Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived;
    you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
    everyone mocks me.
Whenever I speak, I cry out
    proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me
    insult and reproach all day long.
But if I say, “I will not mention his word
    or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
    a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
    indeed, I cannot.
I hear many whispering,
    “Terror on every side!
    Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!”
All my friends
    are waiting for me to slip, saying,
“Perhaps he will be deceived;
    then we will prevail over him
    and take our revenge on him.”

• Jeremiah 20:7-10

The sons of Aaron the priest are to put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire.

• Leviticus 1:7

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

• Acts 2:3-4

The photo is of the view outside my back door a few weeks ago.  The smell was as if half the neighborhood was on fire.  The warnings were to not go outside.  Yet, nothing in the area was on fire.  The smoke came from the Canadian wildfires, possibly a thousand miles away.  While this seems hard to believe, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area is an odd place.  There may be few severe weather events, except for flashfloods, but if something nasty is in the air, it settles into the valley and seems to never leave.  Yesterday, as of writing this, it had rained for a couple of days, and it seemed that I could see minute detail a mile away.  The air was so clear, but the rain had washed the smoke into the streams in the valleys.

I just had the first Scripture in this morning’s Bible Study.  It talks of how Jeremiah lamented delivering continuous messages of gloom and doom with no hope for immediate rescue.  God had shown Mercy to a stiff-necked people for centuries.  The guilty would have to be punished.  And God had warned Jeremiah that the people would not listen.  He was not deceived.  Yet, I might be right there with him in wishing I had never been born.

But notice that Jeremiah even thought of refusing to say what God had put on his heart, but his body was on fire.  The bad news had to be spoken, or Jeremiah felt he would spontaneously combust.

When was the last time you felt that about spreading the Good News?  Notice!  We have Good News to spread to the world.  The world should accept it readily, but the world is just as corrupt as in the times of Jeremiah.  The Os Guinness phrase, or I read it in one of his books, ABC is true about most people these days.  ABC?  Anything But Christianity, Anything But Christ, Anything But Christians.  The secular world has flip-flopped the dictionary.  Love has become hate.  Hate has become love.  And all “love” must have sexual connotations.  No.  No. A thousand times no.

God is love and we can be intimate with Him by simply sharing our deepest thoughts and our desire to know Him better.

We can tell people about that love.  In fact, the love of God within those who are born-again, becomes so great that it bursts forth from them in their speech, in their dealings with others, in their being.  It cannot be held in.  Circumstances may suppress it, but that only causes that internal fire to build up greater pressure inside.

Why should this not be the case?  Fire is something that has been around in worship since the beginning or nearly so.  Cain and Abel offered sacrifices.  Probably they learned to do so from Adam and Eve.  The book of Leviticus starts with Aaron and his sons building a fire.  And how did God show His presence as Aaron and his sons tended the fire?  A pillar of smoke by day, but fire by night.  Moses talked to God through a burning bush.

So why do we not have that fire?

Maybe you do.

But if you truly believe and you do not feel that fire, you might need to confess your sins and repent of turning your gaze away from Jesus.  As Beth Moore said, we do not feel the warmth of God because we stepped away from the fire.  Confession, repentance, Bible Study, and a lot of prayer might help get that pilot light relit.

But if you have never felt that fire, accept Jesus into your heart.  Commit to Him and trust Him in everything.  Upon an unconditional surrender to Him, He will light that fire.  And your every desire will be to know Him more and more and love Him forever.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.