Intro Scriptures
“Be on guard
so that you do not forget the covenant of the Lord your God that He has made
with you, and that you do not make an image of any kind, just as He has
forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; He is a jealous God”
(Deut 4:23).
“As I
watched, I noticed a windstorm coming from the north – an enormous cloud, with
lightning flashing, such that bright light rimmed it and came from it like
glowing amber from the middle of a fire… In the middle of the living beings was
something like burning coals of fire or like torches. It moved back and forth
among the living beings. It was bright, and lightning was flashing out of the
fire. The living beings moved backward and forward as quickly as flashes of
lightning… I saw an amber glow like a fire enclosed all around from His waist
up. From his waist down I saw something that looked like fire. There was a
brilliant light around it, like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds after
the rain. This was the appearance of the surrounding brilliant light; it looked
like the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I threw myself face down, and I
heard a voice speaking” (Ezek 1:4, 12-14, 27).
Re-Contextualizing Scripture for Today
What we need
today is to be caught on fire by One who is
a Consuming Fire. Our inner person needs to be ablaze with the fiery heart
of the Living God, whose name is Jealous, Jealous.
We have had
the fires of illicit passion burn within us for the spoiled fruit of
lawlessness. We burned for satisfying sexual cravings. We burned for satisfying
carnal lusts for immediate self-medicated pleasure of the senses. Our heart
burned for Hollywood that the lusts of our eyes may partake in sensuality and
violence, that our ears may partake of profanity and sexual innuendoes, that
our mind’s eye may partake of self-escaping fantasies.
Our heart
desires to be the character on the screen. Our heart desires to possess the
romance depicted on the screen. Our heart burns for the heights of romantic
highs of hormone driven ecstasy. We seek to satiate the fires kindled in our
heart by the stories in romance novels, in romantic cinema presentations, by
the sizzling articles in magazines.
We search
craving for satiation of these desires that burn seek a way of escape into our
entire livelihood that we can become caught up in the realm where our fictional
fantasies become concrete reality. The fire within us cries out to be released.
We search to find release. We seek the reality of our fiction. We move from
person to person, occasion to occasion, seeking our true first love. Our heart
craves to have its yearning kindled by fiction to become fully and never-endingly
satiated with the self that freely partake in the height of romantic
enrapturement, where loneliness ceases, where emptiness ceases, where striving
for acceptance ceases, where the thirsts for more ceases.
The script
has been written, yet we seek the actor (actress) who can join us in our masquerade
of romantic fiction. Our heart yearns for the story that kindled this fire to
become ours, that our candle can be lit. Reality sucks and our heart becomes
kindled for escape. To pass into another world through a screen, a mouse, and a
keyboard. To play a role on social networking to numb the isolationism that has
become one lonely candle burning.
Our heart burns for pleasure. We eat. We
drink. We overload the senses. Then comes the pain. Then comes the regret. The
fire has turned into a self-consuming fire of insatiable lusts. We eat and eat.
We drink and drink. We watch and watch. Yet the more we do the more the
emptiness of our existence turns into an abyss with a floating candle gradually
fading in the whirlwind of unbridled desire. In moments the candle bursts and
unleashes forth pain in the lives of those around us, who no longer play the
role we had set for them. They no longer serve our dreams. They remind us of
how lost we are to our dreams. We hate these reminders.
We escape
into fires of career, the fires of video games, the fires of social networking,
the fires of hobbies, the fires of partying, fires of friendship, the fires of identity
crises. We burn to find our self elsewhere.
Our heart’s
fire turns into smoldering coals awaiting the instantaneous combustion of
success that come and go, yet keep us going further and further chasing after
our dreams. Our dreams. Our self-consuming dreams. Our heart burns, yet this
burn brings more isolation, emptiness, and self-escapisms, as we live vicariously
through the fictions of our mind.
Our mind
tempts us with possible futures. Our mind tries to relight the candle of our
soul. Our mind speaks of the greener grass over the next fence. Our mind gives
us back ourselves. We rationalize ourselves and our heart comes alongside the
ambitions kindled. An ideal, a vision, a purpose beckons. To leave a legacy. To
impact the world. To make a difference. To help others. The fire burns at a new
altar. The altar of Temporality, a world of fiction, a world where the
internals and externals contradict.
