THE FIRE OF DELAYED ANSWERS – are you waiting for you prayers to be answered? – Refiners fire by BOB SORGE Part 1 of 13
Part One – The Furnace of Affliction , Chapter 1 – Refiners fire
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Sunday, October 27th 2024
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Title: Chapter 1 – Refiners Fire
Introduction
I’m glad you’re picking this book up because its message is straight from my heart. This book is intensely personal. It is the product of a very impassioned search into the heart and ways of God. A season of physical pain and disability has caused me to press into God with all my
heart and soul, and the truths herein are a reflection of that search.
God will always remain beyond our complete comprehension, but He has invited us to explore and uncover His ways — the ways in which He has chosen to relate to man. God’s ways are always self-consistent, but they are beyond our ability to analyze definitively. God will not be put in a box. But He does want us to grow in our knowledge of Him.
As I have pressed into a fuller understanding of God’s ways, there is one aspect of God’s ways that has captured my attention, and it is the central theme of this book. Let me condense it into what might be
considered a “thesis statement” or “summary statement” for all that fol- lows:
Sometimes God delays the answers to our prayers in order to produce a greater maturity and fruitfulness in us.
The word “sometimes” is an important qualifier in that statement because God doesn’t always delay His answers. Many times He sends immediate relief. But I am observing that many saints in this present hour are facing great challenges because their prayers appear to be unanswered, and they don’t understand God’s purposes in the season of delay. They look at the unchanged circumstances, decide that God must be saying “no” to their prayers, and as a consequence make some very unfortunate decisions.
Dear reader, let me implore you: If you are ever to mature into greater dimensions of fruitfulness in the kingdom of God, then you must
commit yourself to understanding how God uses delay to refine His chosen ones.
The refining process is never comfortable. God’s fire is always hot. David Ruis has written a great song that says, “There’s a fire burnin’, falling from the sky, awesome tongues of fire consuming you and I… Oh, sweet fire, come and burn over me.” It’s a beautiful thing when we invoke this refining fire in our lives, but it’s also a very serious thing. If you’re willing to embrace His fire, then prepare yourself for some pain.
Christ calls us to the cross because we’ll never become like Him apart from pain.
God’s first priority in our lives is to make us fruitful — it is not first
and foremost to make us comfortable. God doesn’t enjoy leading us through painful circumstances, and He really does love to bless us. But what they say in athletics is also true spiritually: “No pain, no gain.” The chronicles of the Israeli nation testify that in times of comparative comfort and blessing, the hearts of the people of Israel wandered into idolatry. Distress was necessary to turn their hearts back to God.
In a similar way, we don’t typically choose the strenuous path of maturity apart from the incentive of pain. Oh yes, we sincerely long to mature in Christ. But when times are smooth, our pursuit of God loses its edge of diligence, and often we’re not even aware that it’s happening.
In His infinite grace, God personalizes some troubles with our name on
them, in order to help us toward His design for our lives.
The Bible is chock full of passages in which God has promised to answer our prayers. I emphatically maintain that God desires to answer our prayers that are in accordance with His will. When we claim a Bible promise that is quickened to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we are praying according to His will. And He will answer us. It’s just that He sometimes delays the answer for very purposeful reasons. The focus of this book is to explore the reasons why He sometimes delays His answers.
Maybe you think it’s carnal to ask why. But many of the Psalms ask the why question with no apparent reproof from the Lord. When God begins to reveal His purposes to our searching hearts, and we begin to understand His ways, it helps to keep us from crawling off the altar.
We find grace to persevere in tribulation because we understand that the present pain will produce a future harvest (see Hebrews 12:10).
I don’t expect this book to be “fun reading.” But I do trust that it will be comforting, particularly to those who are experiencing the fire of heretofore unanswered prayers.
What is the nature of your own ongoing
trial?
Financial pressure?
A difficult relationship?
Physical affliction or infirmity?
Sickness or disease?
Family turmoil?
Unexpressed ministry giftings?
Unattained goals?
Grief over the death of a loved one?
Emotional upheaval?
