Firefighters pre-burn an area of land with smaller fires they can control so that when the raging wildfire arrives at that strip of land, it finds no more fuel. With no more trees or brush to consume, the fire turns back on itself and dies. In his book Welcoming a Visitation of the Holy Spirit, Wes Campbell, pastor of New Life Vineyard Fellowship in Kelowna, British Columbia, shares, “In the same way, the fire of the Spirit must be touching new people every day in order to keep blazing.” I would add that the fire within our souls must stay in continual connection with God to stay alive.
Isaiah 9:18-19 makes this same correlation, although in a negative sense. Remember, what is true spiritually applies both in the positive and negative. The prophet writes, “For wickedness burns as the fire; it shall devour the briers and thorns, and kindle in the thickets of the forest. They shall mount up like rising smoke. Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts the land is burned up, and the people shall be as fuel for the fire. No man shall spare his brother.” The emphasis of the passage is not on physical fire devouring natural trees but about how spiritual wickedness devours people.
Spiritual passion operates by the same principle. Love for the Lord ignites in our hearts when we offer our lives as fuel for the Lord’s flame, the flame of Yah. This fire then leaps forward, blown by the wind of the Spirit, to the next willing heart—the next person hungry for God’s love and personal Presence.
Jordan Fowler conveys this principle with beautiful and powerful imagery in the song Fuel:
“I have no silver and no gold to give.
No frankincense or precious myrrh.
But what I have to You I give: a heart that’s broken for the world.
Consume me for Your fire and use me for Your heart’s desire:
To spread Your flame to every tribe and nation.
I give up my life to You to burn as Your holy fuel.
Ignite my heart to burn up for the nations.
My life can be Your fuel—my hopes, my dreams, my wants, my all.
My life can be Your fuel.”
Second, fire must have oxygen. We can have all the wood in the world, but if the atmosphere is sucked dry of oxygen, every fire will instantly extinguish. That’s why small fires can be suffocated with a heavy blanket or stomped out by a tough boot. The same truth applies to us as people. In the realm of spiritual analogy, oxygen represents grace. Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “There is nothing but God’s grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.” Ole Hallesby said, “The ‘air’ which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us…on every hand, with many-sided and all-sufficient grace.”
Without grace, we perish. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God!” (Ephesians 2:8). Without grace, our passion for God suffocates. “Our sufficiency is from God…not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life” (II Corinthians 3:5-6). The fastest way to kill passion for Jesus is with legalism. Will we still love Him? Yes, but our strength to serve Him will be gone. Why? Because “The joy of the Lord is our strength” (Nehemiah 8:10) and “Desire gave you renewed strength” (Isaiah 57:10 NLT). This spiritual principle also applies in a positive and negative. We can be passionate for things that are not of God, pursuing them, such as Isaiah talks about, because desire spurs us on. Or we can crucify sinful passions and cultivate passion for Jesus. This passion becomes our strength to keep running after Him and keep pouring ourselves out to others. Proverbs 11:29 says, “The way of the Lord is strength for the upright.” Why? Because He is our delight and greatest pleasure (Psalm 16:11).
However, legalism kills desire. When we “ought” to do something and are critically judged by others around us, or even by ourselves, when we fail to get it right, our mistakes become a towering wall of perfectionism—an impassable barrier between us and the joy of the Lord. The Apostle Paul writes with rejoicing, “But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” Why is he rejoicing so greatly? Because Christ paid the cost of all our mistakes! Every sin and failure and misunderstanding was laid upon His shoulders at Calvary. He hung upon that tree to make sure we’re never trapped behind the Wall of Perfectionism again!
Does His incredible grace mean we can sin and not be called to account? No, but grace means that when we realize how badly we’ve blown it and that we’re on the wrong side of the wall again, we can leap over it, back into the place of right fellowship with the Lord (Psalm 18:29, I John 1:9). The Holy Spirit declares to us with beautiful invitation, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:1). The Spirit calls out again to us through the prophet Isaiah, “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come buy and eat. Yes come, buy wine and milk, without money and without price…. Let your soul delight itself in abundance! Incline your ear and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live!” (55:1-3)
We come to God through grace. There is no other way. Anyone who tries to live by the law must keep every part, but there has never been a man or woman who can (Galatians 6:13). Nor can the law make anyone perfect, even after salvation through faith (Galatians 3:3). Grace alone is God’s tool to form His Son in us. Grace is the oxygen of the soul.
When grace abounds in a life, a church, and a community, then the fire of the Spirit will blaze free and strong. Our hearts will be ignited with a holy thirst to partake freely of the waters of life (Revelation 22:17).
Then we will be the Bride who calls along with the Spirit in her, “Come! Everyone who thirsts, come to the River of Life!!!”
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