Connect Group 20 – Keep the fire burning!

Text: Leviticus 6.8-13 

 

Icebreaker: What is the easier thing to do - to start a diet, or to keep going with it for a while? (This question can be applied to many other things in life as well)

 

I don’t know about you, but for me to start a diet or daily exercises is a lot easier than to keep it going for 2 or 3 months! In my life I never said, “That’s it! I will stop the exercise now and I will put some weight on and be out of shape”. But all that happened as a consequence of the act of stopping doing what I started to work towards as a goal. Unfortunately, the same thing happens with other areas of our lives.

 

Imagine for a second that you are Moses! God is giving you all the instructions about what should happen with the offerings in the tabernacle, but God keeps pausing and reaffirming as he gives the instructions that you should put wood on the fire all the time, because you need to never let the fire go out. You would take notice of that command, right?

 

Well, God is saying the same thing about our lives today, He is telling us not to allow the fire to go out. And if you want to keep the fire of God burning strongly inside of you, you must understand that:

 

1)    The fire won’t light up by itself

The first law of Newton in physics is that “an object at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it”. This is also true in our spiritual life; everything will stay the same as it is now unless we start to do something! We need a spark, like a match being struck and flaming into life. Sometimes we let the spiritual fire in us get so low, that there is nothing but ashes and hardly any sparks. But the good news is that it only takes one spark to start a fire; one worship song, one prayer, one Bible verse,  can produce a spark that can get something going, especially if we clean the fire-place of the ashes first, by going to God and repenting of everything that is stopping us from being passionate about Him. 

So, we are responsible for starting the fire; for going to God and recognizing that our fire is going out. But… RECOGNITION is only the first step.

 

 2) You must keep the fire burning by putting fresh wood on it every day!

God gave an order to Moses, every morning, if you want to keep the fire burning, you must put fresh wood on it! To keep the fire (passion) for God, and the presence of God moving us forward, we need to give our spiritual fire something that will keep it burning! The wood is our prayers, our reading, our worship, our time with Him and around Him. The Bible says, not just to put ‘wood’ on but to put ‘fresh wood’ on the fire. Stuff that isn’t fresh in our lives tends to come with religiosity – these things are about compulsion and repetition not about hope, joy or discovery – it’s so important that we put fresh things in front of the Lord! Don’t offer the old, offer everything!

 

3) Fire from yesterday was good for yesterday; today you need fresh wood!

A mistake that the people of God often make is to think that the fire from yesterday will keep burning today! That is impossible if the fire isn’t built up with fresh wood. Just because you ate yesterday it doesn’t mean that you can do without eating today! Just because you took a shower yesterday, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to take one today!

Your time, experience, gifts, works and everything that you did yesterday was good for yesterday, today is a new day with Him, and today has new opportunities to allow God to glorify Himself through you!

It’s good to remember what God has done in our lives in the past, but if we are not careful everything that we say about our relationship with God is in the past tense – and we realise that we have gone cold – our passion is missing, and our relationship with Him is not on fire any more. Today is a time to put fresh wood on the fire of our relationship with God, to start again if necessary, but to make sure that we don’t allow His fire to go out in our life.

 

Conclusion:

I don’t know how your life is today, if the fire of the Holy Spirit is going out, or if there have been cold ashes in your heart for a while already! The only thing that I know is that if God helped you to realise this today, it is because He wants to change that situation and put a new fire inside of you! Today is time to be in love (relationship) with God again! Is a new time in our lives, do you want that? Let’s pray