The Secret of Men God Sets on Fire | John Wesley

Every so often God takes an ordinary man and sets him on fire, and the world comes to watch him burn. Not a talented man, not a famous man. Sometimes a small, tired, unremarkable man who had nothing about him worth noticing until the fire fell. And once it fell, nations felt it. Taverns emptied, hardened men wept in open fields. Something came out of that life that no education produced and no ambition manufactured. And everyone who saw it knew they were watching something they could not explain. There is a secret to those men. There has always been a secret, and it is not what you think it is.

Because here is what nobody tells you. The fire is not given to the gifted. It is not handed to the deserving. It falls on a particular kind of soul. And the reason you have never carried it is not that God ran out, and not that he passed you over. It is that no one ever showed you the door those men walked through. You have felt it, that cold place inside where fire used to be, or where you always suspected fire was supposed to be. You have watched other believers burn, and quietly wondered what was wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. You have simply been standing outside a door that has never once been locked.

Before we go on, do something for me. In the comments below, tell me where you are watching from tonight. What city? What country? I want to see how far this message travels, and I want to pray over every place these words are reaching. So, put your city down there right now, and let me know you are here with me tonight.

Now, listen carefully, because I'm about to hand you something, and I do not want you to miss it. Everything in this message is going to point you toward one thing, a walk with God deep enough for fire to fall on. And that walk is built. It does not appear. That is exactly why the War Room Manual exists. It is a 30-day journey that takes you by the hand one single day at a time and rebuilds your life of prayer from the ground up until the God you have been reading about becomes the God you actually know. Scripture every day, a short teaching that opens your eyes, and one real step to walk it out, so that by day 30, you are not just hoping for fire, you are living the kind of life fire falls on. I have watched cold, exhausted, far-off believers come completely alive through it. Go right now to the very first comment pinned under this video and tap the link. It takes 10 seconds. Do not finish this message and forget. Tap it now and start tonight while the hunger is still burning in you.

>> What follows is drawn from the teachings and life of John Wesley, offered in his spirit and not his exact words, with the prayer that God would use it to speak to you tonight.

There is a command buried in the sixth chapter of Leviticus that most readers pass over without a second glance, and yet it holds the entire secret we are chasing tonight. God gave instruction concerning the altar, and he said that the fire shall ever be burning upon the altar. It shall never go out. Not that God would keep it burning, but the priests would. Every morning the priest was to rise and lay wood upon it and stir the coals and feed the flame, and the fire that God himself had originally kindled was to be maintained by human hands faithfully daily forever.

Wesley understood this as few men in his century did. The fire of God falls from heaven, but it is kept alive on earth by discipline, and a man who will not tend the altar will wake one day to find only ashes where God once burned. This is where nearly everyone misunderstands the men God sets on fire. We imagine they were struck by lightning, that some sovereign flash came down, and marked them out, and that the rest of us simply were not chosen. But look at the actual lives, and you find something entirely different. You find men who rose before dawn, men who kept the coals stirred when they felt nothing, men who built their days around communion with God the way a soldier builds his around orders. The fire was heaven's gift, but the burning was their obedience, morning after unremarkable morning, and that is the part no one wants to hear because it cannot be borrowed, and it cannot be rushed.

Wesley himself was the proof of it. Here was a man of enormous discipline and religious seriousness, ordained, educated at Oxford, a member of a small society so rigorous in its methods that others mocked them by calling them Methodists. He fasted. He prayed at fixed hours. He visited prisons and cared for the poor, and examined his own conscience with a severity most believers would find unbearable. He even crossed an ocean as a missionary. And by his own reckoning, he was not yet converted. All that religion, all that method, all that sincerity, and no fire. Wesley learned in the hardest possible way that a man can be exhaustively religious and completely unlit, and that discipline without a living encounter produces a very tidy coldness.

The turn came, as it so often does, through a storm. Crossing the Atlantic, the ship was caught in weather violent enough that the English passengers, Wesley among them, were terrified for their lives. But there was a company of Moravian believers aboard, plain German Christians, and while the sea broke over the deck and grown men screamed, those Moravians went on singing Psalms. Their children were not afraid. And Wesley, watching them, was shaken to the foundations because he realized that these simple people possessed something he did not. A settled and unshakable assurance of God that all his learning had never given him. It is one thing to be religious. It is another thing entirely to be unafraid in the storm because you know whose you are.

