Time of Preparation
Begin by taking inventory of your surroundings. Are things in your vicinity conducive to a time of personal worship? Are there any changes or adjustments (turning off tech, making yourself comfortable) you need to make before you begin?
When you are ready, take some time to sit in silence and prepare your heart for worship. Ask God to clear away any distractions that might keep you from being truly present in this moment.
Confession
In this second movement, we simply see ourselves for who we are: people who need God.
“I will bring that group through the fire
and make them pure.
I will refine them like silver
and purify them like gold.
They will call on my name,
and I will answer them.
I will say, ‘These are my people,’
and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’”
—Zechariah 13:8-9 (NLT)
Scripture often speaks of God in the language of flame. “Our God is a consuming fire,” says the writer to the Hebrews (12:29). The Song of Songs says love burns like “the very flame of the LORD” (8:6). Malachi pictures the Lord as a refiner who sits patiently over the crucible, watching the silver until the dross is gone.
We usually hear “fire” as a word of judgement, but the refiner does not light the fire to destroy the silver. He lights it because he wants the silver to be purged of anything foreign, any blemish that might mar it. The heat is how the refiner’s love behaves when it meets what is not yet pure.
The 17th century Spanish mystic known as St. John of the Cross uses this imagery of purifying fire powerfully in his poem “The Living Flame of Love.”
Oh, living flame of love
How tenderly you wound
My soul within its inmost centre!
No longer so elusive,
Finish then, if you will
And rend the veil of this most sweet encounter.
The flame is loving, the wound is tender. God’s calls us to a place of bitter, painful honesty with ourselves and with him, knowing that only there can his love burn away all that is not of him. It is not easy. It is most necessary.
How have you encountered God’s living flame of love? Are you able to be thankful for those tender wounds? What would it look like for you to go deeper in that work, asking him to “rend the veil” and draw you even closer?
SONG OF CONFESSION: Refiner (lyrics here)