interlude - the quiet fire

Cool story for you. Three political prisoners. One dictator. The three prisoners refuse to worship the statue of the dictator, because they believe in God, the Creator of the Universe, and they worship Him, and this statue is not Him. It is a statue.

DICTATOR: If you don’t bow down and worship my statue, I’ll throw you into this furnace. What god will save you then?         

PRISONERS: To be honest, ‘Your Majesty’, we don’t need to defend ourselves to you in this matter. If we are thrown into that furnace, the God we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your ‘power’. But you know what? Even if He doesn’t, you should know, that we will never serve your ‘gods’ or worship your statues.

***

I love that story because I love their sass. Is that a word? I will use it nevertheless. Sass. They know that God can do crazy things to save them, they think he will, but there they are, staring a king in the face, standing on the brink of a furnace, feeling their skin crack in the heat, and they say “You know what? Even if we burn for it, we believe in God, and we will worship him and nothing else. We will be faithful.”

That probably doesn’t feel as epic to you as it does to me, I don’t really know why I like it so much – but there’s something there. This fire in the belly, this sure-ness, this rock-solid, unshakeable confidence.

And here’s the thing that I’ve not really grasped before: that’s more than just faith. That’s faithfulness.

Faith, in this sense, is knowing that God can do amazing things. That God can save you from the fiery furnace. It’s knowing that he is alive, and ridiculously powerful, and he’s your Dad, and he will take care of you. So yes, they have that faith, but then there’s something else.

“Even if He doesn’t…”

This is faithfulness. This is us being faithful to him, it’s saying, ‘You know what? Even if He doesn’t…’ I’ll still love him. I’ll still trust him.

Does this make sense? It’s one thing to believe that God will do incredible things, but it’s something else to be certain at the same time – utterly, unshakeably certain – that even if he doesn’t this time, he is still God, and we’re still his kids. Because the fact is that sometimes he just doesn’t seem to do what we want him to do, sometimes we cannot see what he is doing or feel like he’s there at all, and nothing makes sense. But faithfulness means that we don’t let go. That we know he is always with us, however it feels. To be faithful is to know two things for sure: that he will never walk out on us, and that we will never walk out on him.

I was thinking about this, and then I was praying for my mate the other night, and I thought of this verse, which is really famous amongst Christians:

“ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

And it occurred to me that I have never noticed what this actually says. God’s talking to these people who are in exile, they’re lost, and they are hopeless. And he says that he plans to give them “hope and a future”. I’ve always read that as “good stuff in the future”. But that’s not what it says – God has a much better plan for them than what I used to think. His plan isn’t just to give them a good future. He’s going to give them hope first. He’s going to give them hope. You see he doesn’t just want them to be people who are OK because things are OK. He wants more than that for them. He wants them to be people who have hope, who trust, who have something golden and burning inside of them which can never be diminished, or broken, or lost. He wants to forge in them something utterly beautiful. To plant in them a peace “which the world cannot give, and the world cannot take away”. And then he wants to give them the future that they’ve been waiting for.

And how does he forge this hope in us? There’s a really powerful bit in another letter that talks about it – so I’ll abridge it for you:

“…we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not just that, but we also rejoice in our suffering, because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character, hope.

And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Why? How? Because when we were still weak and helpless, when we needed him, Christ died for the ungodly. For us. Hardly anyone would actually die for someone else, would they? - even for a good person. But God loves us like this: when we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And if he’s done that for us, then he will certainly save us; if he’s brought us home, he will bring us to life. So we rejoice in God, through our King, Jesus Christ, who brought us home.”

Now, the funny thing with that bit is that you can’t stop quoting it too early because it’s all connected. We’ve got something incredible to hope for. The glory of God himself, now, and forever. But it doesn’t stop there, because even when we don’t see that glory, even when all we see is dark, we grit our teeth and we throw a party in the darkness because we know that pain is a furnace. Disappointment is a forge. And we choose to let God craft in us something better, something deeper. Endurance. Character. Finally, hope. In the darkness he lights a fire inside us that cannot be put out. But it doesn’t stop there either, because that hope is not wishful thinking. It is not optimism. It will not put us to shame. Because it is a fact greater than life itself, and much more permanent: that God loves us. Even when we hated him, he loved us. Loved us so much it hurt, loved us so strong it killed him. So our hope is not just optimism. It is knowing a love greater than life itself, a love so certain that if we take hold of it nothing can ever take it from us, not even death itself. It is knowing that we have life – sweet and satisfying and rich – and we can begin to taste it now, but there will be feasting hereafter. But it doesn’t even stop there. Because our hope; the song of our hearts; the taste of glory on our lips, is the taste of God himself. The Glorious One. Bigger and better than we could ever imagine. He is the home our hearts are hoping for.

I just thought it would be good to talk about this because all these stories of God answering prayers in amazing ways are incredible, and I love them, but I also know people – sometimes the same people – who have big, big prayers which have not got incredible answers yet, some for whom its all over and it never came. And the faithfulness of some of these people, is something beautiful to behold. So as much as I want to see more and more miracles in my life, maybe even more, I want to grow old into someone who has this strange thing singing at the bottom of my soul, who has this quiet fire in my eyes – I want to be someone who has hope.

N.B. If you want to look them up, the story at the start is from Daniel chapter 3, the hope/future thing is Jeremiah 29:11 and the big paragraph is from Romans chapter 5.