God anoints a true foundational ministry not only to present the truth of the Scriptures, but to seek every way possible whereby He can instruct you how to experience that truth. He does not preach a beautiful experience that is unattainable; his main objective is to set a goal before you in the Word and then also show you how to take the next step. If you are first motivated by the Word and then God shows you what step to take by faith, it becomes a glorious experience. The experience of fire is very much like that. If you want the Lord to complete this work, He will show you just what to do.
“But He knows the way I take; when He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold. My foot has held fast to His path; I have kept His way and not turned aside.” Job 23:10–11. Job said, “God loves me. He is trying me; and when He is finished, I will come forth as pure gold.” Job was confident that God knew what He was doing, and so he submitted himself to it. Job’s way was perfect before the Lord (Job 1:1).
Sometimes it seems that you discover certain verses in the Scriptures for the first time. They seem to leap off the page and shake hands with you; then they bother and trouble you. They end up smashing you and you say, as Jeremiah did, “Thank You, Lord. Thy Word is like the fire that burns, like the hammer that breaks the rock in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29). Psalm 66:10 also speaks of the refining: For Thou hast tried us, O God; Thou hast refined us as silver is refined. We cannot get away from the necessity of refinement. There must be something which separates the wheat from the chaff and burns up the chaff. Something must remove from us the impurities. What God is bringing forth is beautiful; but we must find the way to submit to, or even initiate if necessary, the action of the Holy Spirit which refines us. I do not intend to stay in the same spiritual state I am in now. Next year I intend to be far closer than I am now to that conformity to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29).
There are some who look in the Word and say, “Oh, one day we will die; and after we are resurrected, we will be perfect.” But what about the Scripture, “As a tree falleth, so shall it lie” (Ecclesiastes 11:3)? That is disturbing. Is it possible that on the resurrection day they will find that the refining of their spirits should have been embraced here? This, after all, is the preparation for the age to come; and those who participate in the first resurrection will basically have been judged by the Lord during this present period. Their faithfulness, their submission, their entering into the refining fires of the Lord will determine to a large extent the position they will occupy in the Kingdom. What you are doing now is not nearly as significant as what it is opening the door for you to enter into later. These are days of preparation.
Thou didst bring us into the net; Thou didst lay an oppressive burden upon our loins. Thou didst make men ride over our heads (have you been wondering what was causing all those headaches?); we went through fire and through water; yet Thou didst bring us out into a place of abundance. I shall come into Thy house with burnt offerings; I shall pay Thee my vows, which my lips uttered and my mouth spoke when I was in distress. Psalm 66:11–14. It is good to remember what we say under pressure—all those promises that we make to the Lord. It is very important that we know we are going to be tried in the fire, that we have faith we are going to come forth as pure gold.
“Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the Lord of hosts. Malachi 3:1. This passage is quoted repeatedly in the New Testament Gospels as referring to John the Baptist, the messenger who prepared the way before the Lord. But in the end time, a company of people will come forth like John the Baptist, preparing the way for the Parousia, the time of the presence and coming of the Lord. The great John the Baptist company now coming forth for the glory of God is not called by the names of former denominations; neither does it carry on their religious traditions. It is not a part of the “priesthood,” the religious system that exists today. Like John, it comes forth by a miracle birth from the system preceding it which was old and barren, stricken with years, and unable to function anymore. It is a miracle child coming forth in the midst of a decadent and degenerate form of Christianity. This company of believers is not named after its forefathers; it shall be named after the Lord. It is coming forth from the Lord to proclaim His Word.
“But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.” Malachi 3:2. Have you ever made soap? The reference to fullers’ soap brings to mind the home-made soap that is made by boiling together fat and lye. It cleans a person so well that it also removes skin if he is not careful! It is hard on clothes too. If they are washed too long with that soap, they soon become threadbare. The Lord works somewhat like that. When He scrubs off the impurities, He seems to scrub away at us until there is no hide left. He is like fullers’ soap. “And He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the Lord offerings in righteousness.” When we come to worship the Lord, it is the purity of the vessel that He is looking for—not a purity that is self-attained, but a purity that God has worked in our spirits. “Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord, as in the days of old and as in former years.” After all this is accomplished, He says, “Then I will draw near to you for judgment” (God purifies us first; then He comes near for the judgment that must take place); “and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien, and do not fear Me,” says the Lord of hosts. “For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.” Malachi 3:3–6.
