February 1

Hearts aflame

“The God that answereth by fire, let him be God” (2 Kings 18:24).
“He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” (Matt. 3:11).

Fire makes warm; it makes to glow. You stand before a furnace door, behind which is a glowing fire. You have in your hand a bar of iron; it is cold, and black, and forbidding, and there is no beauty in it. But you take that cold, dark, forbidding bar of iron, and you open the furnace door and thrust it into the glowing fire. Soon it is warm, then it becomes red hot and glows with marvelous beauty, and you have the cold bar of iron glowing with fire. You and I are cold—oh, how cold we are! And the Lord Jesus takes us and He plunges us into the fire of the Holy Spirit. We begin to grow warm, and soon we glow, glow with love to God, glow with love for perishing souls.


Men and women, the great need of the day is men and women on fire. Brethren, that is what we need in the pulpit, ministers on fire. What cold men most of us preachers are! Orthodox enough, it may be, and we present the most solemn truth with great force of reason and great beauty of rhetoric and most convincing eloquence, and our audiences sit there and admire our strong preaching, but they do not repent of their sins. Why not? Because we are not on fire. We convince the intellect, but we do not melt the heart. But put a minister who is on fire in the pulpit, and the audience will melt.
But we need that kind of people in the choir as well. What beautiful choirs we have nowadays! Why, they sing almost like angels, and the people sit there admiring them, but nobody is converted by their singing. But when we get a man on fire to sing, or a woman on fire to sing, something is brought to pass.
That is what we need in our Sunday School classes. We set a young man or a young woman to teach a Sunday School class, and they know the lesson capitally and study all the latest “helps,” and make the lesson tremendously interesting, but the boys and girls and men and women in their classes are not converted, because the teachers are not on fire.—R. A. Torrey.

Holiness is both the secret and source of spiritual passion. Apart from a burning passion, both Christian living and spiritual ministry are ineffective.
How basic is spiritual passion in personal living! When it is absent, the individual is frustrated by burdensome dissatisfaction and haunted by an inescapable sense of divine disappointment.—Dr. Frank Bateman Stanger.

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