OnFire Encouragement Letter

Hi Folks:

We’ve had a good week. Mark is over his strep throat. Ian did paint ball for the first time yesterday and had a blast (pardon the pun). He came home showing off his welts.

I’m going to a conference this week on evangelism in Canada with John Stackhouse. I’m looking forward to this. He teaches theology and culture at Regent College in Vancouver, and ought to provide some great insight.

We have a prayer request - a friend of ours, Dwayne, has been diagnosed with a brain tumour of some kind. Please pray for him, his wife, and children. All this is very new, and there are no answers yet about diagnosis and treatment.

Blessings for your week.

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We’re doing some renovations at our church. We’re upgrading the audio-visual system, replacing the time-worn pews with chairs, painting the sanctuary, and re-doing the roof, among other things. Its quite a big project and for the next number of weeks we’ll worship in the gymnasium.

As I walked across the parking lot the other day, I noticed a glassy, black rock. Curious as always, I picked it up. About the size of my palm, it resembled a cross between plastic and coal. It would have been a mystery, except that there was a crew of men on the roof and a large hot tar pot in the parking lot.

As I looked around, I noticed that the tar came in large, black blocks. An operator dropped the blocks into the hot pot to be melted and spread into place. My piece must have been knocked off one of those big blocks.

An interesting property of the tar is that it must be heated and softened in order to be useful. As a black, oily smelling block, its usefulness is limited. It is really only useful when it is melted.

Hebrews 3:12-13 says, “see to it brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” (NIV)

It is possible as a Christian to have a cold, hard, black lump for a heart. We’re not talking the Grinch, here. Remember him from Dr. Seusss, the mean guy who stole all the presents? It would be easy enough to point to people who are evidently cold and hard in their approach to life. After all, most of us are nice enough. No, we’re not talking about being nice.

No, we’re talking about the cooling which can happen, even if we’ve seen God do some pretty neat things. Remember the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13? What caused the seed of God’s word to die away? Trouble and persecution. Worries. Temptation. The pressures of life.

We will never escape attacks of temptation or discouragement, and sometimes our level of faith will go up and down. But our hearts do not have to be hardened. We need to watch them to keep them from cooling. And we need to encourage each other. Encourage - to pour courage into. This is how we keep our hearts from cooling and hardening. No cold hard lumps of tar.

I hope this helps. Be on fire.

Troy

OnFire is a weekly letter on faith and character written by Troy Dennis. This letter published Oct 20, 2008. To subscribe or reply, email him at onfireletter@gmail.com. Archives are located at www.onfireletter.com