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Come to the Fire
By Aletha Hinthorn
Several years ago I registered at the Nazarene Theological Seminary for a class called “Homiletical Study of Holiness.” When Professor Darrell Moore passed around Scripture references asking us to draw one to use as the text for the sermon we would be preaching, I drew Ezekiel 36:19-28. I was excited to study God’s promise to cleanse us and to put a new spirit in us, but I had no idea how this passage would fill me with a new hope.
The background fascinated me. God had told the Israelites they could live in Canaan. The only catch was that they had to obey His laws. The word Canaan is from a word that means “to bend the knee.” They must keep their knees bent to God to stay in Canaan. If they failed to surrender, they would be scattered to other nations where they would be living like the people around them.
The surrounding nations knew God had promised the Israelites that they could live in Canaan. What the nations didn’t understand was that it all depended upon the Israelites’ obedience to God. So when they disobeyed and had to leave Canaan, they assumed the Israelites had a weak God. He apparently couldn’t keep His promises and defend His own turf. “And wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name, for it was said of them, ‘These are the Lord’s people, and yet they had to leave his land’” (vs. 20). The scattering of the people had conveyed to the surrounding nations—not the righteous judgment of God—but His powerlessness to come to their aid.
How He was perceived mattered greatly to God. “I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone” (vs 21). Five times in this passage, God stated that they had profaned His holy name. This was no light matter. God’s reputation was held in contempt because of His apparent inability to keep His people in their promised land.
God could not sit idly by while His name was being tarnished. From the beginning, God planned to reveal Himself to the rest of the world through His people. He wanted all the nations to know Him! “Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him” (Genesis 18:18).
So God promised to bring the Israelites back to their land—but it would not be for their sake. This surprised me. His promise to do something new for them is bracketed by His statement “It is not for your sake” (vss. 22, 32). In no way did they deserve His intervention. But God wanted the whole world to see His grace and glory. He decided to act for one reason: “Then the nations will know that I am the LORD…when I show myself holy through you before their eyes” (vs. 23). He would do something that would enable God to show His holiness through their lives.
As I studied the context for these promises, a new hope for our day began to form within me.
Our Own Dilemma
It is not difficult to see the parallel with our day. Despite God’s call for us to be a holy people, we are profaning His name. When George Barna did a survey of 152 separate items comparing the lost world and those in the churches, he found virtually no difference between the two. God’s name—His reputation—is being damaged in our day. His people live the same self-indulgent lifestyles as those around us. Rather than being a separated people, in Old Testament language, we have been scattered to other nations.
The non-Christian looks to his position, power, and natural joys for his security and pleasure. So do many of us. We seldom relate to Christ who said, “I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.”
I was sitting at a dinner with my husband and overheard a conversation between two physicians sitting across from us. “Life is the pits,” one said.
“Yes, life is the pits,” the other one agreed.
I thought, Yes, that’s right. They don’t know Jesus.
The next Sunday I overheard two women talking at church and one was saying, “Life is the pits.”
Her friend agreed, “Yes, life is the pits.”
“Dear Jesus,” I prayed, “how can this be? They know You.”
Immediately, these words were in my mind. My people are finding their pleasure in the same things as those who are not My people.
We’re lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. Ball games draw greater crowds than the prayer meetings. Love for TV tops passion for the Word. We easily talk of wanting God to be glorified, but when we are in trouble, our chief concern is that we be delivered and how God is perceived matters little.
The result? Millions profess to be indwelt by Christ, but His life is seldom visible. All of this is not lost on the world. They wonder why we who claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit often act as they do. Do we have a weak God who calls us to be holy as He is holy but who is unable to keep us from sinning? Superficial Christianity matters to God.
But it is precisely when His name is being profaned that God promises to act. And when God begins to act, He will do so with a single object in mind: the vindication of His holy name. This word comes as a relief. We know we do not deserve His blessing. Concern for His reputation will cause Him to act on our behalf.
For the honor of His name, God will cleanse His people from all idols and put His Spirit within us so that it will be, as H. Orton Wiley said, as natural for us to obey as it is for the birds to fly. His life-giving Spirit will unite our will with the divine will so that we will be empowered to live in obedience. Others will then see the beauty of His holiness in us.
What a good word of hope for our day!
The Come to the Fire Conferences
In 2005 a small group of us met for three days to pray and seek God’s will for a conference that would call women to live wholly for Jesus. We desired to promote the message that God not only cleanses our hearts and inner desires and motives but that we can live fully satisfied in Jesus no matter our circumstances.
Our ultimate goal is to see the fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21, “May they also be in us so that the world may believe.” Only when God’s holiness is evident in His people will Jesus’ prayer be answered. “Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I show myself holy through you before their eyes” (Ezekiel 36:23).
When I told my pastor of this vision for such a conference, he immediately responded, “You can have it at College Church.” So the first Come to the Fire conference was scheduled for October, 2006 at the College Church of the Nazarene, in Olathe, Kansas.
One Saturday in February 2006, I was sitting at my desk thinking of the mountain of things to be done before the conference only months away. Suddenly it was as though God placed three words on top of all my thoughts. He said, “I am coming.”
From that moment, I didn’t want a one to miss it—rather, I didn’t want a one to miss Him. I wept before Him, “Lord, summon the women.” He did and brought over 1,000 women from dozens of states. He did it again in 2007.
The following note from Sheila Morse of the New Life Church of the Nazarene in Camdenton, Missouri, is one of more than one hundred testimonies we’ve received:
“The Holy Spirit came and filled my heart and mind and freed me from my past hurts and revealed to me how great a love that Jesus has for me. I have attended church, volunteered and even attended Bible studies for years, but there was something missing, a void in my life that nothing would satisfy. While I was there I was changed and the stirring in my heart was for more of Him and less of me. It was very difficult to leave that holy place where the presence of Jesus filled the very air I breathed.
“I was afraid that somehow I would lose what I had discovered there. Well, as God would have it, I did not. From that time on I have been drawn into a love relationship with Jesus and I am learning to live for Him and his Kingdom … I love Him so much that I think my heart just might burst!”
God did come as He promised in the 2006 and 2007 Come to the Fire conferences and hundreds of women went home changed.
I sense, though, that God is going to do something new in 2008—something exceeding abundantly above what we’ve seen. My hope is based upon His purpose for the Church:
“For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, he displays his glory in Israel” (Isaiah 44:23). Dr. John Oswalt translates this to mean that God has chosen us to be His adornment. An amazing thought! God has chosen us to be what others see of Him. He will act, not for our sake, but for the honor of His reputation. When His holiness is no longer in view of the world, God takes action.
The Come to the Fire conferences call women to come and receive His fiery cleansing so they can dwell in Him who is a consuming fire. His fiery cleansing destroys pride, selfish ambition, self-centeredness—all that is destructive to His holy life in us.
But the conferences are not just about a one-time coming into His presence. Fire is His very essence. We who say we abide in Him who is a consuming fire must be ready to dwell continually in that Fire so He is free to reveal anything that hinders His holiness being seen in us.
My great longing and prayer have become, “Will You do something for Your Church to restore the fame of Your name? Will You do all that You desire so You’ll be glorified in all the earth.”
I believe that a new day is on the horizon for Christ’s Church.
Aletha Hinthorn is director of the Women Alive Ministries and the Come to the Fire conferences and editor of the Come to the Fire magazine.