Unfulfilled desires?
Great personal loss?
The list goes on, but if you find yourself in the category of waiting on God for unanswered prayers, then I trust that you will gain fresh fuel for the journey as you join me in exploring the ways of God.
Bob Sorge
April, 1996
Part One – The Furnace of Affliction
Chapter 1 – REFINER’S FIRE
“For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24).
God Is A Fire
God is extremely intense. The intensity of His personhood is described in Hebrews 12:29, “Our God is a consuming fire.” Nothing sinful can survive the fire of God’s immediate presence. Fire issues forth from God’s mouth when He speaks (Isaiah 30:27). The word which proceeds
from His mouth is itself a living flame which burns until it completely fulfills the intent for which God sent it (Jeremiah 23:29; Isaiah 55:11). Psalm 29:7 tells us that God’s voice divided the tongues of fire that rested upon the early believers when the Holy Spirit first fell in the upper room (see Acts 2:1-4).
God is a holy fire, and He burns away impurities from our lives so that we might stand completely purified in His presence. Several scriptural passages describe God as a refiner of our hearts, much like a blacksmith refines gold or silver in a furnace. Some examples are:
•For You, O God, have tested us; You have refined us as silver is refined (Psalm 66:10).
•Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction (Isaiah 48:10).
•I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will
call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, “This is My people”; and each one will say, “The LORD is my God”
(Zechariah 13:9).
•But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness
(Malachi 3:2-3).
God Is A Refiner
The imagery of Jeremiah 23:29 is that of God taking us up in His tongs, sticking us into His fiery furnace, waiting till we’re red-hot, pulling us out, setting us down on His anvil, and then hammering us into shape. Such a vivid metaphor carries graphic implications for us that include pain, loss of control, intense pressure, and violent change. Welcome, dear son of Levi, to God’s refining fire!
God had called Jeremiah to serve as an assayer of His people: “I have set you as an assayer and a fortress among My people, that you may know and test their way” (Jeremiah 6:27). As an assayer, Jeremiah became a symbol of Christ, who is the true Assayer of men’s hearts. An assayer is someone who tests metals or ore for its components and judges the value or worth of a metal based upon its purity of composition. Jesus has eyes
of fire (Revelation 1:14) that pierce through every strata of our being,
discerning the true condition of our hearts.
Jesus is both a Refiner and an Assayer. We see Jesus functioning as Assayer when He confronted the Pharisees. He weighed and judged their hearts and then dealt with them accordingly. Jesus still does the same thing with us today. He examines our hearts, evaluates our true spiritual condition, and then brings His fire to effect a greater purity and usefulness.
God’s Purifying Fire
God’s fire resides among His people: “Whose fire is in Zion and whose furnace is in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 31:9). Because His affections are there, God’s fire abides in Zion. God is intensely passionate over Zion (His Church), so He has placed His fiery residence in the midst of
His chosen ones. Which means if you live in Zion, you will get away
with nothing. God’s fire will burn in your life. This is the “occupational hazard” (and the joy) of living in Zion — God’s fire will not leave you alone. O blessed fire, which accomplishes three glorious things among God’s people: 1) it forces the hypocrite to a decision (Isaiah 33:14); 2) it purges the sincere from sin (Isaiah 6:6-7); 3) and it enflames the heart
with fresh passions for the Son of God (Acts 2:3-4). The Lord will never remove this fire from Zion. We live in a furnace of holy fire.
When hypocrites and the half-hearted can dwell in our midst without being convicted or made uncomfortable, then something’s wrong. God intends for His fire to so envelope the local church that hypocrites will not be able to stay, and the devout will not be able to remain unchanged.
When the heat is first turned up in our lives, initially we feel like the Lord has abandoned us. But as we persevere in faithfulness, we’ll begin to see more and more how close Jesus has been to us all along. Like the three Hebrew men in Nebuchadnezzar’s blazing furnace, we’ll discover that when we’re in the fire Jesus is present with us.
