~ John Of The Cross
i recently heard another man refer to one of the brethren as “El hombre en fuego.” (a man on fire)… Yeah, that’ll work. You can’t turn the switch “off” on this guy. He is up early, goes all day, and every moment of this guy’s life seems consumed with the Jesus that set Him on fire in the first place. Very rarely will you hear him complain about anything. He is actually one of the truly most cheerful guys you will ever meet. He admits feelings of fear sometimes, but rarely acts in obedience to those feelings. He is constantly “in trouble,” in the way that a successful NFL quarterback is trouble (getting hit, and making great plays). Wherever he goes, people get helped, stuff gets fixed, just about everything he touches seems to be left just a little bit better than it was before he passed by. Some have even said they feel G_d’s love, encouragement and Presence when they are around him. You’ve met people like this. What is up with them?
How does someone like this not – to use a term from our modern vocabulary – burn-out? What keeps a person going like this month after month, and presumably year after year? Well, i asked him. The answers were actually simpler than we might expect.
Here goes.
Answer #1: Everything is ALL about Jesus. What is the life of a man which is truly lived, but that which is imbued by heroic Grace in action? There is no other life. One has only to look to Christ on Easter to be convinced. He is indeed risen. He is King. He is THE Hero of THE Story.
Answer #2: There is no other answer.
What?
Yeah, that’s it. It is all about Jesus. He takes us, saves us, kills us, raises us a new creation, and lights a fire in us that will never go out. He is the Source of all of the fuel, and even the spark for the flame. And G_d, being G_d, is infinite. There is no measure to be applied to the shoreless oceans of His power being applied to our lives.
Then, in this space, He actually begins to EXPAND our capacity to serve Him. He does this through discipline. He burns away the dross of our lives. He burns larger and larger holes in the old us, so that there is ever less of us – and ever more space for Him. We mistake discipline for punishment sometimes. But the disciplining of the Holy Spirit is more like an ongoing expansion of the bore and stroke of our capacity to free-flow and manifest Christ to the world. And it is actually quite fulfilling – even fun! – as we become fully involved in the good purposes of Jesus in this world.
Said more simply: As we are disciplined and made more fully set aside for His purposes, He increases our ability to burn more and more brightly for Him.
We become channels of His infinite Presence to the world. There is no fear of “burn-out” here. In a sense, we are just going along for the ride. Oh yeah, we need to properly feed, and rest and exercise the bodies and minds He has given us. But, even when they are broken or sick, such disciplined vessels have a tremendous capacity for transmitting G_d’s power to an even more broken world.
Also, as these lives get deeper and wider in their reach, they get more and more sensitive to sin. Beings like this are open and vulnerable to the movement of the Spirit. And to soil the larger and larger and cleaner and cleaner surface area of their soul’s with transgression becomes an ever-less viable option. Those living lives like this actually begin to hate the sin that they are (thankfully) committing less and less.
Would that we might allow G_d to make us all just burn for Him!
