Where Fire Has Been

We're taking some time this summer to talk about the wildest berry in the wilderness, the huckleberry, and to draw out, to tease out some things we can learn about the life of adventure and faith that God has for us. Some of Jesus's best sermons were about plants, were about weeds, were about bushes, were about farm life. And he would point to the ebb and flow of sowing and reaping and plants and growing. And he would use them to compare to the reality of the soul. The kingdom of heaven is like seeds that are sown and things that grew. And so we're using this as a launching off point. And today in our series, we want to talk about what huckleberries that can teach us about going through hard things, about difficulty, about affliction, about adversity, about when life becomes painful. It was the late, great J. Vernon McGee who once said that the Christian life is a banquet, but it's no picnic. It's a banquet. Yes, we are at the Lord's banqueting table. And he makes a banquet for us in the presence of our enemies. That's amazing. I read Psalm 23 one time, too. But he's saying, but it's no picnic. We shouldn't think that it's all going to be a walk in the park. We shouldn't be so naive as to think that following God

is not going to involve adversity. It is not going to involve difficulty. And so what I want to do with you today is to teach you how to think about the suffering that you face while you follow Jesus so that it really can be possible for you to grow in your suffering. If you anticipate it, if you expect it, and if you have a plan for it, you won't be caught off guard by it. And you do not have to be shipwrecked by life's difficulties. If you know they're coming, if you're ready for them, if you have a plan for them, they don't have to catch you off guard. And I believe in Jesus' name that some of you, some of us, are going to grow in tremendous ways that we never could have grown otherwise had it not been for our hardships. 1 Peter chapter 4, we're going to read just two verses to launch us into this talk today. And we're going to read out of the message paraphrase. He writes, friends, when life gets really difficult, and I like that, really difficult, not just a little difficult. We're going to go through stuff that's a little difficult. He's saying this isn't no blue. This is a black, OK? When life gets really difficult, don't jump to the conclusion. Do you feel seen already?

Any other worst case scenario type person? Any other sky is falling, right? All it takes is a little ruffle, and all of a sudden, where'd my joy go? I used to have the joy, joy, joy. Apparently, it's so deep down, it's not there anymore, because now I'm jumping to the conclusion. Where's God, right? I thought you were blessed and highly favored. Yeah, but that was before this red light. You know, it's like just it almost takes nothing. And all of a sudden now, where'd your joy go? He says when life gets really difficult, don't jump to the conclusion that God isn't on the job. Does Peter know us or what? How quick we are to assume the worst about the one who gave us the best, gave us his best. He gave us Jesus, but the moment it's some difficulty, we're, where's God, right? Don't do it. Listen, what? That's natural. That's nature. It's human nature to do that. Why does Peter have to tell us this? Because he knows that's our default mode. Our default mode is to go through a hiccup and then to look up at the one who supposedly is the great playwright in the sky, writing us this wonderful story, and to go, wait a minute.

Did your pen skip? Did your quill pen run out of ink? Where's your goodness here? Where's your plan for this? Didn't you see this coming? To assume God's not on the job. Instead, he said, so that's what is natural to do. Now here's what you're going to have to choose to do by the Spirit. Instead, someone say instead. Be glad. You're going to write that down. You're going to file that away. And you're going to go through some hardship. And you're not going to feel like being glad. It's not normal. It's not human to be glad when life gets bad. It's not. It's going to take the Holy Spirit, is what I'm trying to get you to see. You can't do this on your own. But with the Spirit in you, you can rejoice instead. You can be glad instead of complaining. You can be glad instead of the dread that comes by nature. Why would you choose to be glad in pain? Here's why. Because you can choose to believe that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. Aren't you glad that we got a God who cries? Aren't you glad we got a God?