Many of us have cried out with great sincerity, “O Lord, please come to me!” The Lord loves to answer that prayer, but He knows we don’t always realize what we’re asking. The Scripture testifies, “A fire goes before Him” (Ps. 97:3). When Jesus visits us, His face is always preceded by His fire. He knows we won’t be prepared for His face until we’ve been purified by His fire. So if you’re feeling the fire of God in your life, cheer up; it means that God is coming to you. This is the fire that precedes Him. He is
drawing you closer to Himself, and His glory is starting to consume you.
The fire is His assurance that you are being drawn into a place of greater
intimacy and knowledge of God!
Buying Gold
There are two ways we receive from God. Some things are given to us, and some things are bought.
Thank God for the things that are
just outright given to us! He gives us eternal life; He gives us His Holy Spirit; He gives us peace and joy, etc. So many things in the Kingdom of God are free gifts, poured graciously from God’s benevolent heart upon His children.
There are certain things in the Kingdom, however, that are not given; they must be bought. Jesus talks about this in Revelation 3:18 when He says, “I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich.”
First of all, what is this gold that is refined in the fire? The answer
is two-fold:
1) This gold is a purified faith. “That the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7).
When we survive the fire, we come out on the other side with a much stronger
faith.
2) This gold is refined character. “But He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job
23:10). In a word, this gold is Christlikeness. When fiery trials have effectively made us more like Jesus, then we have indeed gained true riches.
Notice that this gold is bought. We do not earn or deserve it, but we do pay a price for it. What is the price we pay to buy such valuable spiritual treasure? It is purchased at the cost of great personal pain. This gold is bought in the fire and is attained only as we persevere and endure through the fiery trials that God sends us God’s purpose in and allowing difficulties, tribulations, calamity, infirmity, persecutions, and hardship to come our way is that we might take advantage of the opportunity and buy gold. When the crisis explodes, God wants us to fix our focus on Him, find Him in the adversity, and discover the Spirit’s pathway to renewed victory.
God’s Initiative
We can’t choose to buy this gold any time we want. We don’t wake up in the morning and decide, “I’m ready to buy gold today. Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to grow in Christlikeness today!” Your best efforts will be to no avail.
God is the one who must give us the opportunity to have our faith tested. It is all of His initiative. In fact, we don’t even tell Him when we’re ready to buy gold. He alone knows when we’re ready. You would do well not to go looking for trials, difficulties, calamity, or pressure. In fact, when Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” He was cautioning us against asking God for these kinds of pressures. We tend to think more highly of ourselves than we ought and don’t properly appreciate how devastating calamity can be. We’re really not as strong as we sometimes feel. God knows how much you can bear, and He will
allow “the perfect crisis” to hit your life at the perfect time, in order to do His perfect work in you.
So we do nothing to initiate the buying of this gold. All we can do is respond properly when God gives us the opportunity. “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten” (Revelation 3:19). We need not fear or dread the calamity; if it comes, it is customized in advance by our loving heavenly Father just for us. We can embrace it with expectancy, knowing that our perseverance will produce true riches.
When the time of testing and the fire is turned up in our lives, you can give up (“Forget it, I can’t deal with, this) or you can go for the gold (“I’m going to press into Lord now more than ever”).
The Value Of Buying
We naturally cherish and appreciate something far more if we’ve had to pay a price for it. Take for example the instance of two teenagers who each got a car. One teen was given a car by his parents; the other purchased his car with his own hard-earned money. Which one will appreciate his car more? You’re right — the one who bought a car with his
own money.
In the same way, when you buy gold in the fire of personal pain and calamity, it’s extremely precious in your eyes. That deepened character came to you at a great price. You won’t sell it, you won’t squander it, you won’t lose it, you won’t neglect it, you won’t forget it, you won’t trade it, and you won’t give it away.
When you buy gold in the fire, it’s yours!
When God turns up the heat in our lives, sometimes we find ourselves asking, “But God, why does it have to be so hot?” The Lord has a gentle answer that He wants to whisper to your heart:
“The price tag of what you’ve asked for is very high.” Yes, the fire is hot, but the final product (Christlikeness) is worth it!