That is the first mark of the men God sets on fire. And Wesley discovered it by its absence. They possess a real and personal assurance. A knowledge of God that is not theory, not opinions about God, not correct doctrine held at a distance, an actual encounter with the living God that settles the deepest question of the soul. And Wesley found it at last in a small meeting on Aldersgate Street where someone was reading aloud from Luther's preface to the letter to the Romans. And as the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, something broke open in Wesley. His heart was warmed. He knew, not as a conclusion, but as a certainty, that Christ had taken away his sins, even his. And from that ordinary evening in a small room came a fire that would run across England for 50 years.

Notice where the fire fell. Not in a cathedral, not at Oxford, not in the midst of his most heroic religious efforts. It fell in a plain room among ordinary believers while a book was being read aloud in a moment Wesley did not orchestrate and could not have predicted. Consider what that means for you tonight. You have perhaps been waiting for a dramatic setting, a great conference, a mountaintop, some spiritual event worthy of an encounter with God. But God has always shown a preference for small rooms and unremarkable evenings. And the hour that changes everything usually looks like nothing at all from the outside.

Consider Jeremiah, who is one of the clearest pictures in all scripture of a man set on fire. He had grown weary of the cost of speaking for God. He had been mocked, imprisoned, threatened, and he resolved to stop, to close his mouth, to say nothing more in that name. And then he tells us what happened inside him. "His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay." There is the fire. It was not enthusiasm. It was not a personality trait. It was the word of God burning inside a man until silence became more painful than persecution. Wesley knew that burning, and it drove him onto horseback for decades, riding thousands upon thousands of miles to preach to people who often did not want him. A man with that fire in his bones cannot be talked into comfort. And God asked through that same prophet a question worth sitting with, "Is not my word like as a fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?"

The word itself is fire, which means that a believer who neglects the scriptures is standing away from the very source of the flame and wondering why he is cold. Wesley was, above everything else, a man of one book. He read it, memorized it, preached it, breathed it, measured every experience by it. The men God sets on fire are almost always men who have soaked themselves in the word of God until it burns in them because God has never yet set a man ablaze while that man ignored the fire he gave.

Look at John the Baptist of whom the Lord Jesus said he was a burning and a shining light. Burning first, shining second, and that order is not accidental. The shining is what people see. The burning is what produces it, and a lamp shines only as long as something within it is being consumed. Wesley grasped this with unusual clarity that a man cannot give light without being spent. That the fire which illuminates others is fed by the burning of the one who carries it. We want the shining without the burning. We want influence without being consumed, but there has never been a lamp that gave light while keeping itself intact. And there has never been a soul used to warm others that was not itself being burned.

Consider what the Lord said to the church at Ephesus. A church with much to commend it. He knew their works, their labor, their patience, that they could not bear those who were evil, that they had labored and had not fainted. By every visible measure, they were an excellent church. And then he said the thing that ought to make every faithful tired believer sit up. Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee because thou has left thy first love. They had kept the labor and lost the love. The works continued after the fire went out and they had not noticed because activity is remarkably good at concealing coldness. Wesley preached constantly against exactly this. The deadness that wears the clothing of devotion, and he would tell you tonight that the most dangerous spiritual condition is not open rebellion, but faithful busy loveless service.

And hear what the Lord said to Laodicea because it is the most frightening word in the New Testament for the comfortable believer. "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." Read that carefully. He would rather have them cold than lukewarm. Cold is honest. Cold knows it is cold, but lukewarm is the temperature of a man who has just enough religion to be satisfied, and not nearly enough to be transformed. And it is the hardest condition on earth to be delivered from, because it feels like moderation, and it feels like maturity. Wesley called this the great enemy of true Christianity, a form of godliness denying the power thereof, and he spent his life trying to shake sleeping believers awake from it.

Now, the second mark of men God sets on fire, and Wesley built his entire ministry upon it. They are holy men, not perfect men, not men without struggle, but men who have made a decisive break with sin, and who pursue holiness of heart and life as the great business of their existence. Wesley preached scriptural holiness relentlessly, insisting that God saves us not merely from the penalty of sin, but from its power, that the gospel intends to make us actually different, and not merely legally forgiven. And this connects directly to fire, because God will not entrust his flame to a life that is playing with the very sin his fire came to consume. "Follow peace with all men," the scripture says, "and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord."

Consider the refiner in the third chapter of Malachi, that image the prophet used for what God does with those he intends to use. "He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness." Notice that the refiner sits. He does not leave the metal in the furnace and walk away. He sits and watches, controlling the heat, waiting for the dross to rise so he can lift it off, watching until he can see his own face reflected in the surface. Wesley taught that the fire of God is not only the fire that empowers, but the fire that purifies, and that most believers want the first without submitting to the second. But the God who sets men ablaze first burns the impurities out of them, and the sitting refiner never applies more heat than the work requires.

