When I was a young boy, I had to build the fire in the stove as one of my morning chores. \u00a0I remember so well placing the wood on glowing coals. \u00a0The smoke billowed through the open door until the fire caught hold. \u00a0Fire drove the smoke up the flu and out of the house. \u00a0An old godly minister once remarked regarding the apostasy of his time, \u201cI was born in the fire, and I’m not about to die in the smoke\u201d. \u00a0I understand what he meant. \u00a0The fire is the passion and blazing wonder of God that one experiences in the new birth. \u00a0It arrives with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. \u00a0The fire propels one to go deeper into the folds of God’s love, to know Him fully, and to discover His will, among other things. God is a consuming fire. \u00a0To love Him is to dwell in the fire and with the fire in you.<\/p>\n
The day I was delivered from the darkness was a day I will never forget. \u00a0The fire burned in my spirit. \u00a0All I wanted was to know and serve God more. \u00a0My rude wakening was to discover that all professing Christians do not have the same passion. \u00a0Some of them looked at me with condescending pity when I exuberantly described my experiences with God. Other ones excused themselves with a disinterested air. Eventually I discovered that there existed a Christianity void of passion for God. \u00a0I’ve come to believe that it is nearly as bad as a religion with a false god. Individuals in both groups will vociferously attack anything and anyone that hints of the fire of God. \u00a0Anything that challenges our passion to be pure and obedient to God is an attempt to quench our fire. \u00a0It does not matter what the cost, how many people reject us, how isolated and alone we may feel, we must not lose our fire.<\/p>\n
I came to the realization that simply complaining about a fire-quenching situation is insufficient to overcome it. \u00a0One can sit in the smoke and complain, its acrid vapor burning the eyes and the nostrils, its fumes permeating the clothing and hair, but God’s fire won’t fall. \u00a0The children of Israel had to follow the cloud by day. \u00a0But when it came the night, they had to follow the fire. \u00a0If you do not move when the fire is present, you will eventually find yourself in the smoke. \u00a0The darkness from Satan and his world system presently wafts its deadly spiritual dearth into Christianity. \u00a0It can only be countered by fire. \u00a0Complaining in the smoke does nothing to conquer smoke. \u00a0I have observed many professing Christians, some of them dear friends, in power-drenching, fire-quenching, ministry-hindering, joy-killing, smoked up situations. \u00a0The smoke was draining them of passion for God. \u00a0They had two choices. \u00a0First, they could take the first step, and head to the nearest door leading to the closest path to victory. \u00a0If that is not an option, then they must start a fire. \u00a0After over three decades of being a Christian, I have endured many attempts by various forces to quench my fire. \u00a0I’ve pastored churches that were smoked up with compromise, sin, apathy and lethargy. \u00a0They didn’t remain long in a passionless condition. \u00a0Either they caught fire for God or burned with rage to get rid of me. \u00a0I left a denomination because of the smoke. \u00a0It wasn’t an easy path, but I had to have the fire. \u00a0I’m dead without it. \u00a0My souls knows no sense of purpose, no wealth of meaning, and I wither on the vine without God’s fire.<\/p>\n
Every true Christian must keep his or her fire burning in this Laodicean age. \u00a0God’s fire and a fiery passion for God is the answer to lukewarm, compromising, Christianity today. \u00a0The smoke of dying faith and compromise is mingled with heresy and even licentiousness in many professing Christians. \u00a0I pray that God will raise up people with a fiery passion for Him, that will not fear to speak truth with boldness, and will not back down from apostate hirelings. \u00a0How exhilarating it would be to see fire-born men and women of God stepping up to challenge this present satanic surge of spiritual wickedness that threatens to destroy Christianity! \u00a0God is calling such people from all walks of life; people who do not believe they are worthy, some that believe that they are useless and incapable, and other ones that feel inferior and insignificant. \u00a0He has rejected the confident ones, the educated idiots and hirelings, and the braggadocios crowd of professing and confessing self-proclaimed \u201csuper apostles\u201d that have not a clue to what true faith is. \u00a0The ones God is calling will not read the latest WOF book, the bestselling \u201ctelepastor\u201d book.\u00a0 They will reject the steady stream of spiritual filth that flows from most religious television networks. \u00a0They don’t need spiritual directors to help them sit cross-legged, turn their palms up in Yoga position, count their breaths, and enter an altered state of consciousness. The ones that God is calling already have intimacy with the true God. \u00a0They are ablaze with passion to do His will! \u00a0They are rising up with a prophetic voice; not like the modern false prophets that are nothing more than fortune tellers. \u00a0They will preach repentance from dead works to serve a living God. They will warn of the danger of lukewarmness, of living in shadows, and being unprepared to defeat deception and avoid apostasy. \u00a0Love them or hate them, but they will not yield to demands that they shut up and go away. \u00a0God is going to shake everything that can be shaken until only that which cannot be shaken will remain. \u00a0Only fire-born, fire-bathed, and fire-filled believers will endure to the end. \u00a0I plead with the ones who are withering on the vine and close to becoming a castaway, don’t die in the smoke. \u00a0Allow the word of God to convict you. \u00a0Repent before Him and ask for His Holy Spirit to possess you with holy fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a young boy, I had to build the fire in the stove as one of my morning chores. \u00a0I remember so well placing the wood on glowing coals. \u00a0The smoke billowed through the open door until the fire caught hold. \u00a0Fire drove the smoke up the flu and out of the house. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paIm2N-5e","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}