Fire-building 101

Mom moved us from West Texas to Dallas when I was 10 years old. A single parent, she was offered a promotion, and to provide for her four children, nine to 18 at the time, she chose that over the more comfortable option of staying among her friends and family in her hometown. 

She had made the move for our benefit, so her efforts to provide for us didn’t stop with the move. I don’t remember what that meant for my siblings, but I do remember what that meant for me – Boy Scouts. I remember the sign-up meeting at school one evening, shortly after the August move, and her persuasive plea to the to the troop leaders to accept a 10-year-old boy, a year too young per the age requirements, because of our “situation.” They had compassion, and I became a member of Troop 717.

As I write this, I realize that being a Boy Scout was, perhaps, a life-changing experience. Either through program instruction or osmosis, I took from my three years as a scout what is now my first recollection of foundational manhood – what it means to be a man. I learned various skills, like how to tie a double half-hitch and how to use my jeans as a flotation device, should I ever find myself in an expanse of water without flotation, but fully dressed. This time in Scouts introduced me to the notion that I could participate in the world.

We also learned, of course, fire-building skills. Fire is one of the life’s basic elements. If you watch Survivor you know that it isn’t easy to start a fire without a flame. That show also gives a stark vision of how miserable life is without the energy of a fire.

God knows that too, of course. He knows the “life-giving” sustenance (“the maintaining of someone or something in life or existence”) that fire is to us. So, it should be no surprise that He used fire as a blessing to His people. In Leviticus 9:24 we read that, “fire came out from before the Lord,” and lit the altar, and “when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell facedown.” They were happy, very happy. They were also reverent, knowing that by His action He was sealing His “covenant and communion” with them (Matthew Henry Commentary).

This fire from God was a perpetual fire (Lev. 6:13), for them to keep burning without end (which they did, until they were taken captive by the Babylonians almost 900 years later). The priests had the job of continually adding fuel to keep it going. So… started by Him, tended by them. As long as they kept it going they would receive its benefit. They fueled the fire with wood, but not just any wood. God didn’t tell them what type of wood to use, but they knew that it had to be clean and “burnable.” The wood from an olive tree or a grapevine did not burn well. The wood had to be intentionally chosen, and it had to be kept clean (dry, not rotted or infested…), otherwise it would be a poor fire and even potentially go out.

Clean and intentional fuel is the message for us, also. The fire that “came out from before the Lord” for the Israelites is the same fire that descended upon the disciples of Jesus, and is the Holy Spirit of God (Acts 2:3,4). As there is but One Spirit, this was the same Spirit that is in us. The flame of fire from God that ignited the Spirit in the disciples in the New Testament still burns in us right now, and we’ve got to keep it lit.

We’ve been given this fire, by His grace, but we’ve got to keep it going just like the priests did. We don’t use wood as fuel, obviously. The fuel we use to feed our fire takes many shapes – service, devotion, worship, fellowship, etc… These are intentionally chosen. The “clean” part of the fuel equation is this, that in feeding our fire we do so loving God before any other, and loving our neighbors as ourselves, a pure obedience and love, a love that is not wet, or rotted, or infested.

What’s the risk involved in letting our fire go out? Wouldn’t He light it again? Well, He could, of course, but I don’t want to take that chance. No, letting our fire die out also means that we die out. We lose the life that He gives us, with Him, in His kingdom. While we may not die in our earthly being immediately, we would die in our eternal being, immediately. We would lose our place in Him. And, using unclean fuel would not mean that the fire would go out, but if it continued to burn it would not do so ideally. In fact, using anything other than clean fuel could, like certain woods, produce poisonous emissions, poison gasses that could not only kill us, spiriturally, but also those around us. The risk of using unclean fuel goes beyond us. It is a risk, of death, to our friends, family and people we don’t even know. That’s a heavy risk!

As any good Boy Scout knows, you’ve got to keep wood on the fire. Only a clean, pure, intentional fuel for the fire that God gave us will keep His fire burning perpetually in our souls.