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..."