who bleeds, aren't you glad that we have a God who shows up with scars? And you're going through what he went through. This, he says, is a spiritual refining process with glory just around the corner. Are you thankful for God's word today? Are you grateful for God's word? Man, this is, you got to almost write this down, pull it out when you're going through hard stuff. Because whatever you feel like doing and saying is going to be wrong, probably. Instead of like, OK, I'm choosing to believe good, I'm choosing to believe God, I'm choosing to believe I'm being refined, I'm choosing to believe. Glory is just around the corner. My dad used to give us $0.25, a quarter, when he would drop us off for school or for sports, right? And that's because we sometimes didn't know how long practice was going to go or how long, whatever. We needed to be able to tell him when to pick us up. So he'd give us a quarter so we could use a payphone, right? OK, teenagers, there used to be a phone on the wall. You go, why wouldn't you just call him on your cell phone? We didn't have those, right? We didn't have a phone in our pocket. We had a quarter in our pocket. And you'd pull the quarter out, and you'd put it in, you'd call to say, hey, can you come get me? Or the way I would commonly use my quarter in my pocket

was to call him and say, the time that I told you I needed to be picked up has come and gone. Where are you? I would assume something had gone wrong. I'm just standing here waiting for you, right? And my dad would always say the same thing when I called. Now, he had a car phone. It was a phone that cost like $1 a minute. It was absurd. And so his first thing he would say when he called me, is this an emergency, right? He wanted to answer, but he didn't want to talk because it was expensive. So I would call him with my quarter. He would say, is this an emergency? I would say, no, but where are you? Knowing I had a minute before he was going to hang up on me, once he found out it's not an emergency, where are you? And he always said the same thing. He would say this, I'm just around the corner. I'm just around the corner. I almost get PTSD reading this verse. Because that could mean a lot of things, right? That can mean he's got two more meetings at work before he even gets in the car to come get me. I'm around the corner was very elastic in our family, right? I joke with my siblings about it now, right? And dad around the corner, I mean, he might be coming, like, just about to pull in. But it could be he's in a different state, you know?

It's like, I'm around the corner. Sometimes we feel like that when we read a promise like this. God says, I've got glory coming. And it's like, man, you must mean eventual glory. You must mean like, you know, the glory is coming, and it hasn't even left yet. Peter is trying to help the church then, and by extension, the church now, us today, know how to reframe the flame, the flame of the fiery trial, the flame of adversity, the flame of difficulty. In fact, in verse 12, he, in the New King James version, literally uses the word fiery. He says, beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial, which is to try you. Don't think something's gone wrong as though something strange has happened to you. Don't think, Eugene Peterson put it, God dropped the ball. Don't think that God's made some sort of a mistake when his plan for you as you walk in it goes crazy and takes a sharp turn and the wheels come off. It's going to be human nature to go, God, where's your goodness now? Where's your goodness? I thought you were good now. I thought you were here with me now. He said, don't do that. He said, when you go there, I want you to know that this fiery trial is not evidence that God's not there. Now, when we follow Jesus, it doesn't give us

immunity from the stuff that everybody in this world faces. Grief and confusing seasons and medical setbacks and pain and difficulty, all of us are going to go through these things. And these people that Peter writes to here were going through some terrible catastrophes. When we talk about fire and pain, we use symbolic imagery for most of us, right? For the believers in the first century, the fire was not an allegory. It was normative experience following Christ because they were following Christ in the midst of what was known as the first wave of imperial persecution, the first of many that would follow, where Caesar Nero decided to blame the church, blame Christians, for a fire that many people believe he started. The dude was a little bit of a whack job and a pyromaniac, OK? And apparently, he liked fire and played the fire. His lyre played while the city of Rome burned, as the story goes. And after the fact, when he started to be held accountable for it, he's like, no, it was the church. The church did it. And so the church began to be persecuted in mass. And Caesar, apparently, Nero, would use Christians burnt at the stake to light up his garden parties. Now, Peter and many of the disciples

are still alive, who were like the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. The church started just because they started telling people who told people who told people who told people. And so now the church has reached all over the place. We'll talk in a minute about how far flung it all is. But it was grassroots. It was organic. It was word of mouth. It was hopefully what you're going to be doing, showing up on your high school campus as you tell the gospel, as you start a Bible club, as you get outspoken about your faith, as you begin to boldly testify about the name of Jesus Christ, showing up on airplanes, showing up on your job, at lunch, at break, just to be able to tell people about Christ and to do so without fear of consequences or reprisal. And as that happened, people began to literally get put to death for following Jesus. And the Christians were writing to Peter and other apostles going, what's going wrong? And he says, nothing, nothing. Don't think it's crazy that you're going through a fiery trial. Don't think it's crazy, because this is, and he's telling us now how to reframe the flame. This is a tool that God is going to use for good. In fact, he uses the language of a refiner, a refining process.

