Stronger: Forty Days of Metal and Spirituality by Brian Welch

Author:Brian Welch [Welch, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062010766
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

DAY 20

Daniel 12:10

Many will be purified, cleansed, and refined by these trials. But the wicked will continue in their wickedness, and none of them will understand. Only those who are wise will know what it means.

SO MANY CHRISTIANS, myself included, think that after God comes into our lives, we have to become perfect people. That, my friends, is religion talking. Religion is people trying to be good enough for God. The fact is, we can’t act good enough for God because we don’t know what’s inside of us and we can’t fix ourselves.

God desires Christians to achieve a certain level of maturity so that He can supernaturally purify, cleanse, and refine the inside of us. This is what today’s passage says so eloquently—that a process of purification and refinement is essential for every Christian who means business. God does this by adversity, in the form of heavy trials that come into our lives over and over. According to a speaker I heard once, our emotions are the first objective of purification, because they are the most difficult to regulate (since they bypass the mind). From that starting point, the speaker said, the human soul-life must be tested (tempted and tried) time after time until Christians have confidence only in the soul-life of Christ in them. Pretty deep.

Matthew 3:11 mentions the baptism of fire: a burning that comes inside of us when God allows adverse life episodes to burn out everything in us that doesn’t live by faith. When negative situations come crashing down on us, our response reveals the true character that’s inside our hearts. As various ugly aspects of that character rise to the surface each time we freak out and lose it in the middle of heavy trials, those aspects get taken out of us and replaced with the character of Jesus. I don’t understand how, but our invisible God does this invisible work inside of us. Check this verse out:

Proverbs 20:30 (NIV)

Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being.

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