“Are You Firewood?” [A Dry Season/Life]

“You cannot train a man for freedom while he is in captivity,” Paul Manwaring.

“PIT – stands for prophet in training or people in transformation. Unless your character is transformed, it will ruin the growth or ministry that came through your gifting. But the pit you are in, God’s going to make it into a well as you cooperate with Him so He can grow you,” ‘Brokenness,’ by Graham Cooke.

For years I kept struggling with wondering if I was in a dry place. After years of this it got to the point where I didn’t know what a wet place was. I have been a Christian for nearly 29 years. My heart and sometimes my actions would convince people otherwise. Why was I not feeling like or acting like a follower of Jesus? Where was the fruit? Where was the freedom? I could never keep peace for more than a moment. The fruit in me and from my ministry labors would not last and often decayed. What was wrong with me? Was I even a Christian, if these were the results? I kept working so hard to be a godly follower. I despised my sin and temptations. Then all of the stuff I learned in January 2014 set me free. (See prior 3 blogs.)Stop trying to stop sinning. 
Keep the old man buried. Ask God to teach you the fruit of the Spirit and bear it through you. Let God make progress through you as He leads and pours His Spirit into you to grow you into who He desires you to become.

While at the elder’s retreat in early February I shared some of this transformation. Then one of our elders talked about the vine and the branches from John 15. Remaining in the vine yields life and fruit. John 15: ⁶ ”If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.”  About an hour later an illustration hit me as we were hanging around the fire place. The fire was roaring pretty good. But every once in a while we would have to add more fuel. The fuel was dry, dead wood that had been cut from trees and split so it could catch on fire more easily. It came from a life-less tree that was good for no life or fruit. So it just needed to be burned.

It is thrown into the fire and destroyed. Lots of other analogies can come from this but let’s just focus on a branch being dead and not bearing fruit; even though, this was obviously not a vine or a fruit tree in the photos.

The mental picture I want you to get is that the branch was dead and separate from the vine. It could do nothing on its own. It was worthless for bringing about the fruit necessary for life. This is how I had been living most of my life as a Christian. I was not hell-bound. I was a believer. But my fruit was crappy because the old man was still in charge. He had not been put to death. Christ had not been living through me [Gal 2:20]. The branch [me] was not bearing good fruit because abiding in the vine and dying to sin and self was not understood and; therefore, had not yet happened.

So, let’s die to self. Realize the old man was crucified at the cross and is of no value to the Christian life. Quit attempting to resurrect the firewood. Burn it! You cannot fix or clean up the old life. It is dead. God killed it at the cross. You have been raised to a new life and grafted into the vine so God can bear fruit through you. You are a new person. The old has gone. 

You are not firewood. You are a fruit-bearing valuable member of the vine, the church, the Kingdom of God. You are His child. Rest in the vine. Receive His love.

When my daughter was starting to get all this stuff she was still struggling with identity issues, self-worth and insecurities [old man thinking]; one night God spoke to her, “How can you think you are nothing when I thought of you before I made the stars?”

Wow!

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

― Steve Jobs