Now, what does that mean? If you're a goldsmith, you would melt down gold that's found, these chunks, these little clusters of gold, nuggets of gold. And you would have to melt them down. Why? Because there's impurity, and there's imperfections, and there's dross in the gold. So you get it really hot, and then the top layer, the impurities rise to the surface. They were able to scoop that off, and then they continue to do so again and again and again. One pastor who visited a goldsmith at work once said, how do you know when you're done? How do you know when you've gotten as much impurity out as you can? And the goldsmith said simply, it's easy. I just know when I can see my face in it, it's finished. And this is what God's doing. God is using the trials in your life to refine you. The spiritual refining process. What's the glory that's around the corner? Well, I'm telling you, we're going to talk about a lot of ways that God wants to use it. But the most important is you becoming like Jesus. The most important is God being able to look into your life and see his face in it. Isn't that what Ephesians says? Till we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

No longer children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. All of a sudden, the sky is falling. The sky is falling. Why is this happening? But that we know I'm becoming more like Jesus. I'm become a little bit more like Jesus. I want to grow into your image. I want to grow in grace. I want to grow to become more like my Savior. That's the goal. That's the refining. And everything God does through the pain on the back end is just gravy. It's just bonus. It's just extra. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. Go through something little. Go through something sizable. And you'll discover it hurts to be burned. It hurts to experience the flame. And you don't need to put a nice face on it or pretend that's not the truth. You can be honest to God about it. Like we said a moment ago, we have a God who bleeds. We have a God who wept. We have a God who died. So that means, then, that anything we go through,

we can go to talk to Him about. And He can sympathize with us in our weaknesses. He was subjected to all brutality and did not pull away, even though He could have. Now, I don't want to so much. My assignment, rather, what I want doesn't matter. I get to preach what He tells me to preach. What I am here to talk about is less the fire and more what can happen where fire has been, where fire has been. Because as unpleasant as it is, fire is a huckleberry's best friend. The fire helps the huckleberry grow. We talked last week about huckleberry colonies and how you might look at a whole colony of huckleberries and see all these different bushes. But mistake that you're seeing, maybe in some cases, one plant that's grown through this clonal colony. It's one DNA. It's one life. It's one umbilical cord under the ground. And yet, it's popped up in all these different places. And you might not realize, that's just one life. The Bible says that there's only one body, one spirit, one faith, one Lord, one baptism, right? If you think in heaven, there's going to be the Baptist section and the charismatic section. section and the Catholic section speaking in Latin over there. No, if you've come to Christ, you're in Christ. If you've come to Christ, you're in Christ, right? And so there's only one.

If you got huckleberries, there's one plant that was responsible for it, regardless of how many different bushes it came from in that area. And in Christ, we have the Holy Spirit in us. And a clonal colony, as a clonal colony, the huckleberry is uniquely stimulated. That's the word, stimulated by fire. So though it hurts to be burned, in the case of the huckleberry and in the case of your soul, fruitfulness can follow seasons of burning, seasons of pain. And there are a lot of reasons for this. As a fire moves through an area, competition for space, water, and nutrients gets reset to zero. The darker soil attracts early spring warmth. So no one wants to see the land devastated with ash. We get that. There's logs sticking up, like an apocalyptic nightmare. You see, like, oh, man, this is terrible. Someone should do something about that. And you think about, that's now dark ground. Well, coming out of winter into next spring, this dark ground attracts the sun, because white repels light, and black attracts it. That's why athletes put eye black under their eyes, so that the sun goes there instead of to their pupil. It's why, by the way, lions have white under their eyes, so that the light at night goes into their pupil and not under their eye. You could almost write a whole book about the eyes of a lion.