Behind the
masks of happiness lie unhappiness. Behind the masks of educated masses, like
those who do not know themselves. Behind the mask of love, lies hatred. Behind
the masks of purity lies lust. Behind the mask of altruism lies pride. Behind
the mask of self-righteousness lies stubborn self-centeredness. Behind the mask
of civility lies the violence of the mind and heart. The world that turns away
from the sufferings it creates for the sake of its freedom. The freedom to
lust. The freedom to burn incense to the gods of money, materialism, fame, and
self.
What are we
living for? What a human being lives for can be found at the altar within the
innermost room of our soul. There the fire of existence burns. What keeps us getting
out of bed in the morning. What keeps us from starting the mundane everydayness
over again. The fires that yearn for something beyond, to find release. To find
oneself in the reality of life. To have a fire that penetrates and permeates
one’s walking through the pathways of the created world. We feed the flame with
distractions, with entertainment. When another burns up, we grab for another,
or we smolder in the ashes of yesterday’s thrills to try to suck them dry of
oxygen. The enemy of this fire is boredom, the emptiness of existence.
We each have
an inner flame. Yet each flame burns at an altar. What lies upon this altar
possesses us, our existence becomes shaped by it. Our decisions become driven
by it. Our identity becomes form by it. Our daily drive to persist in
everydayness becomes sustained by it.
The mid-life
crises reminds another of the altar whose flame has just about died out, and
one questions what has been placed there for decades of thousands of
everydayness of what they call their life. They question what they have been
living for. They question the dreams that led to commitments and decisions that
brought them to where they are now.
These
existential crises affect those who spend a lifetime chasing after a dream and
see it fulfilled and then are left with the bitter taste of empty-fulfillment.
The dream was a lie. The dream was a mirage. When it was grabbed the hands
passed through just as empty as before though with a loss of self-willfulness.
Our hearts always
burn for something. Yet what does our heart burn for? More importantly what
flame lies within us? A flame of temporality that chases after dreams rooted in
fulfillment in created goods, in the world itself, in self itself? A flame that
leads to frustration, bitterness, and resentment. A flame that runs off worldly
good, like food, materialism, worldly success, romance, self-exaltation, power,
influence, etc.
A flame that
consumes and consumes yet is never satiated. A flame that burns for godhood. A flame
that placed whatever it wills upon its altar. A flame that runs off the oxygen
of self. A flame that burns off self-effort that places upon the altar what it
believe it can attain by its own autonomy. A self-seeking flame that burns for
what it can conceive, experience, or imagine. A flame burning after created
realities. A flame intoxicated with what a world, whether real or fictional,
seems to have to offer.
You know
what I speak of. You have felt the inner fire burst forth and then fade to a
flickering fame gasping for fuel. The times when you felt life slip through
your fingers as a dream fades into impossibilities or missed opportunities. The
pangs of regret that gripped you and fueled the flame with bitterness,
resentment, vengeance, and the desire to prove that one will not die out, will
make a comeback, will prove the world wrong. The world became our enemy. Self
became our enemy. The other the self has created has become our enemy.
The fire
takes and never gives. The fire has burned our dreams to ashes. The fire has
left us bare and naked. The fire has burned up our flesh and left us but dry
bones. We come to the end of ourselves, and the irony is that the pursuit of
self has brought about the extinction of self. The fire has betrayed us. This
is not the fire that it deceived us to believe it was.
This fire of
either selfishness or altruism has betrayed us. We see how this fire only cares
about self-accomplishment, self-actualization by one’s own effort,
self-reliance. This is the fire of godlessness, of lawlessness, of idolatry, of
prostitution. We have prostituted ourselves to a self-dependent life in the
world, we sold ourselves to sustain our own self-actuality.
We sold our
dreams. We sold ourselves by devaluing ourselves. We believed that we are only
animals, that we are only human beings, that we are mortal, that we were meant
to live for a world fading into ashes. We sold our eternal identities for the
pursuits of a dying world, dying by its own inhabitants, those who depend on it
for ‘self-sufficiency’. We kill our dream by killing our stage, by burning the
scripts that catches flame with the set. We find ourselves alone. We sought to
save ourselves, but have lost ourselves.
