I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!(Luke 12:49 NJB) What a powerful and frightening statement! For those gathered around Jesus it was a very disturbing. Why would it be disturbing? What do these words mean to you?
What do you think of when Jesus talks of fire? Why would He wish the earth to be a blaze? Does He mean an actual burning up of the earth?
Let’s begin by talking about what Jesus meant when He talked about fire. To the people of this time, it would almost always be viewed as the symbol of judgment. In their eyes they felt Jesus regarded the coming of his kingdom as a time of judgment. The Jews firmly believed that God would judge other nations by one standard and themselves by another and that the very fact that a man was a Jew would be enough to absolve him.
However was Jesus really talking about end times or was he referring to another kind of “fire”? Maybe he was referring to the fire of the Holy Spirit. You see for all the judgment and wrath that He did talk of, his true message was to bring about a fire in the hearts of men for God.
Instead of calling down fire from Heaven to destroy us, Jesus is referring to calling down a fire from Heaven to cleanse our souls, to free us from the bonds and wages of our wrong doings. It is also the fire that starts within each of us, that makes us want to spread the Message of the Gospel to others.
Each of us carries the spark of that Fire upon our hearts. We are called by God to pass the igniter of that spark on to others. That igniter is the hope we receive in Christ.
So in a sense Jesus does want the whole world consumed by fire. He wants it to be consumed in our awakening to the call from the Holy Spirit. He wants us spread His message to all.
Why? So that everybody in the world will not have to experience the fire of the final judgment. Jesus tells us these things to give us a sense of urgency in the manners of the spirit.
He also tells us as we take up this cause it will not be easy for those around us. What is it said?
“Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." (Luke 12:51-53 NIV)
Jesus tells the crowd that they are wrong if they think He had come to bring peace to their families and lives. In fact finding Christ in your life can often time have the opposite affect upon a family.
There is a movie called Kingdom Come and in that movie, Whoopi Goldberg plays the matriarch of this strangely dysfunctional family. In this one scene she is speaking to the pastor as they go over her plans for her husband’s funeral. The pastor is explaining how he has observed her husband during his time in the community. However Whoopi explains to him that is because he (the pastor) did not know her husband until he was “old and sick”, quoting her from the movie line.
She tells the pastor of a time when she attended a church revival, and was over come by the Holy Spirit. She said that she got saved that night and she was so happy. She came home and told her husband Bud that he needed to go down to that revival and get his soul saved as well. Bud would not hear of it, in fact he forbade her from ever going to another revival. He was very angry with her for giving God control of her life.
The point is that often times when we have taken Christ into our lives and are filled with the Spirit. We are transformed in such away that people are unable to recognize who we are any more. For loved ones this can be hard because we already have a set image of who this person is, and how that person fits into the family situation.
Sometimes the fear from the other family members is that this person will try to “change” them. Or they will want to point out the flaws in the life they have. As a result, they may even attempt to return that person to the life they previously had.
This is why Jesus said, I have come to bring division. The Word of God is about the sharing of the truth, it is not about making a compromise in what He has said so that we all can get along. However these divisions and splits can be only temporary, they often lead many to find the life they were so avidly against. Where the division between son and father may have appeared irreparable, a new relationship maybe knitted together.
For example, my mother and father had a very rough marriage in their early years. Both were very young and they were rushed into marriage after one day learning that my mother would be expecting me in about 7 months. They made many of the mistakes that young couples make in their lives. Being so young and so inexperienced and obviously not ready for the responsibilities that go along with being married and having children, my parents’ marriage was anything but blissful. At one point when I was ten my parents even separated for awhile, however they did get back together.
When I was in Junior High my mom started going back to church for the first time since the early 1970’s.
There was a new pastor at our church in Selma. His name was Chris Daniels and this was his first appointment in the Iowa Annual Conference. She came to hear him preach and was filled with the Holy Spirit through his passion for the Lord.
Now my father was not much of a church going person and did not have much use for some of the ones that were. While he never really did not say so, he was not very happy with mom’s conversion. This created new strains on a marriage that was none too stable anyways.
However, over the next several years, dad would attend church every once in a while. In fact, in the last year of his life I remember him going to church a couple of times that summer. As they both grew closer to God, their marriage began to gain the peace it had not had in the previous 22 years. At the end of the summer of 1989 my dad was killed in a farming accident, and I know that in his death he had taken with him the peace that Christ had given him.
Also in that struggle and division that my mom and dad faced in those seven years between her rediscovery and his death, God used those struggles and victories as way to tempore her spirit for the days following the tragic end of my dad’s death.
It also allowed her faith to be strengthened, so that as her sons wallowed and foundered in their own grief at the loss of their father, she would continue to pray that both of them would one day be able to forgive God and themselves. She consistently prayed that one day they would recover the faith they lost on that terrible day in August of 1989.
In those next few years as her faith strengthened my brother and my own faiths plummeted. We both lost all hope in God; we both had become so angry at him that we blamed him for everything that was wrong in our lived. For my brother it was through alcohol and drugs and other activities. For me it was through a hopeless life, and a bad first marriage. I praise God daily that He answered my mother’s prayers and that my brother and I both now are once again serving the Lord.
Hebrews chapter 11 verses 39-40 says:
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. (Hebrews 11:39-40 NIV)
What Paul and Jesus were trying to point out to us is that with faith in Christ comes struggle. Even the faithful ancestors of the Jews had to struggle in their lives. None of them went through life without some kind of obstacle to over come.
They remind us that they carried the fire of the Holy Spirit with them. Even when life seemed hopeless, the Spirit was with them.
Paul tells us in Romans chapter 12
Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. (Romans 12:11-12 NIV)
When we are under the affliction of conflict this is when we should be most vigilant in our prayers. It is at this time when the Holy Spirit is at work in our midst. The answer to prayer is at hand, and it becomes a life changing soul altering moment. Which, can bring about the fire of the Spirit in yet another believer.
With each new believer the fire spreads a little further around the world. More people come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior each and everyday.
Just think about this way. In 30 A.D. there were roughly 511 people who believed that Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth was the Messiah. Among those who did not believe him to be the Messiah included his brothers James and Jude. However by 60 A.D., more than 15,000 people from Judea to Rome believed Him to be the Messiah, including His brother James who would die for His beliefs at the hands of the Sanhedrin.
By the middle of the Second Century A.D., a little over a hundred years after the death of Jesus, His followers had spread from the British Isles to the steppes of Russia, to port of Carthage, the jungles of India, and the Kingdom of Ethiopia. Further more it has gone from being just a back water Jewish cult to being considered a threat to the Roman Empire. And yet the fire continued to spread.
By the 4th Century AD, in 312 AD Christianity became the religion of the entire Roman known world. Followers of Christ now ranged from all the way into remains of the Persian Empire, even some ventured into Tibet all in the name of carrying the flame further. All this was in the short span of 300 years.
Now we are near to seeing Christ’s prophecy fulfilled as the Gospel is being received world wide. Each day new peoples hear the Word for the first time in their language. Each day a new heart is opened to the Holy Spirit.
My challenge to each of us here is to heed Paul’s words about not quelling the Spirit. Let it lead you to where you can bring another person to know the fire of the God. Amen.