There's a lot of interesting parallels and corollaries. So that's interesting. It also clears away the excess that has accumulated. So there's all this extra stuff. It's all been burned and been dealt with, the excess that's there, and that's been turned to ash. But that ash is rich in fertilizer. So now the ground is chock full of all the nutrients that got shriveled down to this tiny ash. It's just massively going to help the next season's growth. Fire, we'll talk more later about how fire causes seeds to scatter. Seeds get scattered out in the flame. And then, of course, it forces life deep down. So a lot that's above the ground gets burned, and the fire feeling that happening, what does it do? It retracts into itself. It retracts into that underground umbilical cord. It pulls everything out. It jettisons life. It's not trying to keep operations up above ground. And it has to sort of hunker down for as long as it's unsafe to be above the soil. But out of all of these, my very favorite is this fact. Fire lets the light in. Come on, praise God that the light can come in through what's been taken away and what's removed. Huckleberries need full sunlight. And they can tolerate a little bit of shade. But once the shade level gets to 30%,

and now their sunlight has been diminished to 70%, the huckleberry production begins to decline. Now, the forest floor, or the side of the mountain as they tend to grow in alpine environments, has lots of different things growing, not just huckleberries. And as things begin to get taller, huckleberries aren't a very tall plant, right? So as things like maples and willows and other bushes and other things get taller than them, now you have competition over sunlight. And these other species, these other brush species specifically, begin to choke the huckleberry out because these taller plants are keeping the hucks from getting the sunlight that they need. So one of the benefits to fire coming through is that it opens up and clears out the canopy. And now the delicious, nutrient-rich sunlight, this whole process of photosynthesis, is opened up. And the patch gets full access to the light, which is why when you see after a fire has moved through, one of the quickest things to begin to shoot up from their underground umbilical cord is all of these tiny little creepers that look like a bunch of different plants, but it's all the one plant shooting up a ton of different things. And it can also almost be so much that it looks like a green carpet that has shown up poking through the black ash-covered soil. It's able to do so now because so much light

got let in, which is a different way of thinking about fire. Fire did that. Fruitfulness was going away. So the trimming back, the pruning back that the fire did is so fruitfulness could accelerate, which is John 15, isn't it? God prunes stuff. Why? So that you can be more fruitful. When God cuts something back, He's actually trying to fight for your fruitful future. He's trying to get you ready for what's to follow. You have to think about the flame differently. You've got to reframe it in your mind. And we, as a country in the US Forest Service and National Park Service, have had to recalibrate our thinking on fire. If you look into it, it's fascinating. There were these terrible, terrible fires that spread through, catastrophic fires that spread through in the early 1900s. 1900s, the Big Burn among them. And you have the Smoky Bear kind of figure galvanizing America's decision that fire is bad. Now, Smoky Bear did a lot of good things, right? You should be responsible. Don't be throwing your cigarettes out the window. Don't be smoking cigarettes, right? The whole deal. And which leads me to one of my favorite Bible jokes.

Have you ever heard the cheesy Bible joke? A guy came to his pastor one time and said, pastor, I love Jesus, but I smoke some cigarettes. Will it keep me from heaven? Pastor put his hand on the man's shoulder and said, no, it won't keep you from heaven. It'll get you there faster. So don't smoke. OK, so here's the problem. Our decision as a country to fight all the fires, put all the fires out, was every fire's bad. Every fire's bad. In fact, there was a period up until 1968 where there was a kind of like sort of joke that every fire needs to be put out by 10 AM the next morning because the fire's only bad. But we didn't understand the ecological role that fire played in both protecting and regenerating the next year's forest and the next year's crop, right? And the way that if you put every fire out, some of the little fires that would come through, some of the lesser fires that would sweep through, were actually there to clear out kindling. And eventually, a fire is going to show up everywhere. It's inevitable. Try as you might. And when the big one comes, if you've taken care of all these little fires, there is so much stockpile that's And a much bigger fire down the road will show up.

And out of all the plants, fire especially rejuvenates huckleberries uniquely, which it turns out the Native Americans knew. Which if you go back to previous times, they would actually rotate through areas where they would intentionally set fire and then be harvesting somewhere else so they could come back to an area that the fire had done their job of getting things ready for berry production that would follow. Because of the way these rhizomes of the huckleberry plant uniquely could withstand fire and then be ready, in words of some of the studies I read, to come back with a vengeance in the spring. Come on, in Jesus' name. We're going through this fire. Weeping may last for a night, but joy's coming in the morning. I'm coming back with a vengeance in the spring. I'm coming. It's going to be dark now. Oh, we'll fight in the shade then. In Jesus' name, we can be ready for what God has for us. I love that. And this is how Peter would have us to look at our trials. He's wanting us to reframe the flame in real time, not as evidence that God has abandoned us, but that he's strengthening us and getting ready to produce much through us. Though it hurts, you can actually rejoice every time you face a flame.

