Third Day - Lead Us Back: Songs Of WorshipSample

SOUL ON FIRE

In Exodus 3 we find Moses in a desperate place. He had killed a man and fled Egypt. Now the former grandson of Pharaoh was living a humble life as an outcast. And as he tended his father-in-law’s flocks, he came across a most curious sight: a bush filled with a fire that would not go out.

God could have revealed Himself to Moses in any number of ways. Yet He presented Himself as an unquenchable fire. This fire theme appears time and time again throughout the Scriptures, whether it be a pillar of fire piercing the night sky and leading the Israelites through the desert, or the fiery furnace into which three Hebrew children were cast and came out unscathed. Ezekiel was forever changed by a vision of a fire in the sky. Later, God is described as a “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), inspiring one of Third Day’s earliest songs.

The God that Moses met in the desert is the same as the God we can know today. At His heart He is an untamable, all-consuming fire. Just like Moses, our early faith experiences can involve a fiery encounter, and we can come away, as John Wesley said, with our heart “strangely warmed.” We are a “soul on fire.”

God used Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt in epic fashion but later in his life, things got hard again. As he faced all kinds of trials, surely Moses thought back to that original encounter with God at the burning bush and wished he could reignite that fire of faith, returning to a place of simple trust. Similarly, we go through the briars and brambles of life and feel defeated. We long for the initial fire of faith we had in our original meeting with God.

God has made it clear that the way to reignite our faith is not through any sort of human striving. Rather, He wants us to encounter Him anew. He wants us to spend time sitting still in His presence and basking in the fire of His love. God’s fire is all-consuming, and it will never go out. And if we sit in His presence, He will rekindle the fire of faith.

Prayer: Lord let me burn for You again. Let me return to You again.

Written by Mark Lee of THIRD DAY