Revealed with Fire

“It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.” 1 Co 3:13

Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” This is what I have often read in the sports pages. The way we deal with stress and defeat reflects who we really are. Anybody can handle success with relative ease, but dealing with failure is another story.

What fire does is to reveal and to expose, and to turn all the filth and dross into ashes. No one, except Daniel’s three friends, could walk into the flame and come out unscathed. I am afraid when my work is tested at the end time, it will be reduced to a small pile of ashes.

“Get your works published,” my son urged me a while ago while we were discussing the subject of natural talent.

“No way,” I replied. “They are just not good enough. Besides, it would be better if I light a match to them and turn them into ashes,” I added, with the utmost seriousness. That’s exactly what’s going to take place eventually, so why not save the Lord some trouble by taking the matter into my own hands.

There is just so much narcissism and self-adsorption in my writings anyway, and it may put me to great shame when the truth is revealed by fire. Besides, I don’t want the evidence of my intellectual crime to be displayed on the bookshelf of libraries.

The hardest thing for writers to do is to escape from their personality in the process of their composing. No one likes to listen to a person who is full of himself, spewing out his unbridled emotion everywhere. Being a poet and a fan of T.S. Eliot, I haven’t really adhered to the statement he made in his essay about poetry as “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

What must be done is for our personality to be transformed into God’s personality, therefore “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and whatever we write should be an expression of Christ in us.

We continue to be transformed in the course of our service. The more we put Christ into our spiritual buildings, the greater will be the chances of it withstanding the test of fire. Our works will emerge unscathed if they are all about Christ, and nothing about us, all about bringing glory to God, and nothing about boosting my own ego and enhancing my own image.

Isn’t it that what “living sacrifice” should mean to all of us? We place whatever we have on the altar to be burned, and the fire will consume all the dross and impurity and only the purest will be presented to God. We are being purified daily by adversities and consumed by our inability to be holy and, at the end, there is nothing left but our broken selves with contrite and repentant hearts.