Because you can know that glory is just around the corner. Coming back with a vengeance in the spring is just around the corner. Because remember, we are Jesus' people. We are Easter people. It was N.T. Wright who said, becoming a Christian means that what God did for Jesus at Easter, he does for you in the very depth of your being. Is this different, you think, than just follow God and everything's going to go good for you? No, no, this is death to resurrection, death to resurrection. It's a seed goes into the ground, but it comes back with a wonderful harvest. So every time we experience death, every time we experience sorrow, every time we experience grief, and pain, and betrayal, and hardship, and depression, and anxiety, we can, in Jesus' name, believe this is sorrow that's going to lead to joy. This is death that's going to release life. There's glory coming, and it's just around the corner that God is getting you ready for fruitfulness. In Christ Jesus, hear me, suffering and glory go together. And the trial is temporary, but the triumph of his joy, you'll get to keep forever. How does this glory functionally work? Like my dad, just around the corner, when is it going to get here?

How will I know it when I see it? I jotted down just a couple ways the glory is going to show up in your story as you walk with Jesus and reframe the flame. Your priorities will change. What you care about shifts, and fire accelerates your kingdom-minded perspective. Can I give you just a brief example? Rhetorical. I'm going to either way. Um, the year our daughter went home to be with Jesus, 2012. She was five years old, had an asthma attack, went home to be with Christ right before Christmas the next year. Flash forward to the next year. It's Super Bowl Sunday. I'm sitting on the couch. We're watching the Super Bowl, trying to watch the Super Bowl. Still very much raw in the midst of this grief. And I had this moment of worship on the couch, watching the Super Bowl, where I felt like the rhizome under the ground of the huckleberry, where the fire had come through. I felt my soul crazy. craving God in a way I had never felt my soul craving God. It was like that old hymn puts it, the things of this world grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. I found my soul trying to enjoy the Super Bowl. Again, there's nothing wrong with the Super Bowl.

Nothing wrong with football, nothing wrong with any of that. It was actually a Super Bowl commercial when it happened. I felt my soul see through what was being pushed out and trying to be pumped out through the Super Bowl commercial, which is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. That's 99% of commercials, FYI, right? And the pull on it, if you have this, you could be this. If you could do that, you could be this, right? And that allure that maybe on a previous day, I'm like, oh, well, that would be a nice car to have, or that would be a wonderful bag of chips to eat. But I felt my soul see through, almost like an invisible perspective, see through that commercial and found myself right there in that moment just realizing all I need is God. I don't need anything else other than you. And I don't have anything else other than you right now here in this moment to keep me here on this moment. And out of that glimpse of God's glory in the midst of what the enemy was trying to kind of like, oh, if you have this, you could be this, ended up writing a series of messages called Bread in Circuses, connecting the way that the Roman government would utilize going to the Coliseum and having a bunch of food to steal the liberty away from the people. And out of that sermon series, later on, I found out that one of my best friends who would later on become, for 10 years, my tennis partner came to know Jesus Christ watching one of those sermons.

So out of that perspective shift came a download, came a message, came a reality. And then later on, I get to play tennis with someone who got saved out of that moment. You see what I'm saying? I'm just encouraging you to know you won't even understand as it's happening here in real time. But you can choose to believe as your priorities and what you care about shifts. And that's a gift you're given in pain. Because I can't, if I try on a good day, feel the same way I felt there in that moment. It was the fire that caught the burning through the fire that caused my priorities in that moment to be able to be switched on in the way that they were. The second word I wrote down is presence. Again, I could have picked 1,000 of them. And we'll have all of the ages to come to continue on to unpack the glory that God does in our hardship. But here's five. Second is presence. When you are suffering, there is some unique way when you are capable of experiencing God's nearness that you are unable to any other way. Psalm 34 says, God is near to a broken heart. So when your heart's broken, part of the reframing of that pain is to say to God, I know you are here. And you are near to me, not far.