Is Infirmity From God?
Sometimes the Lord allows the fires of infirmity to touch us so that we can buy gold that’s been purified in the fire. Someone might raise the argument, “Infirmity can’t be from God, because He has given us specific promises in His word that He would deliver us from all affliction.” I will deal with this question at some length later, but let me summarize my understanding of this issue here, before we go any further.
The biblical witness is very clear: God desires to deliver His chosen ones from all affliction. The most notable verse here is Psalm 34:19, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.” This Scripture is a marvelous testimonial to the ways of God.
Yes, God delivers us from all affliction, but sometimes He delays His provision in order to try us by fire. The delay itself is a fire ordained
by God to produce a deep work in our hearts. God has a design for our
deliverance, but He also has a purpose for the fiery delay. Make no mistake, delayed answers are a fire.
When you’re in crisis and have His promise of deliverance, but there’s no change in sight, the heat can become very hot indeed! His purpose in the delay is to strengthen our faith, kindle our love to new depths of passion and maturity, and impart the heart and character of Christ to us — all in order to make us a more useful vessel.
Why Infirmity And Affliction?
Again someone might ask, “Why would God send infirmity and affliction to His people? He can use persecutions and tribulations to purify our hearts, why does He have to use sickness and affliction?”
I don’t claim to have the complete answer to that question, but let me share what I see from my limited perspective. The end-times church is often referred to as the “Laodicean church” because it is characterized by the qualities of the Laodicean church in Revelation 3:14-22.
The cities of Laodicea and Corinth in Bible times had this in common: They were both given to “religious toleration.” The saints in those cities were not harassed and persecuted, but they faced a challenge of a different nature. Because of the multicultural toleration of their communities, the believers were tempted with materialism, hedonism (pleasure-seeking), and the apathy that comes from relative comfort and security.
Interestingly, these are the chief besetting sins of the church today. It’s clear that we’re living in the last of the last days.
When the fires of persecution have given way to a pseudo-toleration of Christianity, what should God do? Should He just allow that church to mutate and to degenerate into a lukewarm, milquetoast, insipid, selfcentered, powerless form of religion? No, He’s too jealous for that to happen.
So what does God do? (To understand this, we must be convinced that His ways are higher than ours.) In His mercy, He allows other fires to put the heat on our lives: financial distress; physical distress (sickness, infirmity); family distress. Without the heat, so often our love grows
cold. You say, “Those things can’t be from God because He has given us specific promises in His word that He would deliver us from those things.”
He does deliver us, but He uses the delay period (while we’re waiting for the deliverance) as a purifying fire in our lives.
Our lukewarmness has our faith in such a sickly condition that when these fires arise, we don’t have the faith to quench them. God’s intention is that when these fires blaze against us, that they challenge and provoke our faith. God has a design for our deliverance, but in the process, the fire of these distresses will have been used of God to renew and restore our
faith to a refined purity and to incite our love to new depths of fervency and maturity.
So see this clearly: The fiery distress you face is the mercy of God to you.
Salted With Fire
Mark 9:47, And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire — 48 where “Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” 49 For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.
Gehenna was a place outside Jerusalem where King Josiah, in his godly reforms, destroyed the altars of idolatry. It became a place where refuse was burned. It was the city’s incinerator. The purpose of Gehenna was the purification of the life of the city. In time, Gehenna came to be the name for the fire of hell. Gehenna (hell) is set ablaze by the holiness of God. Fire destroys the perishable and perfects that which is imperishable.
Jesus said, “everyone will be seasoned [literally, salted] with fire.” In other words, the fire of God is going to touch every human being. The only question concerning being salted with fire seems to be when — when will we be seasoned with fire? Either we will know God’s purifying fire in this life, or we will suffer the eternal flame of His holy wrath. I hear Jesus saying, “Unless this holy fire burns within you now, bringing you to true purity and peace, then you will have no escape from the fire of Gehenna which consumes forever.” Be encouraged, dear reader, that the fire is your friend. We can embrace Christ’s fire gratefully, knowing that it leads to the salvation of our souls.
