Wickedness Burns

Surely wickedness burns like a fire;

it consumes briers and thorns,

it sets the forest thickets ablaze,

so that it rolls upward in a column of smoke. 

(Isaiah 9:18)

It's amazing to think that the wildfires which periodically ravage forests in Colorado, California and the Pacific Northwest all start off small. They burn hundreds or even thousands of acres. They force families from their homes. They kill wildlife. But in the beginning, they are small enough to stamp out with your foot. You could prevent all that damage with a single glass of water if you were there early enough. But sadly we often don't notice these fires until they get big, and by that time, it's often too late to do anything about them.

This Scripture tells us that wickedness burns just like a forest fire. It's just as destructive. Sin will ravage your home. It will send your family away. It will take everything you hold dear away from you and leave a path of destruction in its wake. 

But, just like forest fires, we often don't notice our sin until its too late. Our sin looks so small to us. We can't bring ourselves to think it can really do any harm. We think we've got it under control, so we turn our back on it...and there in the background of our lives, it burns. While you aren't paying attention to it, your sin grows and spreads and gains destructive power. If you aren't careful one day you'll turn around and it'll be too late. Your materialism, your lust, your addiction, or your selfishness will have grown too big for you. It will be blazing out of control, and you'll have to watch it destroy everything you hold dear.

Hear this warning of Scripture before it's too late. "Wickedness burns like a fire! It sets the forest ablaze." So be vigilant! Remove wickedness far from you. Don't hold burning embers against your chest. Cast them away! Harbor no sin or deceit. Give no quarter to your enemy. Make no provision for wickedness in your life. Ask God to help you see the sin you harbor today, and turn it over to Him.

Spiritual Amnesia

Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

Exodus 6:6-7

In these verses God tells Moses that His purpose for the plagues is so that Israel may know that He is the LORD. After more than 400 years in slavery Israel has spiritual amnesia. They have forgotten who God is. Either they have stopped telling the stories of His mighty deeds that He performed on behalf of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or else they have become only stories to them and they have forgotten that a real God of power stands behind them. So, through the ten plagues God is going to remind His people who He is.

The ten plagues, the exodus, all of it is designed to be a special revelation of who God is for His people. His actions in the Exodus will prove that He is the LORD. In the plagues He reveals His love, His power, His wisdom, His provision, His faithfulness and so much more to this people who have forgotten who He is. 

I’m convinced that just like Israel we are all prone to spiritual amnesia. We are prone to forget who God really is! Over time our human brains grow weary of straining to comprehend a God who is beyond comprehension. So they shrink Him down to a more manageable size and we forget who God really is. We forget the mighty deeds He has performed in the past. We forget what He has revealed to us about Himself. And as we forget these things we slowly drift away from Him. This is the human condition, the spiritual amnesia, that plagues us all as humans. 

But just like He did for Israel, God battles our spiritual amnesia by revealing Himself to us. I am convinced that God reveals Himself to you every day. He reveals His power and beauty and creativity every day, morning and evening in the sunrise and the sunset. His wisdom and order are displayed in the intricacies of the natural world. His power is revealed by wind and storm and sea. His goodness is made known by all the pleasures He makes available to us in our world. He reveals all this and more about Himself every day so that you might know that He is the LORD. 

Yet, sadly, for the most part, you are blind and deaf to all of this revelation of who God is. You rush from one place to the next consumed by the things of this world and you miss this amazing revelation of who God is. Open your eyes! Pay attention to what God is doing in our day and know who He is. Open your Bible and read what He has done in days gone by and know who He is. Open your ears and hear the birds singing, the crickets chirping, the cattle lowing, and the dogs barking as they all sing His praise. He has done all this so you might know Him. Open your eyes and remember who your God is!

The Ministry of Struggle

Praise be to... the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God... If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort,

2 Corinthians 1:3-4, 6

We all go through times when we hurt, when we are weak and broken, when we weep far more than we laugh. Often in these times we want to hide ourselves away from the world. We're tempted to hide our pain, to deny our struggle, and to cover up our weakness. We see this in small gestures like when a person quickly brushes a tear away from their eye out of embarrassment. And we see it in bigger ways like when a person suffers alone, refusing to tell anyone about their struggle even years after it is done. 

We all have different reasons for doing this. You may think people don't want to hear about your problems or you may just be uncomfortable being vulnerable around others. You may even be ashamed of the behavior that led to your suffering. Whatever your reason, this passage tells that a Christian should never hide in his pain.  

Paul David Tripp puts it this way. "We all know that we don't own the blessings in our lives, that we are meant to pass them forward into the lives of others, but this passage confronts us with the fact that even our sufferings belong to the Lord for His use... This means that our suffering has ministry in view" (Tripp, Paul David, Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense. p183).

Your struggle is an opportunity for you to be comforted, and your comforting opens up fresh avenues of ministry to you. It literally trains and equips you to comfort others who struggle with the same kind of struggle you have had. This is why widows are often most effective at ministering to other widows. It's why those who have escaped the predatory porn industry have started ministries to help other porn actors escape and find freedom in Jesus as well. It's why recovered addicts play such a major role in addiction recovery programs. Those who have been through the fire, who received God's comfort in the battle, know best how to comfort others. 

