To Build A Fire

My wife and I just got done burning the last of the brush piles in our new vacant lot yesterday.  We had built the piles up over the summer and now, finally, they are all gone. I bet our neighbors are happy. LOL!

It wasn't the easiest to get the fire started yesterday. The weather was damp and foggy and all the leaves and braches were wet. Here's a little Boy Scout survival tip for you. If you are ever having trouble getting a fire started, try pine needles and pine branches. The sap inside them burns quite nicely.

As I tried to get a fire started I thought back to my high school days. English class. We had to read the short story To Build A Fire by Jack London. The story's main character was an inexperienced city man. He tried to travel across the Alaskan wilderness by himself in 70 below temperatures during the gold rush. He didn't make it. Sorry to spoil the ending of the story for you.

One of the last things that frozen, dying man tried to do was to build a fire. You need three things to successfully build a fire. Fuel (wood, leaves, tinder, etc), a fire source (matches, lighter, magnifying glass, etc) and oxygen.

When God draws us to Himself, it's like He is preparing to build a fire. We are the combustible material. We are what God is trying to ignite. The oxygen, I think, is God Himself. He gave us the breath of life after all. The ignition source or the spark needed to ignite us and our faith is God's Holy Spirit.

The thing about fires is they tend to go out if they are not well attended to. If there is no more fuel the fire goes out. No oxygen? The fire goes out. So how can we Christians keep OUR fires burning brightly when the world keeps pulling us back? There are several ways. But to really get a roaring fire we should be doing all of these.

1. Read the Bible. Study it!
2. Pray
3. Worship
4. Serve God by Serving Others

This past Saturday I met with a young friend of mine who, I would say, is on fire for the Lord. She serves God by going on mission trips, she volunteers with her church's youth group. She prays regularly and always seeks God's will in her life. She loves to worship and she reads her Bible daily and leads Bible studies. Her fire burns brightly.

But if she didn't do any of those things, her fire would start to fade and her faith would grow cold. How are you doing in those four areas I just mentioned. Are you doing all of them excitedly? Continually? We should be.

One more though about fires and our need to keep them burning. My wife and I have a wood-burning fireplace. We build fires in it but we had to buy our fire wood from a friend. Who pays for the "wood" in the life of a Christian? Who paid for our sinfulness? Well, Jesus did. As the old hymn goes, "Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe."

Don't Let The Fire Die - Stephen Curtis Chapman
To Build a Fire - Jack London
Jesus Paid It All - Newsboys 

(This was my 600th story written for this blog. Thanks for reading! Love you!)