We have a story to tell to the nations, but it is also a story to tell to the neighbors all around us.
Devotion of the Day
“Some Through The Fire”
And I will bring the third part through the fire.
Zechariah 13:9
Why some lives move along in story-book fashion to happy endings, while others are a long tale of woe-that is one of the puzzles we shall have to let eternity explain. We know only that, while some pilgrims seem to travel mostly in green pastures and beside still waters, others must know flood and fire.
“God leads His dear children along,” but while they arrive eventually at the same destination, they do not fare the same en route. We are often perplexed but we need not be in despair, for even though the furnace be heated seven times hotter there will be with us one “like the Son of God.”
If you seem to have been “chosen in the furnace of affliction,” “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial that is to try you as though some strange thing happened unto you, but rejoice,” because it brands you as a partaker of Christ’s sufferings.
The Great Refiner is at work, and His “refined people” do not get that way along flowery fields but in fiery furnaces.