The flesh says God's far. God's forgotten. God doesn't care. God forgot your phone number. The spirit says, you're near to me. You've entered into my suffering. You know, when George Washington and the Continental Army went through Valley Forge, it was one of the most bleak periods of the Revolutionary War. One of the ways that they got through it was something called a camaraderie of suffering. Historians ask the question, how did the army stay together? It was because George Washington and all of his officers were right there in the thick of it with the men. They all endured the difficulty together. He didn't run off and get a house in Philadelphia. They were in the thick of it together. And this camaraderie of suffering, we're suffering, but we're all suffering. We're all in it. That is Jesus. Jesus is in the midst of your suffering and near to you, present with you in your difficulty. Matthew chapter 5, reading from the message, you're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you, I love this, there's more of God and his rule. You're blessed when you feel like you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.

The third word is perspective. Your perspective on situations can change with the canopy cut down. Now you can see further. You talk about some hikes that used to be just so bushy and so many trees. And sometimes for the benefit of fire, now it opens up a whole new view. That's one of the things fire can do for you. You can see things you didn't see before. I think about John, the apostle, the beloved apostle, who wrote the book of Revelation. The greatest, grandest, most glorious glimpse of anyone Jesus ever gave to anybody in history is Revelation and what John got to see of who Jesus is in his resurrected, returning glory. A lot of people saw him as the lamb. John got to see him as the lion. Oh, we'll all get to one day, because any moment in the twinkling of an eye that the clouds will roll up and Jesus Christ will come. And I say, may he come quickly. Maranatha, come quickly, Lord Jesus. And if this were the day, may he come back and find us doing what he wants us to be doing. John got that whole vision in the book of Revelation. How did he get it? Suffering. He entered that door through pain. Church history records that John,

in the midst of the imperial persecutions, was told to renounce Christ. And he said no. So you know what they did to him? They burned him in hot oil to kill him. But God miraculously kept him alive. But he was burned all over his body, head to toe. And so then, for his unwillingness to turn to the Caesar and say, you're the Lord, Kairos Kourios, he kept insisting Christ is king, Christ Kourios, Christos Kourios. He was banished to his version of Alcatraz, a prison island that you can go to to this day. And there, what was his choice? To walk around bummed out, saying, God wasn't there for me. I got buried and burned in hot oil. I can't believe you'd let that happen, Jesus. No, no, no. Here's his response. Revelation 1, verse 10. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. And I heard a voice behind me like a trumpet. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. You know what that means? He was going to church. He went to church in a cave on an island, burned from head to toe in the Spirit. That's what we're here to do today. We're here to get in the Spirit.

Come on, it's easy to be in the flesh all week. But we start the week out on the first day saying, I want to be in the Spirit on the Lord's day. I want to take day one. I want this to be a tithe of my week. I want my attention to go to God. I want my perspective to go to God. I want finances to go to God. Why? Because I want to ride that wave of his peace all week long. And how we start determines how things go. So we start with God. We seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these other things will be added unto us. And why do we do it on Sunday, not Saturday, as the traditional Sabbath was throughout all of Jewish history? Well, I don't know. Jesus rose from the grave on Sunday. So we decided that was a good day to worship him. On day one, we start by saying, thank you for rising from the dead. Now, all week long, help there to be many resurrections from the little crucifixions that we face all week long. And John couldn't get to a gathering of God's people because he was in a cave on an island. So you know what he did? He had some church all by his lonesome. And Jesus liked it so much, he went ahead and showed up in that cave and gave him

the book of Revelation for his trouble. Hello, somebody. So what am I trying to get you to see? I'm trying to get you to see that your perspective, how you see things can change when you choose the spiritual reaction, not the earthly, human, natural reaction. When you don't jump to the conclusions that God's not on the job, and you say, hail, hail, Lion of Judah, right there in the midst of your difficulty. And he shows up in that moment to receive that praise and to give you power. Come on, someone give him some thanks if you're grateful for the way that glory is coming. Glory is coming. And it's just around the corner. Some of this works through God exposing our idolatry through pain. We don't mean to, but some of us accidentally turn things and stations and people and situations into idols until the fire burns through and that thing gets taken from us. And we find out it meant more to us than it was supposed to. And we sing, oh, you are my everything. But when something else got taken away, and we're like, oh, that stings, we're realizing, oh, I was looking to you more than I should have. It's a gift to let the flames come through, because it tells us who or what we put in priority above Jesus.

