The Fire With No Enemy

For the believer who inherited a passion and can no longer find the thing it was lit for.

Nobody in your tradition started out angry. They started out in love, and the argument came later.

That sentence sounds obvious and almost nobody believes it about the people they disagree with, and quite a few of us don't believe it about our own side either. We inherit a set of convictions with heat already in them, and we assume the heat came from the conflict, because the conflict is the only part still being discussed at the table.

It didn't. Every movement that has ever mattered began because somebody could not get over Jesus Christ. The defining, the distinguishing, the careful separating from the people down the road: all of that arrived afterward, and it arrived as a way of protecting the fire rather than as the fire itself.

She's worked that out slowly, over about two years, and it started with a box of her grandfather's papers.

There's a notebook in it from when he was twenty two. She expected argument, because argument is what she knew him for. What's actually in it is page after page of a young man who can't stop writing about how much God loves people, in handwriting that gets faster when he's excited.

You inherited a fire that was lit by love long before it was ever aimed at anybody. The written Word describes the faith in a run of positives with nothing to push against, and the Holy Spirit keeps that original warmth alive in you rather than filing it with the family history.

What Happens to a Fire When It Gets a Job

Here's how it goes, and it's nobody's fault in particular.

A group of people love Christ, visibly, in a way their neighbors notice. That draws pressure, because it always does. Under pressure they have to explain themselves, so they work out careful language for what they mean. That careful language is good, necessary, and saves a great deal of confusion.

Then a generation passes. The next one inherits the careful language without the pressure that made it necessary, and the language is now the main thing they were given. So they defend it, faithfully, with the heat that came down with it, and they never quite find out what the heat was originally for.

That's where she found herself at thirty eight. Fluent in the defense, warm about it, and unable to say what the original love had actually been about. Not because she doesn't love God. Because nobody ever handed her the notebook.

One Body, One Spirit, One Hope

Here's the opening line of a passage written to believers who were being pulled several ways at once:

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling.Ephesians 4:4 (KJV)

Read it for an opponent. There isn't one anywhere in the sentence. Nobody is being corrected, nobody is being distinguished from, and no word in it requires another group to exist before it makes sense.

It's built entirely out of what is: one body, one Spirit, one hope. That's the register the fire was originally burning in, and it's the register her grandfather was writing in at twenty two, before anybody had asked him to explain himself to a single soul.

You are held by a description that never needed an enemy to be complete. The written Word states the faith in positives with no contrast inside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that description live in you now.

A Fire Aimed at Somebody Gives Off Less Heat

Here's what I'd carry out of that box of papers if I could take a single thing away with me.

Aimed heat is a strange substance. It feels stronger, because it has a direction and a target and something to push on. It's also colder in the room, and everyone standing near it knows that without being able to say so.

Unaimed heat is different. A fire that isn't pointed at anybody warms whoever comes near it, including the people who came to argue. It's less impressive and far more useful, and it's what her grandfather's notebook has in it on every page.

So the question isn't whether you're passionate. You plainly are, and so was he. The question is whether the passion you inherited still knows what it was lit for.

Your passion was lit for a Person, and it gives more heat when it isn't aimed. The written Word puts the fire on Christ Himself rather than on a boundary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it burning in that direction.

Nothing Here Is a Criticism of Your Grandfather

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would wound you and I refuse to write it.

He wasn't wrong to defend what he defended. He was holding something precious at a time when holding it cost him, and the sharpness in his later voice was almost certainly grief about people he'd watched drift rather than contempt for anybody.

I'm not asking you to be embarrassed by him, and I'm not asking you to go back through the family and correct anyone. You can honor every word of that defense and still read the notebook he wrote first.

You can keep the whole inheritance and still find what it was lit for. Scripture supplies the original register without belittling anyone who learned a later one, and the Holy Spirit does the adding rather than the demolishing.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.