Aflame For Jesus
The psalmist declares that God makes “His ministers a flame of fire” (Psalm 104:4). The Hebrew word for “ministers” (“sharat”) means:
Someone who waits on, who serves, who ministers, who attends. Although this verse in its context is describing angels, it can also be applied to us. We have come into God’s house as His attendants, those who serve Him and wait upon Him. I love the promise of this verse: Those who come before Him to serve Him and touch His heart are made into a flame of fire. The fire represents God’s holiness and passionate love. Think of it — you’re destined to be an eternal flame and to shine as brightly as a star!
We become the light of the world when our passion for Jesus burns as a flame before others. As His holiness and love burns in our hearts, we will not be able to hide the witness that will shine from our lives.
God’s fiery dealings in my life are radically changing my heart motivations. I always used to express the vision of my heart with statements such as, “I want to touch more people in our city for Christ,” or, “I want to equip more leaders for the work of the ministry.” But then God’s fire started to burn through my life. Now, I find the vision of my heart chang- ing, and it’s becoming more like, “I want to develop a greater love and fervency for Jesus.” “I want to get to know Jesus more intimately.” I’m discovering that God really does want the first commandment (to love God) to be first in my life, and the second commandment (to love others) to be second. When the two become inverted, nothing works right. When our passion for God becomes the foremost fire in our lives, then the impacting of others lives becomes the inevitable outflow of that dynamic relation-
ship with God.
The Last Days’ Fire
Carefully read the words God spoke to Daniel, as He gave Daniel insight into the very last of the last days: “Many shall be purified, made white, and refined, but the wicked shall do wickedly; and none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall understand” (Daniel 12:10).
God was telling Daniel that the very last days would be known as a time
when God would be purifying and refining His saints. The wicked will not
understand this fire, so they’ll run from it (and in the end be destroyed by it). But the righteous will understand what this fire is all about. They will embrace the fire, and rather than finding it destructive they will discover it to be constructive in their lives.
This truth is emphasized again in the letter to the Laodicean church
(Revelation 3:14-22). The last days’ church will be filled with people
whose love has become lukewarm (Revelation 3:16). But at the same
time, there will be those who will buy gold refined in the fire (Revelation 3:18), and their love for Christ will become a flaming torch. God is going to turn up the heat on His last days’ church, because if He doesn’t, His saints will succumb to apathy, greed, lukewarmness, materialism, and the self-indulgent spirit of the entertainment industry. Be ready for it in this hour, dear saint. God is going to send or permit calamity to come against His children, and He’s going to delay the answers to our cries for relief in order that He might perfect us into the image of Christ. In time He will answer our prayers, but in the meantime our love will have been purified and strengthened, and we will have become incredibly sensitized to the tactics of the beast to pull us into areas of compromise.
Finally, here’s yet one more passage that points to this last day’s fire:
Malachi 3:1, “Behold, I send My messenger, and he will prepare
the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts. 2 “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness.”
This passage describes the nature of Christ’s ministry in His first com- ing, but it also points to the nature of His ministry as His second coming approaches. Even as the Lord prepared the way for His first coming with the fiery ministry of John the Baptist, the Lord will also prepare the way for His second coming by sending His “refiner’s fire.” There is a fire go- ing forth before Him, and it is preparing us for His long-awaited return.
“He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver.”
This is a reference to all believers, for we are all called to offer spiritual sacrifices before God (Romans 12:1). But I see it applying in particular to those that accept God’s call to leadership in the body of Christ. God is going to turn up the heat on His pastors and leaders. The end result will be wonderful, however, a company of leaders will arise in the last
days who will offer to the Lord “an offering in righteousness.”
Instead of loving their labors, they will love their Lord. Instead of gaining fulfillment in their ministries, they will find fulfillment in offering themselves without guile to God in adoration.
These servants will be the gold vessels of 2 Timothy 2:21, “a vessel for honor, sanctified and useful for the Master, prepared for every good work.”
Shalom!
Ambassador Monday O. Ogbe
God’s Eagle Ministries
