Refiner's Fire

I just got back to school after Christmas break and you know the routine. You’ve made New Year’s resolutions and this year is going to be different! So you want to drop that 15 pounds (or for some of you it’s more like 50), or you want to eat more healthily, or you want to exercise more regularly. It’s one week into the New Year and you’ve started full force on your commitments. You’ve gone to the gym this week and spent hours on the treadmill, the ab board, the stationary bike, and lifting weights. And now you’re body is paying the price! You can’t even sit down without feeling some muscle in your body scream with pain, “Why have you done this to me!” It’s that initial drive, that dedication, that passion that got you this sore. The problem is that you don’t realize that you’re body must go through that pain in order for any “progress” to be made on your resolution.

I just got back to school and we started in with baseball workouts full force. My team has a personal trainer who used to play rugby at Clemson University and he is psycho! I really think he's on the crack pipe! None of us on the team have really done much over Christmas break because we used the time to recuperate from our Fall season and to eat any kind of sweets we could get our hands on, so needless to say we are extremely out of shape! But yesterday our trainer put us through the most grueling, cruel, and unusual workout I have ever been through! We did 20 minutes of abs, we did all this jumping and hopping and running in place stuff (agilities), we did squats and bench and curls and pushups and trunk twists and any other kind of exercise he could think of at that moment! Let me tell you, I will be feeling this pain for the next week! It is unreal! But the thing is, he is training us to perform at our best as athletes. Just like you, going to the gym for your New Year’s resolution, are trying to look and feel your best as a person. But in order to perform or look your best on the outside, all the impurities on the inside must be flushed out. And the only way to do that is through “torturous” workouts! The soreness is good! It means it’s working.

We go through these times in life too. No one can argue that sometimes in life things don’t go our way! Life in this sinful world is full of suffering, and sometimes it’s suffering of good people. That’s all thanks to a big thing called Sin. We don’t have anyone to blame suffering on except ourselves and our sinful desires. What’s our response to times of suffering most of the time though? Why would God let bad things happen to good people? He must not be a loving God. A long time ago people bought things with gold. Now gold can be softened when heated and formed into coins, bars, or whatever shape you want. There were some people who were thieves and would mix wax in with the gold or silver in order to make it look like they were meeting the required weight of gold (kind of like your used car-salesmen of today). The only way you could tell if it was PURE gold was by putting it in the fire to pull out any impurities. Now I imagine if the gold had feelings it probably wouldn’t like being put in the fire, but it was NECESSARY in order to be used and to be counted as full value. The bible says in Malachi 2:17 “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like refiner’s fire or launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. . .” Just like we have to be cleansed on the outside with soap if we are dirty, sometimes we have to be cleansed on the inside with fire to lift any impurities out of us. Psalm 139 says “Search me, Oh God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” In order to experience the abundant and full life that Jesus promises (an eternal life) we must eventually go through the fire and allow the impurities to be lifted out of us.