a lot more when time allows on this awesome chapter in a book we’re studying. This is probably the first book in a long time I've read that I haven't cared much for, but now on chapter 7, things are starting to resonate... But for now, after an hour long discourse on faith in the bible study group this morning, I wrote my most simplified conclusion in my book:

Faith is a constant moment by moment, circumstance by circumstance

choice

of where to turn my gaze

Myself and my circumstances and trying with all my might to figure out a solution on my own, rely on myself, trying to solve the problem

or to God…

Who will I depend on?

Who or what will I trust?

Who or what will I choose to believe?

“Faith is simply believing God.” – Francis Schaeffer

A.W. Tozer wrote, “Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God… Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existsnec. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object on upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all.”

Streams in the Desert: A Tree that Flourishes

(originally written 10/18/08)

I'm starting a new series called "Streams in the Desert," based on the title of a devotional that has some powerful truths for weary travelers on this journey we call the Christian life. I am finding a new strength in the last couple of months from these streams, the promises of God and God himself I've encountered in the desert. This first post of the series features the beginning of it all at a women's ministry kickoff last month and then I will post random devotionals or verses that have been life-giving streams to me in this once parched land. I feel He has come and nourished my soul, providing living springs where there was once desert.





Psalm 1:1-3. Blessed is the man/woman who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his/her delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he/she meditates day and night. He/She is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he/she does prospers.





Jeremiah 17:7-8. But blessed is the man/woman who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. He/She will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.



I learned from the speaker that day that these two passages depict two different streams. (I've shared my answers from my reflection that day and answers provided in the teaching below in italics but feel free to reflect on these questions on your own)



What is the stream in the first passage? Here the stream represents the Word of God… “her delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law she meditates day and night.” The word is feeding it [the tree] constantly… as the tree remains planted near it. Here is the critical point, we must realize we are firmly planted near the source, even in seasons where it seems we are in dry lands.



What is the stream in the second passage? Here the stream represents God himself, our Source. The tree drinks deeply and their soul is nourished, even in times of no rain… and it always bears fruit. We can be thriving women, in every season…



Prayerfully reread the Jeremiah passage and answer the questions below.
Who is the blessed man/woman in this passage? The one whose confidence is in the Lord… who trusts the Lord despite the circumstances… who doesn’t forget the Lord in times of difficulty or drought and freak out that they have got to figure it out on their own… but who sends its roots by the stream, whose roots drink deeply from the Lord.



This woman can drink deeply, even when there is no rain.



What does the passage say about?



The roots-Sends its roots by the stream… reaches out to the life-giving source… our thirsty souls… to be fed daily by being close to the Lord, to drink deeply… planted by the water.



The leaves –Its leaves are always green… despite the season, despite the circumstances



The fruit –Always bearing fruit, even in times of drought or difficulty



The stream –The stream is what is sustaining it.



Draw a picture of the tree described in the passage in Jeremiah. Then we had to draw ourselves as the tree. Then they asked the following questions. How would you draw YOU as a tree right now at this point in your life (basing it on your spiritual health or state right now? What is the health, or “flourishing” of your tree? Are we next to it? Are we connected to it? Are we flourishing? Do we feel we are withering? What is the promise found in both of these passages? What do we need to do in order to receive this promise?



We did this exercise in a bible study in a women’s ministry I’m a part of. It was powerful. I mean, how many of us can relate to needing that stream in the desert? I have loved this imagery as I have found how God has come and filled this parched land with springs day after day that I have hardly forgotten I am in desert. But my job is to remember that I am firmly planted next to Him and allow Him to sustain me constantly, so that the way I see and live my everyday life, in the mundane tasks, he is glorified.



He has been my stream in the desert, as well as His word which I’ve come to treasure. I heard someone talk about a book called Streams in the Desert, which is actually a devotional, but it reinforces a lot of these themes I’ve just begin to explore in the last month.
I want to be a woman who is like that tree planted by the water… whose leaves are always green.



Those last few words really stuck out to me because as I can see in my life, even this summer which I would describe as the hardest part of the “desert” season, as we’re connected to the source, even in times of drought, we are nourished. We do not fear when heat comes, we never fail to bear fruit. These are rich promises I was refreshed to read in Jeremiah 17 and rich promises that have allowed me to be sustained not by the promises along, but by the Promiser.

voice

(originally written 10/15/08)

Sometimes we need nothing more than to hear the voice of God.

It is a voice that calms all fears and inner chaos.

It is a voice that breaks through my racing thoughts and anxious heart.

“In the silence of the heart God speaks.”

The process of getting completely still and silent before God is something that takes work. It takes an intentional effort of calming myself down and making it a priority to sit still long enough for the one part of my day that is most crucial, yet the getting there I’m tempted to believe I can put it off, or that I can wait till later, or that I will be fine.

Every time I enter into his presence through in silence and am completely alone and away from distractions, my soul is at ease.

His presence is something we can continually experience throughout the day. But nothing is more precious than those moments where it’s just you and God and where you shut up long enough to let Him speak. And it is there again that worlds collide and we're confronted with the sufficiency of Christ.

Today He said something to my heart, it was in the middle of my rambling prayer about all these things that I know God is acutely aware of but that I needed to get off my heart when I just sat there bowed, laying myself at his feet, when I heard those words…

“You know I’m going to take care of you, right?”

And I immediately remembered who I was talking with.

It was the voice my Father. A voice strangely more familiar and comforting than any voice I have heard audibly. It was the familiarity and gentle authority of His voice that put me at rest.
A voice that reminds me that I am not alone. I am not forgotten. I don’t have to do this on my own. And that I seen, known, loved and chosen. A voice that calls out to us as we're out to sea and reminds us that He is here. It is a voice that gently takes you by the hand again, and simply says, do not be afraid.

My intimate relationship with the one who raised me and has walked with me every step of my life. Of the one who knows me more than I do, who has more stake in my life and well-being than anyone else. Who loved me from the beginning of my life simply because of who I am and who he created me to be. He loved me and was pleased with me long before I ever “was” anything in this world. In His eyes, I am the beloved, with who He is well pleased.