Consuming Fire

Connect

Last week what did name of God did we study? Yahweh

We looked at Exodus chapter 4 to learn and understand that our God is most definately the Great I Am. The fact of the matter is that our God pursues us even when the circumstances may be fighting against it. This week we will look in to another side of the undisputed champ of the world.

I want you to Imagine a wild fire. An uncomtrolable force that engulfs everything in it’s path. The path is not decided by a particular person or circumstance. The fire has one need, to keep burning.

As Christian’s we treat our faith more like a candle flame most of the time. As people, we like to picture a God that we can control and manipulate at our will. We get nervous when we have to have a little something called faith, which is the hope for things to come. Or even when we have to “hope” which is defined as the confidence in the outcome of a particular situation.

The point that I am trying to make is that we have to let go of this need to put God in a box and make Him in to something that we can understand. We will never experience the fullness of what our lives could be unless we let go of the man made Idol that we have turned God in to.

Instead of experiencing fullness we will get anger, anxiety, and apathy.

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Context

We find ourselves at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy which the man of God named Moses’ is writing to the Israelite people, the chosen people of God. Then we find our self in chapter 4 of this book which in which Moses is calling the people of God to obey Yahweh’s commands. He references when the people came up short and worshipped Baal instead of worshiping the God that brought them out of captivity.

Moses also reminds them when God commanded him to gather God’s people around the mountain at Horeb. And when they gathered, they witnessed a mountain engulfed in fired saying to follow the ten commandments that were written on the stone tablets and to follow the statutes and laws set for them.

Then, that is when we pick up in chapter 4 verses 15-21.

Moses writes to command the people to not fashion their own saviors, noting that they had done it once before, but if history tells us anything, we don’t always learn from our mistakes.

Don’t try to act all holy on me either because that’s true in our own lives as well. When we get in trouble by our parents for hanging out for hanging around a certain person.

When you get in trouble for waiting until the last minute on you homework or even not turning it in.

When you get in trouble for smoking, yet you continue to do it.

We don’t always learn from our mistakes, so sometimes God has to give us some tough love in the form of very direct commands so that there is no question which way we should go.

God is fair, just, and righteous all of the time. Yet we live a life that doesn’t communicate that at all to the world around us.

People say all the time to follow your heart, that is the dumbest thing that I have ever heard.

Jer

Jeremiah 17:9 HCSB

The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?

I don’t need to want what my heart wants, I need to want God more than anything.

Apply

1. Consumed with Myself (v. 15-18)

I don’t know how many times in my own life that I have been so consumed with myself that I have made my worship more about my stuff more than I have made it about My God. Faith is not simply about ourselves, but about the God that we created us to desire fulfillment through him.

God has never created anything or anyone that deserves our worship as much as He does.

Lies that you believe if you are consumed with yourself:

Nobody can tell me what to do with my own life. I’ll do whatever I want.

Galatians 2:20 HCSB

and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Galatia

I can do it all myself.

2 Corinthians 12:9 HCSB

But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.

2 Corinthians

I don’t need/care about God.

Proverbs 3:5–6 HCSB

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; think about Him in all your ways, and He will guide you on the right paths.

Proverbs 3:

2. Consumed with Creation (v. 19-20)

Too many times have I worshipped the things created over the one that creates them. I have spent more time in my life than I would like to admit. Even when I know what and who I am called to worship, it is my actions that speak louder than my word ever could. My heart is consumed with a terminal condition called sin and it get me a one way ticket to hell without the intervention from my God!

Matthew 6:24 HCSB

“No one can be a slave of two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot be slaves of God and of money.

Matthew

You see, what owns your heart in private, will end up consuming your life in public.

3. Consumed with Fire (v. 24)

This has always been such and interesting verse to me because of the language used. God is.. Well God, what doe HE have to be jealous of. The more that I dug in to this passage and the more that it dug in to me, it hit me. Out of all of His creation: space, planets, gravity; God loves us the most. The greatest thing that we could ever accomplish in this life is to live it for him.

Romans 12:2 HCSB

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

Response

There are many in this room right now that are consumed by something, and it’s not God. You have probably been wrestling with it the whole time I have been speaking. But at the end of the day, you know that if, God forbid, but it something happened to you tonight and you didn’t wake up in the morning, you would bust hell wide open if God were to judge the way that you have lived your life up until this point.

One simple question and we will be finished. Heaven or Hell friend?

Are you being consumed by this world? Or are you being consumed by the God of this universe.

Romans

Romans 2:16 HCSB

on the day when God judges what people have kept secret, according to my gospel through Christ Jesus.