Consumer fire

Those were the days when my whole being praised the Lord motivated by the beauty of 'first love'. I can still feel the disorder of my heartbeat in the race of total surrender to an inner something that made every chink of my reason bursting with enthusiasm and joy. My faith grew with every step. The world and life radiated new light. The event of Christ in my life was published incessantly. Announcing it became devotion and devotion is a matter of God. The personal vision of the Christ who opened his arms to me was an obsessive apparition. He possessed my mind and soon I began to mend the broken saddlebags of worldly consciousness with heavenly threads and let myself slide down a spiritual channel where I knew beforehand that everything I would find, even in times of misery, was a blessing. .

The word love began to acquire a new dimension; it was a new discovery of myself. I never suspected that that supernatural feeling that came from the love of God could bring out the best in me ... and I sang ... Then I didn't even know a single praise, but I invented it, I sang to my God, I did it in a low voice, high, he screamed with contentment. On my first family vacation, already in the Lord, I cried like a child one afternoon watching the sun go down on the horizon and there came my first attempts at poetry, naive and stark, but full of gratitude and sincere emotions. How loved I felt! My tears turned to hummingbird wings and enlivened my feet, my soul and my senses!

But one day, without expecting it and in the pure heat of enthusiasm for my Savior, they snapped at my face: "Careful, God is not only love, but also a consuming fire."

No one is able to imagine the negative effect that such words can have on a newly converted and joyful heart, worse if they come from a brother supposedly mature in faith and communion with God. That night, literally, I was consumed in the flames of innocence and confusion. I could not understand that new mixed feeling of love and apocalyptic dread for a God that was now made incomprehensible to me because of a supposedly biblical but devastating comment. I panicked ... and plunged - perhaps for the first time - into the Word. The first thing I discovered was the superficial handling of the Scriptures in order to minister to a new creature in Christ that all he needed then was to reaffirm his faith and trust in God. Over time, the study of the word fire in the context of God has ministered to my life and on more than one occasion I have asked my King that his fire consume me (to extinguish forever the strategies rigged to try to please him, the twists towards self-centeredness and self-sufficiency and the temporary and disturbing appearances of the old man who already died on the Cross almost a decade ago) so that the Christian who knows himself victorious in Christ Jesus may emerge and survive.

The good news is that the Christ who clothed us in his holiness, gave us 2000 years ago the immeasurable benefit of his grace through a glorious new covenant - sealed with his death and resurrection - in which love is the most ardent flame of his purifying fire. God, having sanctified, justified and redeemed us in his Son Jesus Christ, does not intend to annihilate us, extinguish us and disappear us from the geography of his pastoral map. No, not us! The judgment will come with fire (Revelation 19), but we have been baptized by Jesus in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:11). He who abides in Christ should not fear. We are part of an unshakable kingdom and our hope is built on an indestructible foundation. Christ is today the fire that consumes us. In Him we have no condemnation (Jn. 5:24; Rom. 8: 1), but a heavenly longing to bless us with every spiritual blessing.

God longs to merge with you, consume you with his embracing fire, and make you one in Him.

God bless you!