Uncontainable Fire

Since reading John 14 the other day, verses 12-13 have been niggling at me: “The person who follows me in faith, believing in me, will do the same mighty miracles that I do—even greater miracles than these because I go to be with my Father!  For I will do whatever you ask me to do when you ask me in my name ” (TPT)

It is God’s desire and expectation for His disciples to be following the Great Commission, making disciples of all nations, baptising & teaching, and using whatever means necessary to persuade them, including miracles. So if I am not doing that, what sort of Christian am I? I can’t claim the part that says “I will do anything you ask” without accepting my responsibility to be working miracles in His Name!

Then a video fell across my path yesterday, by Torben Sondergaard, who I love (link here). Warning: don’t watch if you don’t want to be challenged! I do want to be challenged, though: I know that my natural inclination to just spend time in the Secret Place with God can become a bit self-indulgent it I am not careful. There’s nothing wrong with being a ‘Mary’, neglecting all else in favour of sitting at Jesus’ feet – He loves it! And He has been very careful to reinforce that message to me recently, that He wants me to spend protected time resting in His love. But if I spend all my time just basking in His love and receiving His blessings then I have to ask myself if I am really in a two-way relationship with Him, or if I am just self-focused. Anyone who truly presses in to His heart cannot fail to hear His heart beating for those who are still lost, those who still do not know Him. And as He spoke to me the other week, He passionately wants to be known.

So I press in to being challenged. I don’t ever want to become a spiritually fat baby, receiving all His blessings but not sharing them with those others who really need them too. And as I started to watch the above video, even in the first couple of minutes my heart was stirred and convicted, fanning into flame the passion I used to have to see a Church on fire with the Holy Spirit, ministering in power to the broken and needy, like in the book of Acts.

At a prayer meeting yesterday God started to speak to me from the book of Revelation. In chapter 3 we find a letter written to the Laodiceans, the famously “luke-warm” church. And really it is no stretch to suggest that we in the West are luke-warm. We like to think we are passionate and on-fire, because many of us are sincere in our desire to serve God – we go to church every Sunday, attend life groups, prayer meetings, and pray for our neighbours. But I do wonder if we are sleepwalking – acting like we’re awake when we are heavily sedated. Even those of us who can happily spend hours in prayer, worship and studying God’s Word – if we are not also out in the world, sharing the Gospel and seeing signs and wonders following, are we really on fire? I don’t want to judge or condemn anyone, but I AM challenging myself. I am kidding myself if I think I am on fire. Yes, I am in love with Jesus but that’s not the full picture.

See, if the point of my life was just to come into restored relationship with Him, then I would have been snatched away to Heaven the second I became born again. But the reason why I wasn’t raptured – the reason for my being on Earth still – can be summed up very simply: so I can go and tell others what Jesus has done in me. To be a witness to His resurrection and restoration power. We are not supposed to just BE the fruit of His sacrifice – we are supposed to go out and BEAR fruit.
Isaiah 32:15 says “until the Spirit is poured out on us from on high, And the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, And the fruitful field is counted as a forest” (NKJV)
The Holy Spirit was sent so that we would bear fruit for Him – and not just the fruit that a field produces in one season (ie our own lives), but the kind of fruit that comes when the trees are established as a long-lasting forest, that bears much fruit for generations

Anyway, this morning in my “devotional time” (ie the time I set aside to devote myself to chatting with Him, with no other interruptions), He took me back to Revelation 3, and the call to repentance & returning to a place of passion & zeal. Being cold and apathetic is apparently preferable to being luke-warm – because the luke-warm believe that their warmth is a sign that they are not cold – but they don’t realise that the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost to set the world ablaze. He wasn’t meant to be contained in polite little packages, just blessing our prayers and helping us to be better people. That is undoubtedly part of it. But Jesus came to baptise us with the Holy Spirit and fire. Baptism means to be overwhelmed, or immersed – not just to receive a little dab, the way some infants are ‘baptised’. His fire is supposed to consume us, not be contained.

And just as Paul exhorted Timothy to “fan into flame the fire of the spiritual gift imparted to him” (2 Tim 1:6), so it’s our season to fan our fires into full flame too. And not only ourselves as individuals, but let us encourage each other to do the same. Just as a single coal is more quickly extinguished when it burns alone, so we need to gather together and encourage each other to burn brightly – that none of us will be counted as luke-warm in the eyes of God, but we would burn hot with zeal and passion for God’s Kingdom. Amen, Lord – let it be so!