Look at the three Hebrew young men standing before a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual, refusing to bow to an image, telling the king plainly that their God was able to deliver them, and that even if he did not, they still would not bow. And they were cast bound into the fire, and the king rose in astonishment and said, "Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? Lo, I see four men loose walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt. And the form of the fourth is like the son of God." Consider what the fire did to them. It burned only their bonds. They walked free in the very flame that was meant to destroy them, and they came out without so much as the smell of smoke on their clothes. Wesley would have you see that the fire God permits in your life is not there to consume you. It is there to burn what binds you, and he is in it with you.

And consider what the world saw. The king did not merely see three faithful men, he saw a fourth figure in the flames and the whole kingdom heard about it. Wesley preached in fields to tens of thousands of miners and laborers precisely because he believed the world does not come to admire our arguments, it comes when it sees something burning. When Wesley preached in the open air, hardened colliers with coal black faces stood weeping until white streaks ran down their cheeks and it was not because his rhetoric was clever, it was because fire had fallen on an ordinary clergyman and the flame drew people the way flame always draws people in the dark.

Now understand the third mark and it is the one Wesley demonstrated more visibly than almost any man of his age. The men God sets on fire are men of relentless disciplined prayer. Wesley rose in the small hours of the morning to pray and he did it not occasionally, but as the settled architecture of his entire life for decades in every kind of weather and circumstance. He believed and taught that God does nothing but in answer to prayer and he lived as though he actually believed it and here is the point that must not be missed. He did not pray because he felt fire. He prayed and the fire came and he went on praying so that the fire stayed. The altar must be tended and it is tended before dawn while the rest of the world sleeps.

Wesley understood something about early rising that our age has entirely lost. The first hour of a man's day reveals what he actually treasures and the soul that gives its freshest, clearest, most alert hour to God has made a declaration that no words could match. He gave that hour and it built a life. Consider that the great awakening which swept England in his century was not born in a strategy meeting. It was born in rooms where a small number of men and women gave God the beginning of their days year after year, long before anything visible happened. Fire falls on altars that have already been built. It does not fall on empty stones.

Consider Peter on the night of the betrayal and the detail the Gospel of John preserves with terrible precision. Peter had followed at a distance and the servants and officers had made a fire of coals in the courtyard for it was cold and they warmed themselves and Peter stood with them and warmed himself. Read that slowly. He was cold and he went to the enemy's fire for warmth and it was standing at that fire borrowing heat from the world that he denied his Lord three times. Wesley would draw the line straight from that scene to our own hearts. A believer who has let his own fire go out will inevitably go looking for warmth somewhere and the world always has a fire burning and is always glad to make room. The denial did not begin with the words. It began with the coldness.

And consider the mercy of what came after because the same Gospel records another fire of coals on a beach at dawn where the risen Christ had prepared breakfast for the men who had abandoned him. He did not lecture Peter. He fed him and then asked him three times whether he loved him. One question for each denial and restored him completely and commissioned him to feed his sheep. Wesley preached the God who restores as fiercely as he preached the God who demands and he would want you to hear tonight that if your fire has gone out, if you have warmed yourself at the world's fires and denied him in a hundred quiet ways. There is a fire of coals on a beach with your name on it, and the Lord who prepared it is not asking for explanations. He is asking whether you love him.

Now, here's something Wesley proved with his own body over 50 years. The men God sets on fire are men who obey immediately and completely. When Wesley became convinced that the churches were closed to him and that the people who most needed the gospel would never walk into a building, he did the thing that horrified his own sensibilities. He went out into the open fields and preached to whoever would stand and listen, to crowds of thousands in the open air, to miners and laborers, and the desperately poor. It cut against everything in his refined upbringing and his sense of ecclesiastical order, and he did it anyway because obedience mattered more to him than dignity. Fire follows obedience. It does not follow preference.

Consider what the scripture says about the ordering of a man's zeal, and note the word it uses, "Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." That word fervent means boiling. The believer is commanded to be at a boil in the spirit, and a boil requires sustained heat, not a single spark. Wesley would tell you that spiritual temperature is not a mood, but a discipline, that a soul can be brought to a boil and kept there by the ordinary means of grace, by prayer and scripture and fellowship and the sacrament and obedience, and that the man who neglects these will cool as surely as a pot removed from the flame, no matter how hot he once was.