Potential is the next word, number four. I told you seeds get scattered and spread through fires, through disturbances. Sometimes seeds get opened up through flame that couldn't have opened up any other way. The church was like that. Remember when I told you a moment ago who Peter was writing to, this message? Where? There's Christians everywhere. Where were they at? Well, 1 Peter 1.1 says they were in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. And you say to me, Levi, how'd they get there? Because when Jesus rose in Jerusalem, all there were was Jesus' people in Jerusalem. I'll tell you exactly how they got there, Acts 8.1. Now Saul was consenting to the death of Stephen. Flame, burning, pain. At that time, a great persecution arose against the church. Flame, which was at Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, all except the apostles. What am I trying to get you to see? Fire isn't there in your life to destroy you. It's there to set you free. It's there to get you to where God needed you to go. It's there to deploy you. It's there so you get out of the salt shaker,

into the world that God wants you to be in. And he's seeking in all of it to bring him glory and to bring you joy. In Jesus' name, I close with this. Do you trust God? Don't answer quickly. Write that down. Spend some time journaling this week and reflecting, do I trust God? Because that is exposed in pain like no other time. Do I trust him? I was listening to an interview not too long ago with Matt Damon. And he was reflecting on now, the Odyssey, and working with Christopher Nolan. But he said something that stopped me in my tracks. And I had to write it down, because he was being asked about how he got the initial. Because he's now done three movies with Christopher Nolan. He did Interstellar. He did Oppenheimer. And most famously, for sure, his role is Odysseus in the Odyssey. But he talked about when he first got the call to do a movie with Christopher Nolan. And he said this. He said, they wanted to know if I wanted to do a movie. And I said, yes, I'll do a movie. And they said, well, do you want to know what the part is? And he said, I don't need to.

Do you want to know what the movie is? He goes, I don't need to. And he said, I don't need to know the movie, because I know Chris. I don't need to know the part. I know Chris. He said, I don't need to know the plot. I know Chris. Do you trust God? Because if so, every little wrinkle in the plot, every little development, every new character, every hard day, you don't need to go, how is this all going to work? Because I know the director. I know the story writer. I don't need to know why he allowed this. I don't need to know why this has happened, because I know the one making the movie. And I'm going to come forth as gold. And if he allowed it, he's going to use it. It's going to be a refining process. Come on, I know the director. I know the one. I know that my Redeemer lives. And he shall stand at last on the earth. And I know that when my flesh, I get to stand in it one day seeing God, even if my flesh gets destroyed. With my eyes, I will see him. I know him.

If I know him, the God who bleeds, the God with scars, the God who weeps, the God who died, if I know him, I'm good. I can just stand here and worship and enjoy the ride. So Lord, would you help us to trust you, to believe you, and to watch and wait for your salvation, and to not miss out on a moment of what you want to do between now and then? These hucks are going to grow because of the fire. If you today either would be saying, Levi, I received this, and I received this as a word from God, or I needed this, could I ask that you would raise up a hand so I could pray for you? Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. I don't know every hardship and difficulty these are facing or will face. But I know you're going to use it. I know it's going to hurt, and I know it's going to be good, and I know it's going to be beautiful. I pray we would not think something strange has happened, but we would trust this is a refining process. Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, God. You can put your hands down. I want to now invite anybody here who's not surrendered your life to Christ to enter into a resurrection story for the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead to enter your life, and to use all of the same hardship that everyone in the world is going to experience.

All of us on this planet are going to suffer. The Christian gets to look to the cross and the empty tomb as prototypes of what God's seeking to do. If you want to start a resurrection story today by opening your heart up to Jesus Christ, I want to pray with you as you make that decision. It can't happen through you being good. It can't happen through you doing good things. It's got to come through the cross. If you're here today and you would say, I want to surrender my life to Christ, say this with me. Church, pray with us. No one praying alone. All of us praying together. Dear God, I know I'm a sinner, and I can't fix myself. But because of the cross and the resurrection, I know that you can. I open my life up to Jesus. Come into my heart. Change my story forever in Jesus' name.