The judgments have to follow in the wake of the purification. The Lord has to deal with us first. The fact that the Lord is finishing up what He began with us is probably the greatest witness of the judgments that are beginning in the earth. When the Lord spoke about the judgments to come, He warned God’s people to get ready: “Purify yourselves. Look up; your redemption draws near. Prepare your hearts. Be in readiness. Do not let this day overtake you unaware, because it is going to come as a snare upon the whole earth” (Luke 21:28–35). The warning is always for us to prepare.
This in itself should be a deterrent and a warning against rapture teaching which claims that the Lord is coming to catch all the Christians away. A book by one Bible expositor teaches that the rapture is the first event on the agenda. Then, trying to show that our redemption is based upon faith and the grace of God and not upon any of our conduct, he makes some rather startling statements: “Your salvation is not based upon any attainment of righteousness on your part; it is attained because you have believed in the name of Jesus Christ. When He comes, the Lord will even pick people up out of houses of prostitution and catch them away to be with the Lord. Regardless of how you are living at the moment of the coming of the Lord, your standing before God is based entirely on faith.”
The old saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars surely can figure,” holds true when it comes to the interpretation of the Scriptures. The Scriptures do not lie, but the misinterpreters of the Scriptures, including the devil himself, can quote them by the yard.
Every reference in the Bible to the coming of the Lord tells us to make preparation by purifying our hearts so that we will not be caught in the snare which comes upon the whole earth. The New Testament emphasizes our need to be ready when the Lord comes. The preparation must be made ahead of time. Read it yourself, and see if you do not come up with that same impression by the Holy Spirit. It is the cry throughout the New Testament: “You must be refined; you must be ready.” The reason is that God has a job for you to perform during the days of His presence. First He deals with you; then He will use you to deal with the world.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. I Peter 1:3–5. The Lord has allowed you to obtain an inheritance, and it is reserved in heaven, ready to be revealed at the last time. God has tremendous things for you to walk in, and they are ready to be revealed.
In this (the great inheritance that is coming in the end time) you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials (which get you ready for the thing that is to come), that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. I Peter 1:6–7. When the Lord Jesus is revealed, the praise and glory is to come forth in your faith, which God has tested by putting it through the fire. The great inheritance that is reserved in heaven for you will be revealed in this last time. It is another way of saying, “Submit now to the preparation. Submit to the fire.” It is not just a little exercise that God brings upon His people; it is a deep refinement of the human spirit to prepare you to be God’s people, God’s instruments, God’s remnant of judgment in the last time—not only the remnant of judgment, but a remnant of real deliverance. For there shall be deliverance in Mount Zion, and in the remnant whom the Lord our God shall call (Joel 2:32).
God tends to deal with remnants. He originally starts out with great numbers, but the testings He allows leave only a select company of people. However, in the end time, everyone will have a chance if they will open their hearts to the Lord. The Holy Spirit is wooing everyone to come out of Babylon, and if they all said Amen to it, it would look like the rapture had taken place in many churches. The report would suddenly appear: “Millions of churches empty,” because God had pulled them all out of Babylon. But only a few that God has dealt with will open up and submit. Do not forget that many are called, but few are chosen (Matthew 22:14). It is the chosen one who has submitted to God. It is true that he was called, but he becomes chosen by the initiative of his own acceptance. It is his initiative to accept.
Not many people will choose to be in the remnant. Why would anyone who could join a traditional church and be socially accepted choose to walk this lowly way? Who wants to be persecuted, to be considered odd and way out in left field, with criticism and persecution arising from his own brothers in the Lord because they do not understand or are jealous? Who wants to choose that way of life? If we were setting out to find the easiest way to live, we would not choose this way of walking with the Lord. We say, “Lord, we want the fire,” but in the next breath we ask, “Lord, do we really want this fire?”
Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing (it comes for your refining), as though some strange thing were happening to you (now here is the formula for the coming Kingdom and for its days of establishment); but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing; so that also at the revelation of His glory, you may rejoice with exultation. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. I Peter 4:12–14. Anyone who has chosen to walk in the glory of the Lord will go through the fire. The fire is what purifies and prepares his heart.
We have seen what the fire does to us and how it is definitely related to what God is bringing forth at this moment of the end time. Is this fire inevitable? We read in Hebrews 12:29: For our God is a consuming fire, and in Hebrews 10:38–39: But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. It seems strange that these two verses are not in the same chapter, since they express the same thought so perfectly. God is a consuming fire, and if you draw back from it, He will have no pleasure in you. Do you understand the connection here? These are not two random Scriptures pulled out of context; all these chapters deal with the same truth and show us what God is preparing us to walk in.
Hebrews 10 tells us that when He comes, if anyone is shrinking back, the Lord will have no pleasure in him. In order to miss this fire, we must choose to be imperfect. We make a deliberate choice. We may deny this principle, but consciously or unconsciously, we do make a choice. When we draw back from the dealings of the Lord, instead of submitting to them with an aggressive faith, we are choosing to be imperfect. The perfection that God has in mind for us will inevitably happen to those who are spiritual and who submit to what God is saying about it. If they aggressively strive for perfection, it will happen to them.
One thing you probably do not realize is that you are not forced to submit to this fire; it does not inevitably happen. However, every person who loses his walk with God does so because he will not submit to the fire. Do you ever find the pressure becoming so great that you want to back off? God will keep dealing with your heart in another way; soon you will find yourself in a spiritual vacuum, not making any progress. One day you will wake up to the fact that all the time you were thinking that it was business as usual, the old nature was rising up to clout you. Usually the circumstance that causes you to submit again to the dealings of the Lord is a major catastrophe in your life. Some evidence of the old carnal nature, a vestige of the old passions of the flesh rises up and devastates you. The Lord sees that you have backed off from His dealings when you should not have. There is no way then that He can refine the nature He has brought forth in you while the old nature is seizing upon the opportunity to get back on the throne again. Eventually you have to face the fact that God’s dealings upon your life are necessary.
I do not know why, but God takes people from different ethnic backgrounds through testings which are unique to them. He deals with each of us to burn out even the things of our heredity and basic nature; He deals with anything within us which would react adversely to being an instrument of destiny in His hand.
The Lord knows your problem area, the spot He must prick to test your responses. But instead of submitting, you often back away. Saul of Tarsus experienced that. When the Lord Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus, He said, “Saul, it is hard for you to kick against the pricks.” A prick is a piece of hard wood cut to a sharp point. If a man’s ox did not move fast enough, he would be pricked in the shank to get him going. If that ox angrily kicked against the prick, his bellow could be heard in the next county, because it hurt! Now the Lord is saying to you, “It is hard for you to kick against the pricks.” Sometimes He keeps pricking you to get you to move into God and to do His will. If you become angry at the dealings of the Lord and kick against them, you will only hurt yourself.
There are six aspects which need to he considered concerning your initiative in the fire. In the first step, you submit to the fire. Paul wrote in Romans 12:1: I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God… You come, saying, “Here I am, Lord; apply the fire.” You will not die; but neither will you remain only half alive like you are now. When you submit yourself to the fire, the dross will be burned out, and this conflict of nature will be resolved by the Lord’s life coming forth and prevailing in you.
Your submission to the basic teaching of the Lordship of Jesus Christ initiates this experience of fire. This first step is taken at your initiative. When you become submissive to the will of the Lord, and come into submission to divine order, and submit to the order in the home, a fire starts in your life. A fire starts to burn wherever a living Word is preached. The living Word shakes a church. The moment God brings a revelation to your heart of His divine order and you begin to submit your life to it, you start going into the fire.
