The impact of sacrifice.

During our worship in church on Sunday we began singing a fantastic Matt Redman song (‘Lord, let Your glory fall’). As we sang it we began to make it our own song and I remember us singing one verse over and over…

A sacrifice was made
And then Your fire came
They knelt upon the ground
And with one voice they praised

There was something in this verse.
We sang it again and again. Even though this was our worship to God, God’s voice was somehow in this song speaking to us too. And then I suddenly got it.

Fire, God’s fire (the fire of the Holy Spirit), only comes after a sacrifice is made; no sacrifice, no fire – it’s that simple. As this dawned on me I was became aware of all the times I had prayed for the fire of God in my life and it had not come. Now I realised that this was not because it wasn’t there, or available, but because there was nothing on the alter. I wanted a fire that cost me nothing. God does not offer cheap fire; He is an all consuming fire. However, when a sacrifice is made – when we lay our lives [all of our life] on the alter (Rom 12) – then God will not hold back His fire; His glory will fall upon our lives and everyone will see it.

We also had a number of people being baptised on Sunday; it was awesome! Each one of them have seen God’s glory fall in their lives.
The following day in work a woman stopped me and asked whether Bethel was the church that I went to. After I had confirmed that it was she began to tell me that she had just been to lunch with a friend whose cousin’s…. [oh, it was all very complicated and so I stopped listening to the spontaneous genealogy]… daughter was among those who had been baptised and the whole family had noticed how much she had changed for the better since she went to the church. And more than this the wider family were also talking about it! She no longer had a chip on her shoulder, she was full of life and joy and it was all because of Jesus!

When the fire falls people notice.