Picked From the Fire
John Wesley never forgot a terrible night of his childhood. He was only six years old at the time, and he had awakened in the family’s old rectory to find it ablaze from top to bottom. Everyone else had been dragged from the building, but by some extraordinary oversight he had been forgotten. At the very last moment, just before the roof fell in with a crash, a neighbor climbed on another’s shoulders and pulled the terrified child from a window. Later that scene was drawn for Wesley, and he kept the picture until the day of his death. He wrote under it this verse in the third chapter of Zechariah: "Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?"
Wesley’s experience in being literally saved from fire was unusual, but all of God’s people experience it in a far more important sense. Jesus Christ has rescued us from the fires of hell. We too are encouraged to do so for others. Jude 23 reads, "save others snatching them out of the fire."
[Christians too are in a testing fire. And the time we spend on this earth is the only hell we will ever know.]
From a sermon by Dennis Davidson, Satan Rebuked & Man Cleansed, 2/25/2010