Jesus is NOT a Condiment!

When I was a sophomore in high school, I played the part of Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. It was a horribly dark story centered in the Salem witch trials, in which a good man named John Proctor is eventually overcome by the murk he'd allowed into his life; it's a powerful and somber story of the struggle between good and evil. 

I'm going to tell you what I thought the title meant for the pure illustrative point that everyone can still learn new things decades after-the-fact. I liked the name, The Crucible. I thought it was a poignant way of showing how John Proctor had found his "cross," his crucible, taken it up (whether he wanted to or not), and carried it. I just realized this morning, twenty-four years post-play, that I was mixing up the definitions for "crucible" and "crucifix." 

A crucifix is what I had been attributing to the title: a picture of Christ on the cross and John Proctor's symbolic crucifixion of himself by way of his own life choices.

A crucible, on the other hand, according to Merriam-Webster, is 1: a vessel of a very refractory material (such as porcelain) used for melting and calcining a substance that requires a high degree of heat, or 2: a severe test.

And if you're like me, you had to look up calcining, too. ;) Calcining: "to heat (something, such as inorganic materials) to a high temperature, but without fusing in order to drive off volatile matter or to effect changes (such as oxidation or pulverization)."

In other words (because those were a lot of big ones; thanks, Merriam-Webster): carefully melting down to remove impurities.

This morning, I read Psalm 66, which lays out a story of praise in the middle of the crucible. This concept blows my mind: Who praises in the middle of agony? And yet that's exactly what the psalmist does here. Look at this, in verses 8-12: "Praise our God, oh peoples; let the sound of His praise be heard! He has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. For You, oh God, tested us! You refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but You brought us to a place of abundance."

We went through fire and water, but You brought us to a place of abundance!!! (I just felt like there needed to be an exclamation point there, maybe even two or three). My footnotes say: "Times of distress constitute a testing of God's people as to their trust in and loyalty to God. The metaphor is borrowed from the technology of refining precious metals, which included heating the metals in a crucible to see if all impurities had been removed."

Flipping over to Malachi 3:3: "He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver." 

This verse is contextually set in Malachi's prophesies regarding the Day of Judgment, when the Lord will suddenly come to His temple, and every person will be required to stand before the Ancient of Days, the Ultimate Judge, and give answer for their deeds, the choices they've made throughout their lives. The Lord will separate the sheep from the goats; He will put His people on the right, and the ones who chose not to follow Him, He will have stand on the left.

To make us ready, He refines us. He carefully refines us. He sits over that crucible and watches it. He keeps His eyes on the temperature for the purpose of removing the impurities!

Let me say this and make it as clear as I possibly can: God is not a side-order. You cannot live your Christian life and sprinkle a little Jesus on top. He is not a condiment. He is not the bag of chips that goes with your entrée.

"Our God is a consuming fire!" says Hebrews 12:29. 

The Lord gave me another clear picture this morning: I saw a field of bean plants obviously to be used as a feed-crop, to be cut down and harvested as food for stock during the winter. The entire field was yellowed plants, stalks that were long past their prime. The stalks were sagging, dying, weighed down with dead leaves and beans. They seemed to droop with weariness, ready to return to the earth from which they'd sprung.

A man was bending over the plants, hanging onto them, running from plant to plant to keep them from falling over in their weight and weariness. I was so confused, because the plants were certifiably dying, but the man refused to let them rest in peace. He refused to let them touch the earth, where their seeds could bury into the soil, the husks die, shed, and be reborn in the spring. 

The man fought the natural order. No, return us to what was!

He couldn't let the seed die and be reborn. He couldn't see that, in order to bring new life, the old had to die. The seed-husk had to be buried. The man was clinging to what he knew, panicked that he was losing the past. He couldn't see the promise of the upcoming spring, because he was so focused on the summer that had come before.

Y'all, this is where God had me today. We have got to let ourselves fall into that crucible. Stop praying for self-preservation. Stop praying for the return to our familiarities. Stop praying for fortunate circumstances. God does bless His people, His church, yes, He does! But often, as we see in Scripture, He blesses through the fire, instead of veering away from the fire.

Do pray for release from those dead stalks we're clinging to. Do pray that we are heated so much that the impurities are burned away. Do pray that we are consumed by the living God. Do pray that we make Him our everything, not our side order, not our "sometimes Jesus." Because "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Once we are in that place of complete sacrificial openness, then we can see that it doesn't matter whether we go through the fire or veer away from the fire. When we are consumed by Him, no other fire can touch us. He has already done the transforming work; the fires of distress and hardship must go burn somewhere else.