We sought to
save the one’s we love, but hurt them. We sought to save the helpless, but have
become predators to the helpless that we use for our self-medication, like the Hollywood
and music stars decaying of depression and addiction. What we have worship is
not god. Our gods are dead. Our sovereignty is no more. Our self-sufficiency is
a broken machine that cannot be restored. We come face to face with the reality
that what we have worshipped has betrayed us, has destroyed us, for it is a
lie.
We have sold
ourselves for a lie of love, like one who lets go of their purity for
acceptance by cheapening their worth. They become an object of self-medication
for others whose dreams have become hallucinations. We are a society of the
living dead. The gods of humanism have destroyed the dreams of humanity. A
world of materialistic selfishness. A world of commodities. A world of faceless
persons.
Who will
burn these altars down? Who will extinguish this destructive fire, this flame
of perversion, this flame of rebellion against Governance? Who will dare
overturn the incense tables before the Altar of Consumerism? Who will say that
I am not an animal? Who will declare my happiness does not consist in worldly
prosperity and carnal pleasure?
Who blow out
this candle of self-destruction, as we have lived a lie all along, that what we
thought would give us ourselves, has stripped us of ourselves? Who will confess
that the dreams have been tainted? Who confess that the dreams of peace and
happiness have morphed into a nightmare?
Who will
say, “enough is enough” to self-erected altars of temporal destinies? Who will
rebel against this world of myth? Who will say that this altar is not meant for
a created reality, whether money, influence, romance, the good of humanity, the
good of the planet, or whatever else has taken possession over our lives, our
choices, our freedom? We have sold ourselves into slavery. Consumerism is
slavery. Carnal pleasures of our body are slavery. We are addicts. We hate what
we love. We want to let go, but we cannot.
Another
flame beckons to be embraced. A flame outside of us. A flame alien to the
flames of the world that we have invited into the home of our inner person. A
flame that gives and does not take. A flame that offers liberation from the
deadening flames that we have known. A flame hostile to these worldly flames of
self-accomplishment. A flame that beckons us to come and die to ourselves, to
blow out these worldly flames for good.
This flame
is blue and cool. It is like an ocean. Yet this flame is beyond us. It is
beyond the world. This flame is living. This flame is the highest life force.
This flame is consuming in another way than we have known. This flame consumes
the dross that has come to fill our existence. The dross that marred our
dreams. The dross that perverted us. This flame is passion. This flame is
self-sacrificial. This flame subsists on giving itself a way.
It is its
own fuel. It is a self-sustaining flame. It grows the more it gives, the more
it saves, the more it delivers, the more it liberates. This flame beckons to
take up residence within our inner person. This flame beckons to demolish the
altars that inhabit our inner person. This flame beckons to be embraced. It
does not force itself like an addiction. This flame does not come to rape our
virginity like the flames we have known before.
This flame
cannot be ignited by our own effort. This flame requires a contrite heart, a
broken heart, a humble heart, a meek heart, a letting-go heart. This flame can
only be embraced as the cry of the heart gives itself away, wants to be rid of
the altars of prostitution that have raped the dreams He placed in it. The
lullabies sung by this living flame first awakened this childhood dream, yet
the deadening flames of the world tried to commandeer and twist this lullaby
and like the pied piper turned our dream into a nightmare.
The music of temporality urged us to lite
idolatrous fires to the gods of humanity’s self-reliance to attain subsistence,
freedom, bliss, and rest. The Living Fire comes to burn up these idolatrous
fires hazardous to our soul. This Living Fire comes to be an All-Consuming
Flame of Passionate Devotion. This flame comes to unleash us. To release our
dreams.
This Living
Fire comes to reshape our mind, to re-start the heart, to invade the soulish
decay of worldliness that has become toxic. He comes to expel the garbage, the
lies, that like a dog returning to its vomit keeps us addicted to what destroys
us under the false pretense of fulfillment. This consuming fire seeks to give
us clear vision to replace the foggy vision that keeps us falling into the same
pot-holes of life over and over.
This
consuming fire offers to be the fuel of our existence. He offers Himself as the
subsistence of our existence. He offers to be our God. He offers to be our
Savior from the false fires that have left us bare, naked, bones of flesh, as
the world has stripped us of our dreams. He offers to be the reality of our
dream. He offers to take us into His reality, into His heart, His mind, His
vision, as the very One who created us. He is the One who will re-create all
things, when the fires of perversion have been finally extinguished.
