The Fireplace of Faith

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”—Hebrews 10:23-25

Outside my living room window snow is swiftly falling from the sky and blowing across the street. Snow is everywhere, and it’s one of those days where you want to stay home, curl up in front of a fire, and read a book or watch a movie. I enjoy getting up in the morning and reading my Bible by the fireplace. There’s something about having a fireplace that relaxes me and enables me to meditate upon the Word. It seems that I have passed my fireplace fetish on to my children. The first thing they do when they get up in the morning is sit near the fireplace and play with their toys. They enjoy the warmth it generates in our cold house.

In the fireplace are logs. Logs are the fuel that heats the fire. There’s just one thing about logs. They don’t light themselves. Once I light the fire and get it going, I need to keep it burning by putting more and more logs on it. If I don’t, then it burns out. Or, if I were to take a log out of the fire, then what happens to the fire on the log? It goes out. It takes the combined fire of the logs to keep the fire going.

There are two spiritual truths here. The first involves church attendance. God lights the fire in our hearts by giving us His Holy Spirit. However, we cannot keep the flame of God burning by ourselves. We need other believers to keep us fired up and burning for Christ. When we remove ourselves from fellowship or church attendance, we are like a log taken out of the fire. We are extinguishing our spiritual fire and usefulness for the Lord.

Secondly, there is the truth of evangelism. Fires don't keep burning with the same logs forever. New logs must continually be thrown on to the fire to keep the fire going. We need to be sharing the truth of God with others, hoping and praying that God lights their spiritual fire through us. And when God does, we bring their spiritual log into our fireplace of faith, which enables the fire of God to continue on bringing spiritual warmth to all who come into our fellowship.

My question for each of us is this: are you on fire for the Lord? Or is your fire dying out? Have you removed yourself from fellowship with other believers? We need the body of Christ to keep our fire bright and red-hot. As today’s scripture passage teaches, our time of fellowship is where both the giving and receiving of encouragement takes place. So today, I hope and pray that you might worship with the body of Christ. Don’t stay away and remove yourself from God’s fireplace of faith. Stay in the fire with the other logs burning brightly for Christ. Amen.