On The Altar of the Human Heart (Created to be a House of Fire)

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]