Lessons from Camp - Day 2

"Seek God until He breaks your heart, and then preach from the bottom of your broken heart." This 

is what I often say to those I mentor. So with seven weeks of speaking, writing devotions and heading up ministry at a summer camp, I anticipate being challenged, stretched and broken as the weeks roll on. Each day I will post some lessons to be learned from the devotions and messages we have studied as a camp.

God had warned them – He had told them judgement was coming. The prophet Jeremiah had been telling Israel to repent or face judgement for years. But after being beaten, thrown in a well and rejected by his own family, Jeremiah could only watch as the country of Israel was invaded by Babylon. Would Israel be completely destroyed? It is what they deserved. But our God is a good God, and He preserved a remnant – a precious few taken captive in Babylon.

Among them, four brave young men – Daniel, Hannaniah, Mishael and Azariah. And three of those men (presumably Daniel got out of this somehow) were willing to follow the Lord even unto their death. You know their story – although of course, you know it by their Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They didn't bow down. The furnace heated up. Three were thrown in the furnace, but four were inside. Nebuchadnezzar saw and believed.

There's a reason why they got to walk with that fourth man in the fire. Its where He always is - at the end of a road of self-sacrifice and total commitment. These three were willing to go there. Willing to die for the sake of following the Lord. And the reward was to meet the Lord Himself.

As descendants of Adam born in the days of a disobedient Israel these men should rightfully have had hearts to cold to feel any love towards their God. But without faltering. they picked up their crosses and followed Him.

Which is what we are called to do. God has asked for nothing less than our whole lives. He demands to be our top priority. He demands the entirety of our service and the entirety of our lives. He demands we choose the flames before bowing a knee to another.

This kind of faith is contrary to our nature. This kind of love for God is not born naturally in our hearts. And we can flip through Psalm 63 and find out how much David loved God, but we don't naturally muster that kind of excitement about the Lord. About deities we imagine, perhaps, but even then only when they appear to have done something that appease our proud and selfish hearts. Not when they call us to fiery furnaces.

So what does it take to follow this God into the flames? Where does that kind of love and self-sacrifice come from? Because no amount of prayer, time in church or understanding of Scripture will produce in us the kind of faith these three men had.

It takes the work of God. The one that created the universe must create again. We need to have new hearts created in us, or we can not even have the kind of faith we need to pick up the cross He is telling us to carry. He demands something from us that He Himself enables. Which is why salvation is such a mysterious and marvellous mystery from our wonderful God.

Kevin Deane
Posting from Camp Mini-Yo-We
Muskoka, Ontario