The fire changes people. For this reason we must refuse to see anyone as he was a month ago, six months ago, or six years ago. We cannot see one another after the flesh any longer because God is doing such an amazing thing within us. Sometimes the illusion stays awhile. Once we had a cabin in a national forest. Sometimes rats tried to chew off the sides of the logs to get inside the cabin. We used a poison which was not harmful to human beings, but very deadly to rats. One day we found a rat outside which looked like a normal rat, but I noticed that it did not have eyes. When I touched it with a broom, it collapsed. Nothing was left of it inside; only the hide remained. This illustrates what God is doing through the living Word. Before the Word has been working in your life very long, people look at you and say, “Oh, I know that old rat. I’ve known him a long time.” They judge by the appearance, not perceiving the change that God is working inside of you. There is hardly any of the old you left at all!
The second step of initiative is an aggressive appropriation of the fire. There must be a compulsion in your spirit—call it a yearning, a hunger. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Matthew 5:6. There must be an aggressive appropriation of the fire. You can back away from it, constantly refuse it, and work around it; you can choose a situation in which you run away from this kind of dealing. And to a great degree, God lets you position yourself at various levels of His dealing. Those who are on the outskirts of the Lord’s camp are not bothered much by problems or requirements that come up within the Body. But those of the inner camp attend the tabernacle where the glory is, and that is also where the fire is. In the days of future testing, it will be as it was with Israel: the wrath of God will fall on those on the outskirts of the camp, because they have not submitted to the righteousness of God. This aggressive appropriation of fire seems to be a very necessary move on our part.
The third point concerning our initiative with the fire is the need for a faith to become. You have to believe that you are going to become. All prayers should have that quality of appropriation which believes to become something, which believes for the will of the Lord to be done. You cannot listen to the promises of the Lord that are being preached to you and then pray, “Lord, if it be Thy will…” He is trying to tell you that it is His will! Are you saying to the Lord, “If it be Thy will, let the fire come”? You know very well that it is the will of God. Do not pray, “If it be Thy will to heal me…” or “If it be Thy will, deliver me…” Get into the battleground and believe for that healing! It is His will to deliver you! Believe it, and pursue after it in the name of the Lord! Stop fooling around with the kind of prayers that sound religious, but miss the mark by a million miles. Do you want God to refine you? He will. Do not just submit to it; aggressively appropriate it. Believe to become what He wants you to be.
Do you really believe to become a manifested son of God? Do you really believe that you are going to walk in perfection in this generation? Do you believe that you are going to be a refined vessel for the Lord to use? Face it: this is where either faith or unbelief enters in. You may say that you believe in a walk with God, but do you believe in the destination of that walk for your own life? Do you accept it? You must have faith to become the will of God.
The fourth step in our initiative is expressed in Hosea 10:12b: Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord until He comes to rain righteousness on you. If you want God to do something for you, there is an initial preparation necessary on your part, or else all that God says and all that He would do will have no effect on you. You must get the ground ready: break up the clods, plow it, and harrow it; otherwise when the Lord plants the seed of His Word in your heart and waters it, it will not produce any fruit. This hundredfold ministry with nothing choking it out, a hundredfold yield returned to the Word of God, can come only when the clods have been broken up and the soil has been prepared and made ready for the seed to be planted and watered by the Lord, and for the sun to shine upon it. If the fallow ground is not prepared properly, that seed springing up will soon die. If you want to conquer Canaan, first come to Gilgal for the circumcision of heart. You are not prepared to go in and really win until the Lord has dealt with your heart and brought this deep and necessary preparation. Break up that fallow ground. Get ready for the Lord to move!