And Paul told Timothy something that speaks directly to every believer who once burned and now does not. He told him to stir up the gift of God which was in him. And the word he used carries the sense of fanning a fire back into flame, of taking coals that have gone gray and breathing on them until they glow again. Notice who was told to do it. Not God. Timothy. There is something in your hands tonight, some responsibility you have been quietly waiting for God to take. The gift is already in you. The coals are already there. And you have been sitting in the cold asking heaven for a bonfire when God has told you to kneel down and blow on what he already gave you.

Wesley also warned and scripture warns plainly that the fire can be resisted and grieved. "Quench not the spirit," the apostle wrote, and quench is the word for putting out a fire, for dousing a flame with water. Which means it is possible for a believer to actively extinguish what God is doing in him, not by dramatic apostasy, but by refusing, by delaying, by saying no to the promptings that come. Wesley taught that every act of disobedience puts a little water on the fire, and every act of obedience adds fuel, and that a life is simply the accumulation of thousands of those small choices. The man who is on fire at 60 made 10,000 small obediences at 30 that nobody ever saw.

Consider the fire that fell at the dedication of Solomon's temple when the king had finished praying, and fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the house, so that the priests could not enter into the house of the Lord. Notice the order once more because scripture is relentless about it. First the sacrifice was placed on the altar, then the fire fell. The fire did not fall on an empty altar, and it never has. Wesley would ask you tonight, quite simply, what is on your altar? Because we pray for fire while keeping our lives entirely to ourselves, and God has never in the history of the world sent fire to consume nothing.

And consider the fire at Pentecost and the specific way it came. There appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. Upon each of them, not upon Peter alone, not upon the leaders, but upon each, upon the whole company, upon ordinary men and women who had done nothing more remarkable than obey the command to wait and pray for 10 days behind a shut door. Wesley believed with all his heart that this was not a one-time historical curiosity, but the pattern of what God does among a people who will wait on him. And the awakening he lived through was, to his mind, simply God doing again what God has always done when a company of believers stops being casual.

Now, here is a hard word, and Wesley never softened it. The men God sets on fire are men who have settled accounts with the love of the world. Wesley lived astonishingly simply, gave away nearly everything that came to him, and warned constantly that riches and comfort had destroyed more spiritual movements than persecution ever had. He observed with real grief that as his own people grew diligent and honest, and consequently prosperous, they also grew cold, and he could not find a way to prevent it. And the scripture is blunt about the mechanism. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Two loves competing for one heart, and the stronger one always puts out the other.

Consider the parable of the sower, and particularly the seed that fell among thorns. It sprang up, it was real, it had life in it, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. Nothing dramatic killed it, no storm, no enemy, no persecution. It was simply crowded to death by ordinary concerns and comfortable desires that grew up quietly alongside it until there was no room left. Wesley would tell you that this is how most fires actually go out in the modern believer, not through some great fall, but through the slow, unnoticed crowding of a hundred small, good things until there is no space left for God.

And consider the zeal of the Lord Jesus himself when he made a scourge of small cords and drove the money changers from the temple and overturned their tables. And his disciples remembered that it was written, "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." Eaten me up. Consumed him. There is nothing lukewarm in that scene, nothing careful or balanced or moderate. Wesley faced constant accusations of being an enthusiast, which in his century was an insult meaning fanatic, and he bore it because he had concluded that the accusation of excess is inevitable for anyone who takes God as seriously as God deserves. The world will always call fire fanaticism. It has no other category for it.

Now, understand what the fire is actually for, because Wesley would never let it be reduced to a private thrill. God does not set a man ablaze so so he can enjoy the warmth in a corner by himself. The fire is given for others. It is given so that a soul becomes useful, so that the cold are warmed by it, and the lost see it burning in the dark and come toward the light. Wesley wrote until his body wore out, preaching in the open air to people who could not read, organizing the poor into societies where they could grow, sending out preachers who had no formal education because the fire mattered more than the credential. The men God sets on fire are always spent men, poured out for people who often never thank them.

Consider Aaron in the 16th chapter of Numbers when the plague had broken out among the people and was killing them. Moses told him to take a censer and put fire in it from off the altar and put on incense and go quickly into the congregation and make atonement for them. And Aaron ran into the midst of the assembly with fire from the altar in his hands. And he stood between the dead and the living and the plague was stayed. There is a picture of what fire is for, not display, not sensation. A man carrying the fire of God into the middle of a dying people and standing between the dead and the living. Wesley believed this was exactly what God had called him to do in the England of his day, and it is what God still calls his burning ones to do in every generation.

