Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father help us not confuse the comfort of the Holy Spirit within us, with the idea that He wants us to be comfortable in this life. May it never be! Father, you prize our growth over our comfort. Help us not to be discouraged with the difficulties of life, but be encouraged by the fact that you will use anything and everything to make us more like your son, Jesus. Thank you Father, in the powerful name of Jesus, for not wasting any of our pain, our suffering, our affliction. Make us like your Son! Amen.
Your Morning Song: "Come to Jesus" by Chris Rice
Your Morning Scripture: Isaiah 48:10-11
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.
...
Are you comfortable with the idea that God would "the furnace of affliction" to try us? Before you answer, let's define some of the words in the question.
What is "the furnace of affliction?" It could, quite literally, be anything that is hard for us. Here in Isaiah it is referring to Israel's exile in Babylon. But any suffering, any struggle, any difficulty in life, great or small, fits "affliction" here. And any of these things are only and always the result of sin (our own personal sin and the sin of all humanity). So God is making use of and giving purpose to the suffering/affliction/pain produced by our sin. How horrifying to think of purposeless affliction of any kind?
So how does God use affliction as a "furnace?" understanding affliction as a furnace here also ties into the last word we will define here, which is "tried/try." To "try" something in a furnace, typically means some kind of metal. Two good examples here that both fit would be heating the metal to make a tool of some kind, or burning a metal to refine it and get rid of anything that is not that metal (such as gold or silver).
Heating a tool in fire, if done correctly makes it strong. Burning a metal in fire to strip aware unwanted materials within it purifies that metal.
It would be best to see both understandings of "trying in a furnace" in the context of these verses from Isaiah.
God will use difficulty of any kind to make you stronger from the inside out, and to remove anything that He deems unwanted (sin, foolishness, immaturity, childishness, self-focus, etc.)
And so we return to the opening line, the question, are you comfortable with this? Because I am not.
I'm not comfortable.
And that's okay. Because my life isn't about me. My life belongs to God.
God made me for Himself. He did not make me for myself. My hopes and goals and dreams, everything I want and desire, must bend and blend and align with God's Will, God's purposes, God's desires and designs. God will allow us to go through difficulty to grow us, to make us stronger and to purify us of ungodly patterns of acting, speaking, and thinking.
Why is that okay? Why is that good?
Because God's ways are the best ways. God's plan is the best plan. God's designs are not only the best, they are the only way that is right, that is true, that is good.
If we trust God's love for us as He allows us to be tried in our furnaces of affliction, He will make us stronger and purify our hearts and minds. By our affliction, He will make us more like His son, Jesus.
I don't want to be comfortable. I want to be stronger.
I don't want to be comfortable. I want to be purified.
The grace of God is beautiful in how mercifully He makes use of our affliction to grow us into the likeness of His son, for His glory!
Comments