The Plumbline

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while . These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls . (I Peter 1:6-9) One of the hardest things for some of us to come to grips with is that we have to face and endure trials. Yes, the timeframe may be limited, but why on earth do we have to face them at all? Peter was writing to a group of believers who were likely facing great persecution on a daily basis, yet he tells them to rejoice and take hope. How...

Now and again, mom begins a discussion by saying she doesn't know what she has done in this lifetime to 'deserve' all the pain she experiences because of her arthritis, stenosis, and neuropathy. Any one of those can be quite debilitating - add all three together and you rarely have a day when one or the other isn't a troubling thing. Add to this that she is legally blind, hard of hearing, and 100 years old, and you can see why she might just 'bemoan' some of these ailments once in a while! While we may not understand the 'why' behind the present set of worries and woes that we experience, we can be assured of one very important fact - the day is coming when we will live healed and whole once again if our hearts are surrendered to Christ! What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future i...

Back in the days of the pioneers, there was a crazy flurry of activity to 'hit it big' in the gold mining 'rushes' of the day. Someone would come across the 'mother-load' and the rush would be on. Whether that sparkly stuff was panned from streams or chiseled from the walls of the caves that housed their rich vein, the result was the same - it had to be melted down before it could really be used. Along came the silver and copper mines, each yielding their own 'ores' of great promise - each requiring their own type of 'smelting' processes, but each producing various 'qualities' of 'finished product' as a result. The smelting process usually involved what came to be known as the 'crucible' - that smaller collection spot within the larger furnace where the refined metals would be collected. While the furnace produced the heat to accomplish the refining process, the crucible acted as a collection device to capture the purified...

Silver is  purified  in the crucible, gold in the  furnace , but  motives of  the heart are judged by the Eternal.  (Proverbs 17:3 VOICE) Richard Nixon once said, "The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire."  If you really stop to think on that one, he was pretty close to the truth.  The steel doesn't become steel because it dreams of being steel one day.  It doesn't even know what is about to happen to it when it approaches the fire of the furnace. It is kind of naive in a sense, because it just trusts the one handling it to make something beautiful from the carbon and iron when it is combined in the heat of the furnace.  In essence, we don't really know what will come of our lives, but when we trust the one who made all the elements of our lives to put those elements to use as he sees fit, we find the object "refined" as he imagined it to be from the beginning. The furnace isn't a place for wimps.  In fact, most of ...

Yesterday we discussed passion and purpose.  We have one more character trait to consider in our "P" List which is purity.  Now, this sometimes gets overlooked in our consideration of character traits to "put on" because we don't live in a very "pure" world, do we?  It is hard to make pure choices when all around you others are bombarding you with all kinds of wrong ones.  Purity is the freedom from anything which debases (reduces in quality or value), contaminates (adding/mixing in that which makes unclean), or pollutes (corrupts or defiles).  In the most literal sense, impurity is the "adding in" of something which does not belong.  That which does not belong actually changes the consistency or integrity of what does. You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.  (Matthew 5:8 MSG) But friends, that’s exactly who we are: children of God. And that’s only the beginn...

3  As silver in a crucible and gold in a pan,    so our lives are assayed by God.  (Proverbs 17:3 The Message) Yesterday, we took a look at the process of "stoking" the furnace of our hearts - getting us to a place that God can work with us, forming us into what it is he envisions for us.  Today, I'd like to continue to explore another instrument of the craftsman used in the process of purification - it is what is known as the crucible.  The crucible is similar to the furnace, but its purpose is not so much to heat to the point of being "pliable" in the hand of the craftsman as it is to bring to the surface that which is impure in the substance he is working with.  For some of us, we feel the "heat" of the crucible much more often than we'd like.  Take heart, that really means that God is just at work bringing to the surface the things in our lives that he needs to remove by his tender care. When I lived in Alaska, I got to know a gentle...

3 The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold,  but the Lord tries the hearts. (Proverbs 17:3 The Amplified Bible) On my journeys in Virginia, we went to an old-fashioned glass blower's house.  We learned that the fires of the furnace had to be stoked for a period of not less than two weeks in order to get the necessary heat to actually produce the highest quality of glass.  Two weeks of stoking a fire seemed like a lot to me - think about it - two weeks of standing around, just waiting to be able to "get on" with the thing you really know you enjoy doing.  Isn't that how we often think about the times of the "stoking" of the fires of our heart?  We want to move on to the next thing that we actually enjoy about our walk with God and he wants us to have the fires stoked a little hotter so that the thing produced will actually be of the highest quality! The crucible is only at its best when it is at its hottest point.  In order to get the fires ...