When we surrender to God, God will transform our lives with fire.

Fire.  It is one of those essential aspects of life.  It has been there since the beginning of God’s creation when God said, “Let there be light”.  Most of us know that fire is not God, but how many of us are aware that God is fire?  That is what the author of Hebrews tells us in the Bible when he says that “our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:29)  Throughout the Bible, God makes Himself known through this incredible, powerful element of fire.  Have you ever wondered why we light the candles on a Sunday morning for our service or why I have lit out here this morning?  Probably not, but I will tell you anyways!  It obviously is not for the light that they produce – we have enough light in the lamps in the Sanctuary, just like the sun today gives us more than enough light for our worship together.  No, we light the candles because it reminds us that our God is a consuming fire, and we desire to experience His fiery presence when we come together on a Sunday morning.

That sounds a little intimidating, doesn’t it – God’s fiery presence?  You know, you and I tend to prefer it when God is safe and predictable, when we maybe can see His fire in our lives in a joyful way and we enjoy seeing His fire in the life of another person, but we don’t want God’s fire to consume us or to control us too much.  And yet there is such power when the fire of God touches our lives – it does change us forever.  That fire was very present in our Scripture passage today in I Kings 18, as we continue my sermon series this morning on the great moments in the life of the prophet Elijah.  Last week we talked about Elijah made a bold challenge to the prophets of Baal, the foreign god that evil King Ahab and his wife Jezebel had brought into the nation of Israel.   Ahab had invited Elijah along with 450 prophets of Baal and all the people of Israel to Mount Carmel, a mountain in the center of the nation, to decide once and for all who Israel’s God would be.  Mount Carmel had formerly had an altar to Jehovah or the Lord, the one true God of Israel, but Ahab and his wife Jezebel had torn that altar down and replaced it with an altar to Baal.  Elijah was actually the only public prophet of Jehovah left in the country, as the rest had all been killed by Ahab or forced into hiding.  So Elijah on that day proposes a contest with the prophets of Baal, saying that the two sides should both get a bull and cut it into pieces and put it on the wood, as they would normally do for a sacrifice to God.  However, they were not to set fire to it, as they would normally, but rather the prophets of Baal were to call on the name of their god, and Elijah would call on the name of the Lord.  The god who answered by fire – that would be the one the nation of Israel would know is the one true God.  So in this way,

ELIJAH CHALLENGES THE PEOPLE TO FOLLOW GOD.

Well, the prophets of Baal took the bull given them and they prepared it for sacrifice.  Then they called on the name of Baal from morning until noon as they danced around the altar cutting themselves and crying out “O Baal, answer us!  Bring us your fire!”  But there was no response – no one answered.  Finally they limped off to the sidelines, physically and emotionally spent.  Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come here to me.”  He gathered them around the altar of the Lord that Jezebel had ordered torn down, and he took twelve stones, one for each of the tribes of Israel, and with those stones he built a new altar to the Lord.  Now as we talked about last week, Elijah was a bit of a showman, so after he prepares the sacrifice with the bull and the wood, he asks the people to dig a trench around it, and then instructs them to pour four gallons of water on the wood not just once, not just twice, but three times, so that the wood was totally drenched and the trench around it was filled to overflowing with water.  I’m sure the people of Israel watched with amazement as Elijah did this, but you see, Elijah just had such tremendous confidence in the power of God ever since he had seen God raise that young son of the widow that he had lived with from death to life. 

So at the appropriate time, Elijah walked up to the soaked altar, and without spending anytime dancing or crying out or cutting himself like the prophets of Baal, he simply prayed this prayer and let’s say this prayer together, “O Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, prove now that you are the God of Israel and that I am your servant and have done all this at your command.  Answer me, Lord, answer me, so that this people will know that you, the Lord, are God, and that you are bringing them back to yourself.”  I Kings 18:36b-37 (GN) What faith Elijah had as he prayed that prayer, as he asked God to prove that He was the God of Israel so that these people would know it, and the Bible tells us that

GOD RESPONDS WITH FIRE TO ELIJAH’S PRAYER.

It was at that moment that the Lord sent fire down, which burned up the sacrifice, the wood and the stones, scorched the earth and dried up the water in the trench.  What an amazing sight it must have been!  And the Bible tells us the reaction of the people of Israel, that they threw themselves on the ground and exclaimed, “The Lord is God, the Lord alone is God!” Thousands of people as one acknowledged with their words and their actions that the nation of Israel had just one God, and that God was the Lord.  And Elijah ordered that the prophets of Baal be killed so that the stain of idolatry and following other gods would be taken away from Israel, and he then went confidently back to the capital with Ahab as the skies poured down rain and the drought that the Lord God brought to Israel came to an end.  Elijah confidently expected that the nation would now turn her heart back to the living God.   That is not exactly what happened in the end, but I will tell you more about that next week.

I want you to understand this morning though that

GOD WANTS YOU TO EXPERIENCE HIS FIRE TOO.

The wonderful thing about God’s fire is that it still draws people to Him, just like it did on the day Elijah called God’s fire down.  You know, the following warning is put on a Duraflame fireplace log – “Caution-risk of fire.”  I find that humorous because I don’t know why you would buy a Duraflame log if you didn’t want to set it on fire, but there it is.  Well, maybe we should have a sign over the front of our church that says “Caution-risk of fire.”  Because the Holy Spirit of God wants to touch all of our lives with His fire.    Now, the reality is that some of us here today are like wood.  You may have been going to church your whole life, or this may be the first time you have stepped foot in a church in a long time, but in either case, you have never really encountered God in your life, and God has never encountered you.  You’ve never opened your life to Him, and so you’ve never been set on fire.  So you’ve got all this wood in your life, and the way you can know that it is just wood and not fire is because you’re not passionate about the things of God.  But I want you to know this morning that God can even consume with His firewood that has been drenched in water.

Some of us here today are more like ashes.  What has happened with you is that you were wood, and at some vulnerable moment in your life you did say something like, “God, I’m yours.  I understand that you are a consuming fire.  I give you everything I am.  I throw my life, my future, my dreams, my hopes, my pain into your flames.”  And God’s fire did consume you in that moment, and you were burning for God.  But then, over time, the fire in you went out, and you discovered that you had nothing left in you but ashes.  And the way you talk is, “There was a time when I knew God, a time when I felt really close to God.”  Now you keep looking back at that time as you carry around your ashes.

And then there are some of us who have our little pilot lights on.  God’s fire is at work in our lives, but in pretty small ways.  But God wants to give you more, God wants you to experience more of His consuming fire, He wants to fan the flame.  You see, when God consumes us with his fire, he purifies us; He burns our pride, our greed, our jealousy, our bitterness, our anger, and our self-righteousness.  He transforms our dreams and our hopes and our visions for our future.  God’s fire comes into our lives whenever we cry out to Him. 

Today, I would like to offer you the opportunity to be filled more with the fire of God.  In Paul’s letter to Timothy in the Bible, Paul says this to Timothy, and let’s say it together from II Timothy 1:6 (TNIV), “For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands.  For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.”  So Paul encourages Timothy to fan into flame the gifts of God within him, knowing that the Spirit does not make us timid but gives us power and love and self-discipline.  In a moment, I will invite you to come forward if you would like more of the fire of God in your life.  Mark as an elder of the church and I will be up front, and if you desire more of God’s presence in your life, more of God’s passion within you, if you want more of His power and to experience more of His love or to know His self-discipline, I will invite you to come forward to be anointed in Jesus’ name and prayed over.   Please don’t worry about what the person on your right or left is thinking, but if God is calling you this morning to experience more of Him, please respond to that call.  Amen.