"– our 'God is a consuming fire.' " (v. 29)

For Reading and Meditation:     Hebrews 12:14-29

George MacDonald writes: "Nothing is inexorable but love – For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection even that itself may be perfected - not in itself but in the object. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. Our God is a consuming fire." Powerful words. The nature of God is so terribly pure that it destroys everything that is not as pure as fire. God desires us to worship Him in "the beauty of holiness." This means that He wants the purity in us to match the purity in Him. We cannot arrive at this purity by self-effort, of course, but the more we draw nigh to Him the more the fire of His purity will burn out the dross within us. "It is not the fire will burn us up if we do not worship," said George MacDonald, "but the fire will burn us up until we worship." And the fire will go on burning within us after everything that is foreign to it has been consumed, no longer with pain and a sense of something unwanted being consumed, but as the highest consciousness of life. God is a consuming fire. He always was, and always will be - world without end.

O God, I long with all my heart that my worship might be all You want it to be. May Your consuming fire burn out all the dross within me until everything that is foreign to Your nature is part of me no more. In Jesus' Name I ask it. Amen.