This is what made the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire described in Acts 2 such a fantastic experience. Notice in the first chapter of Acts that the believers were continually in prayer. Although they tarried in Jerusalem to receive the Holy Spirit, today we can receive the Holy Spirit by faith; no tarrying is required. But the extent to which the Holy Spirit is to operate powerfully in your life may depend greatly on how you have broken up the fallow ground before the Spirit took over. In the past, many people who tarried and emptied their hearts, wanting to be completely open before the Lord, had a wonderful experience. On one hand, too much introspection—without the appropriation of faith that believed to be filled—resulted in many people waiting longer than they should have. On the other hand, those who came unprepared spoke a few words in tongues, but there was no great experience of the Holy Spirit in their lives because there had not been the necessary preparation. We have to prepare for that which the Lord would bring forth.
The fifth step involves our association with God and with others which will refine us. Practicing the presence of the Lord is probably one of the greatest benefits, because He is a consuming fire. The more you enter in to be close to the Lord, to associate with Him, the more the fire happens. People who walk together in the Spirit are soon all going through the same thing. Paul wrote to one church, “Oh, I rejoice that you have the same conflict which you have seen in me” (Philippians 1:30). In other words, “Welcome aboard! We are all in the battle together. The same conflict that you saw working in me is working in you.” When we are around one another, we partake of the same warfare and the same dealings of the Lord.
This happens in any association that people have together. When a couple is first married, they have to make quite an adjustment to each other. Many times their whole life-style is altered. Their association with each other brings about quite an extensive refining of their natures, so that their personalities undergo a change from total selfishness to a lesser degree of selfishness—assuming they are mature people. If, however, they are locked in their own immaturity, nothing but difficulty will result from that association. When we associate with the Lord, we automatically find that refining fire beginning to work in our lives.
The sixth key is worship. Perhaps you have never considered worship in this light, but when you come to worship the Lord, it is as though you throw a match on a pile of wood. You start the fire. In His dealings, God will show you what He wants; then you will have to drag it in, tie it to the horns of the altar, and say, “Now I’ve initiated it.” In our worship we open our hearts and drag everything in our innermost being right into the presence of the Lord so that He can touch it with His fire. The fire is not ours; the fire is the Lord’s. It is His fire that burns, but we initiate the positioning of ourselves so that it can happen. We do not make the fire happen in the sense that we start it and finish it, but we initiate it; we bring everything under the focus of God’s dealings, so that God will lay the fire to it.
How many times have you read in the Old Testament about the fire coming down and burning up the sacrifice? They made the altar and brought the sacrifices. After they had made the full preparation for the Lord to be glorified, they said, “Now Lord, where is the fire? Lord, you send the fire.” And if they had pleased the Lord in their sacrifice, the fire would come.
The Lord never receives any sincere offering from you that He does not break or burn. He either breaks it, or He burns it. The alabaster box was broken. When five loaves and two fishes were laid in His hands, He blessed them and then He started breaking them. The little boy’s mouth was probably watering as he saw his barley cakes and fishes being distributed to the people. He may have sat there hungry while his gift was being broken, blessed, and distributed. It will be that way with you as you come and give the Lord whatever He requires of you. The most beautiful little lamb, the one without any blemish, was burned with fire! That is the way the Lord wants it.
What will happen when you have nothing left but ashes? That is answered in Isaiah 61:3: He will give you beauty for ashes. He takes away the self-reliance, that assertiveness, that pride, all of the grooming of the old flesh. Then you stand before the Lord crying, “O Lord, what a mess I am—a man of unclean lips.” He will solve that by putting a little fire on your tongue to remove the uncleanness, and then you will be able to prophesy until nations fall and the Kingdom arises.
That is the way it will be: You submit in order for the Lord to deal with your heart. You see, the Lord never really chose you because you were so handsome, so diplomatic, or had such an outgoing personality and great qualities of leadership. He did not choose you for your money either. Why did He choose you? What you have to give Him may not be much, but put it on the altar and let the Lord burn it up. When He is through, you will see that you have been tried as gold in the fire. And you will say like Job, “When He has tried me, I shall come forth as pure gold.” Do you find yourself willing? Are you determined to go through with it? Do you want to be eager? Did that last bit of fire leave blisters? Come in closer anyway. Let the Lord send the fire and refine you. Let Him make you what He wants you to be.