So don't be greedy with your pain. Don't hide it away or struggle alone. If God has already brought you through something, then He did so in part so you could help bring someone else through something similar. And if you are in the midst of your struggle right now, then go to the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort and ask Him to minister to your needs. And let others know what you are going through. It just may be that as God comforts you you'll be able to reach out to someone you know who is struggling as well with the fresh supplies of comfort and hope that you have received from the Lord.

Be Someone's Aaron

The Lord said to Aaron, “Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.” So he met Moses at the mountain of God and kissed him. Then Moses told Aaron everything the Lord had sent him to say, and also about all the signs he had commanded him to perform.

Exodus 4:27-28

God told Aaron to go meet Moses in the desert and where should they happen to meet but at the very mountain of God where God had recently appeared to Moses in a burning bush. And there Moses told Aaron what he had presumably told no one else. Scripture doesn’t record that Moses told his wife or sons or his father-in-law or anyone else why he was heading back to Egypt. But Scripture does tell us that now he told Aaron. He told Aaron that God had spoken to him out of a burning bush on this mountain, and he told Aaron that God had heard the cries of His people in Egypt, that He had seen their affliction and that He himself was coming down to rescue Israel from the hand of the Egyptians. God was sending Moses and Aaron to tell Pharaoh to let His people go.

Moses told all of this to Aaron, and from that time on, with a few notable exceptions, Moses and Aaron were one. They were a team, each one supporting the other and helping out where the other was weak. As they walked into Egypt and told the elders of the Israelites what God had planned, they were one. When they stood before Pharaoh and delivered God’s message to him, they were one. As they unleashed God’s plagues on Egypt, they were one. Together they bore the weight of leading probably 2 million people out of Egypt and through the dessert, providing food and water for them. These people grumbled against them and repeatedly threatened to rebel and return to Egypt; and through all of this, for nearly forty years (Numbers 33:38), they were one. Aaron was always by Moses’ side.

Be someone’s Aaron. We weren’t meant to do life or ministry alone. We need someone to be with us, to help us, to encourage us when we are discouraged, to correct us when we are wrong, to intercede for us and pray for us, to work alongside us. We find this principle all throughout Scripture. Jesus sent the Disciples out by twos. Paul didn’t go on his missionary journeys alone. He took Barnabas, or Silas, or Timothy with him. Even after Aaron died, Moses had Joshua.

So we all need at least one person in our life who will walk with us as we follow Jesus. We need someone with whom we can share the callings God has placed on our hearts. Be that for someone. Find someone that you can help accomplish what God has called them to do. Sunday School teachers need an Aaron. Deacons need an Aaron. College and high school students need an Aaron. Mothers and fathers need an Aaron. Be someone’s Aaron!

The Bible is a Mirror

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

James 1:22-25

Doesn’t that capture perfectly what Scripture is like and what so many of us are like? Scripture is like a mirror that lets us see ourselves clearly. We read Scripture or we hear a sermon and we are pricked in our conscience. We see something about ourselves, some part of our life that is out of joint that is sinful and wrong- cause that’s what sin is like. It’s like a clump of hair sticking up on the back of your head. It’s out of place and it hurts your overall appearance and everyone else can see it better than you can. But then Scripture shows it to you. And for most of us our first instinct isn’t to look deeper into the mirror and fix the problem we are seeing for the first time but to look away from the mirror as quickly as possible and try to forget what we saw so we don’t have to deal with it.

If you aren’t careful that’s what you’ll do when you read the Bible. You’ll be reading along and you'll come to a verse that speaks to your situation, and the Spirit will convict you of some sin in your life but you’ll just shoot past it. You’ll just keep reading quickly on trying to get your mind to focus on the next verse instead of lingering on that conviction. “I’ll come back to that and think about it later” you tell yourself, but in reality you are running away from that verse as quickly as you can. I know because I've done this.  

Or the same thing happens when you hear a sermon. At times a sermon can bring Scripture to bear on the sin in your life and cause you to come under the conviction of the Spirit, but often we are masters at wriggling out of that conviction aren’t we? We ignore it and tell ourselves that “God will forgive me.” Yes, He will if you repent and stop sinning against Him, but not if you persist in rebelling against Him. Or the pastor will point out something in Scripture that we don’t like, that convicts us and we’ll say to ourselves “Well I just don’t believe that.” You don’t believe what the Bible says?! It doesn’t work that way. Or we’ll convince ourselves that we just aren’t strong enough or a good enough Christian to obey God in that way yet. "One day," we tell ourselves, "one day." 

Be careful that you don’t fall into this trap. Be careful that you don’t sit in church week after week hearing the Word preached to you and coming under the conviction of the Spirit but refusing to be changed by it, refusing to put God’s Word into practice. If you quench the Spirit long enough you may just succeed in hardening your heart against Him, you may just succeed in deafening your ears to His pleas and blinding your eyes to your own sin. Then what hope will you have?

So when you hear a sermon or read God’s Word, the question you should be asking yourself is this: What would God have me do about this?! Be doers of God’s Word, and not hearers only.