He offers us
the position to be His co-worker in extinguishing these fires and replacing
them with Living Fire that is living water for the soul that has become parched
in the deserts of temporal mortality chasing after mirages that give a false
sense of sensation, like food that tastes good but dissipates before it even
gets to the stomach.
He is a
Living Blue Flame of Hope, Love, of Purpose, of Eternal Life. He becomes red
hot at that which stifles hope, love, purpose and eternal life. He is passionately
grieved at the effects of the flames of worldly desire that curtail the eternal
life, purpose, and love He offers. He is passionately and earnestly set to burn
away all that separates His beloved creation from hope, eternal life, purpose,
and rest, which are all found in Him. He is the subsistence of our eternal
life. He is the dwelling place, the habitation, of our eternal destiny of our
eternal identity as flaming ones, baptized with His Living Flames.
The Messiah
came to baptize humanity in this Living Flame. His forerunner declared the
following about Him: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clean
out his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his storehouse, but the
chaff he will burn up with inextinguishable fire” (Luke 3:16-17).
The Messiah
of Humanity has declared, “I have come to bring fire on the earth – and how I
wish it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49)! “His eyes are like a fiery flame”
(Rev 1:14). His vision is set upon liberating humanity from the deadening
flames of perversion that strip humanity from the calling to be Temples of the
Living Fire of God, the Holy Spirit. He is “The light of Israel” who has “become
a fire,” for our “Holy One has become a flame; it will burn and consume the
Assyrian king’s briers and his thorns in one day” (Isa 10:17).
The Messiah
of Fire came to destroy the works of the Evil One who has sought to kindle the
deadening flames of perversion rooted in the idolatry of being possesses by the
world instead of by God (1 John 3:8). He
has come to set us free from what keeps us from living in holiness and
righteousness, as those living for our Creator, fulfilling His vision for our
life, through the fuel of His existence that inhabits us (Luke 1:74-75).
He seeks to
encounter each of us like He encountered Isaiah, “I said, ‘Too bad for me! I am
destroyed, for my lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose
lips are contaminated by sin. My eyes have seen the king, the Lord who commands
armies.’ But then one of the seraphs flew toward me. In his hand was a hot coal
he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, ‘Look,
this coal has touched your lips. Your evil is removed; your sin is forgiven.’ I
heard the voice of the sovereign master say, ‘Whom will I send? Who will go on
our behalf?’ I answered, ‘Here I am, send me!’” (Isa 6:5-8). He seeks those to
inflame with His Holy Spirit to be not just His messengers of liberation, but
His instruments of liberation.
Of such instruments we read, “Now when the day
of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound
like a violent wind blowing came from heaven and filled the entire house where
they were sitting. And tongues spreading out like a fire appeared to them and
came to rest on each one of them. All of
them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other
languages as the Spirit enabled them…grant to your servants to speak your
message with great courage, while you extend your hand to heal, and to bring
about miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant
Jesus.” When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was
shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the
word of God courageously…
Now many
miraculous signs and wonders came about among the people through the hands of
the apostles. By common consent they were all meeting together in Solomon’s
Portico. None of the rest dared to join them, but the people held them in high
honor. More and more believers in the Lord were added to their number, crowds
of both men and women. Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets,
and put them on cots and pallets, so that when Peter came by at least his
shadow would fall on some of them. A crowd of people from the towns around
Jerusalem also came together, bringing the sick and those troubled by unclean
spirits. They were all being healed” (Acts 2:1-4, 4:29-31, 5:12-16).
He says to
each of us, “I am sending you to open their eyes so that they turn from
darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness
of sins and a share among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts
26:17-18). Unleashing the fires the consumes the enemies of God that seek to
destroy humanity’s inheritance in the Living Fire of God (Heb 10:27).
This Living
Fire is the sanctifying fire that flows from the indwelling inhabitation of God’s
Spirit within our inner person, as He becomes the reason for us to wake up in
the morning. He becomes the driving force of our existence. He defines our walk
in life. He becomes our all in all. Our heart beats for Him alone. When this
happens, He sets us apart for sharing His Fire with others, as a vessel of His
Liberating Fire that seeks to set free those whose hearts have become broken
and contrite recognizing their need to be delivered from the flame that has
become a tyrant over their life and has destroyed their dreams.
