I felt led to share something that the Lord revealed to me a while back. He shared this with me back in 2016 and I recently found it in one of my old journals.
Fire. In a lot of ways, faith is like fire. It must be fueled and it needs to breathe. But the thing that is most alike is that they both need someone to tend them.
If you were to start a fire it would be small and wouldn’t give off a lot of heat, but if you add fuel and fan it, it will grow into a steady flame. But even if you get that flame you still need to keep an eye on it, because if you don’t it will reduce down to coals. But even if that happens you can still spark up a new flame, but if you let the coals die you’d have to start back at the beginning.
When trying to associate that to faith we simply need to look at it like this. The fuel is hope, the heat source is Christ, the oxygen is who and what we surround ourselves with, and we are the ones are in charge of tending it. Starting and maintaining your faith fire isn’t hard it’s what comes next that people struggle with.
Nowadays when you have a fire you’d think the best thing to do is contain it, but when talking about a faith fire the best thing to do is let it get out of your control, to let it consume you. If you keep your fire contained and you tend to it you will carry the smell of smoke with you everywhere you go, and all the people around you will smell it. Having the scent of fire is good, but it’s not the best. Would you rather have the residual scent of fire, or be set aflame so as no one can deny that you are a child of God? When we can no longer control our faith fire there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it.
I realize that wasn’t all said perfectly. Even I have found a few problems with what I wrote. But I still find this portrayal of faith to be very accurate. And as I re-read it God continues to reveal more to me.
In the three years since I wrote this, I’ve come to see that we are not the ones who start the “fire”, that’s something God does. But maintaining it is something that falls to us. God definitely helps us to do that every day, but we still have the choice to have faith or not. I’ve also come to know that maintaining faith is simple, but not always easy. That’s why it’s called faith. If it was always easy we wouldn’t grow, we’d become complacent and stagnate. Through struggle, our faith grows and becomes stronger than before.