They forgo
self-reliance and offer themselves to the sanctifying heart of God that
re-creates their mind and heart to live rightly before Him, to live a life that
pleases Him, to make them genuine lovers and knowers of Him. Those who set out
to make others lovers of Him, who we were created to love if we will turn from unfaithful
worldly lovers to the absolutely faithful, good, and true First Love of humanity.
Just as marriage brings two fires together into a single flame, so does God
desire to be united with us, as His flame enables us to become enflamed, for He
is our flame, our true flame that leads us into Eternal Life, as coworkers with
Him in Agape-Love, the way of complete liberation, the way of unshakeable hope,
the way of unending rest, the way of life abundant, the way of self-emptying.
May we be a
fire that gives new life to the decaying forest that is the inner life of the
hopeless ones. May we be the inviting and homely flame on a cold wintery night
of the soul. May we be the flame that purifies a person making what was once
ugly, beautiful, what was seemingly worthless, of infinite value. May we be God’s
instrument for enables others to shine like the stars as those fueled by His
fire that flows through us into their lives. May we ignite the passion of
others for God. May we burn away the twigs and briars that entangle the soul
keeping it from the garden of eternal life, Eden where the heart of God and the
heart of His children become re-united.
May we be
the fire that awakens the courage of God’s people to take back the land of one’s
heart and mind that has been taken and ruined by the enemies of the soul. May we
be fires that demolish the walls of hard-heartedness that keeps people from
embracing the Fiery Heart of God. May we live to fuel love for God. May we live
sold-out as a vessel consumed for passion to see His kingdom come and His will
be done. May we be vessels of God’s fire pouring out into the hearts and minds
of all we come in contact with. May we be baptized into the fires of the Holy
Spirit that gives us the courage to speak forth words energized by fire and
actions fueled by the fires that birthed creation, the supernatural fuel of the
gifts and fruits produced by vessels of the Holy Spirit’s fire (1 Cor 12-14).
May we live
to see others become beautiful vessels of fire that reflect the One who is a
Consuming Fire of Love, who freely and undeservingly bestows supernatural honor
and gifts upon His beloveds, for He is jealous that we may eternally prosper in
the God-relationship, for apart from the eternally blossoming God-relationship
all else will bloom, decay, and fade away. May we be eternal abodes of the
Fiery Heart of God, through whom His omnipotent hand of love tangibly touches, impacts,
and purifies the world we inhabit into a reflection of His splendor.
Concluding Scriptures
“So as you
come to him, a living stone rejected by men but chosen and priceless in God’s
sight, you yourselves, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house to
be a holy priesthood and to offer
spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ… But
you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own,
so that you may proclaim the virtues of
the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You once
were not a people, but now you are God’s people. You were shown no mercy, but
now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to keep away from fleshly desires that do
battle against the soul, and maintain good conduct among the non-Christians, so
that though they now malign you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and
glorify God when he appears” (1 Pet 2:4, 9-12).
“For the love
of Christ controls us, since we have concluded this, that Christ died for all;
therefore all have died. And he died for all so that those who live should no
longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised. So
then from now on we acknowledge no one from an outward human point of view.
Even though we have known Christ from such a human point of view, now we do not
know him in that way any longer. So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new
creation; what is old has passed away – look, what is new has come! And all
these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and who
has given us the ministry of reconciliation. In other words, in Christ God was
reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s trespasses against
them, and he has given us the message of reconciliation. Therefore we are
ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His plea through us. We plead
with you on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God!” God made the one who did
not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the (rectifying) righteousness
of God” (2 Cor 5:14-21).
“So, since
Christ suffered in the flesh, you also arm yourselves with the same attitude,
because the one who has suffered in the flesh has finished with sin, in that he
spends the rest of his time on earth concerned about the will of God and not human
desires. For the time that has passed was sufficient for you to do what the
non-Christians desire. You lived then in debauchery, evil desires, drunkenness,
carousing, drinking bouts, and wanton idolatries. So they are astonished when you
do not rush with them into the same flood of wickedness, and they vilify you. They
will face a reckoning before Jesus Christ who stands ready to judge the living
and the dead. Now it was for this very purpose that the gospel was preached to
those who are now dead, so that though they were judged in the flesh by human
standards they may live spiritually by God’s standards” (1 Pet 4:1-6).
[Scriptures
taken from the New English Translation (NET) bible.org]
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