Look at Paul on the island of Malta, shipwrecked, soaked, cold, gathering a bundle of sticks to build a fire for the survivors. When a viper came out of the heat and fastened on his hand. The islanders watched, certain he would swell up and drop dead, and he simply shook the creature off into the fire and felt no harm. Wesley would have you notice two things there. First, that the great apostle was on his knees gathering sticks like anyone else. That the fire of God does not produce men too important for humble work. And second, that when the enemy came out of the very fire he had built, Paul shook him into the flame and went on. The men God sets on fire meet opposition precisely when they are being most useful, and they learn to shake it off without ceremony and keep tending the fire.

Consider what the Lord Jesus himself said about his own mission in words that startle anyone who has only met the gentle Jesus of popular imagination. "I am come to send fire on the earth," he said, "and what will I, if it be already kindled?" That was his stated purpose. He did not come merely to improve morals or to found an institution. He came to set the earth on fire, and he longed for it to be already burning. Wesley took that sentence with complete seriousness, and it explains a great deal about his life. A man who believes his Lord came to kindle a blaze will not be content with a respectable, manageable, well-behaved Christianity. He will spend himself trying to see something catch, and John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness, told the crowds plainly what the coming one would do that he himself could not. "I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance," he said, "but he that cometh after me is mightier than I. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire."

There is the promise that stands over every believer. The baptism Christ administers is a baptism of fire, and Wesley preached constantly that this was not the private possession of the apostolic age, but the birthright of the ordinary Christian. If you have been living beneath that, it is not because the promise expired. It is because no one ever told you it was addressed to you.

Look at Gideon and his 300 men surrounding the enemy camp in the dead of night, each man holding a trumpet in one hand and a pitcher in the other with a burning torch hidden inside the clay pitcher. And at the signal, they blew the trumpets and break the pitchers and the light blazed out into the darkness on every side and the enemy host fled in terror. Consider the mechanics of it. The fire was already lit. It had been burning inside those vessels the whole time, but not one ray of it had escaped until the clay was shattered. Wesley would have you understand something painful and hopeful at once. The breaking is not God destroying you. The breaking is how the light gets out.

Consider Elijah on Carmel setting the terms of the contest before an entire nation and note the exact words he chose. Call ye on the name of your gods and I will call on the name of the Lord. And the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. He did not propose that they compare doctrines or debate philosophies. He proposed a test of fire because he knew that the true God is the God who answers by fire and that a religion which produces no flame has already answered the question about itself. Wesley lived in a century full of correct, cold, respectable religion and he would tell you that the world is not finally persuaded by our arguments. It is persuaded when something burns that men cannot explain.

And look at what happened to Elijah immediately after the greatest day of his life. Fire fell, the prophets of Baal were destroyed, the rain came and he outran a chariot in the strength of God. And then a threat from a queen sent him running for his life into the wilderness where he sat down under a juniper tree and asked God to let him die. The man who had just called fire from heaven wanted to be finished. Wesley knew the exhaustion that follows spiritual labor, and God's answer to it in that passage is worth memorizing. No rebuke. An angel touched him, and he was fed, and he slept, and he was fed again, and only then was he sent on. If you have burned and are now empty under some juniper tree tonight, understand that God deals gently with tired fire. He feeds it before he sends it.

Consider the day Elijah was taken, when he and Elisha walked together, and suddenly there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it and cried, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof." Notice what he called him. He looked at one old prophet and called him the chariot and the horseman of Israel, as though this single burning man were the nation's entire army. Wesley would tell you that this is the true reckoning of heaven, that one man genuinely on fire with God is worth more to a nation than its regiments, and that God has repeatedly changed the course of history through people the census would have counted as nobody.

Look at what happened at Ephesus when the word of God prevailed and men were genuinely converted. Many that believed came and confessed and showed their deeds, and many of them also, which used curious arts, brought their books together and burned them before all men, and they counted the price of them and found it 50,000 pieces of silver. They burned their own books. They calculated the value and burned them anyway publicly without trying to sell them off quietly first. Wesley would press this hard because real fire always costs something concrete. Repentance that never touches your possessions, your habits, your calendar, or your relationships is not repentance yet. There is usually something in every life that has to go into the flames before the flame can go into the life.

Consider Achan and the hidden thing under his tent, the garment and the silver and the wedge of gold that he sought and coveted and took and buried while an entire army was defeated at a small city because of it. Nobody knew. The camp looked exactly the same. And the power was gone. Wesley taught with great seriousness that unconfessed and tolerated sin in a believer or in a company of believers acts precisely like this, quietly draining the power while everything appears normal on the surface. If you have prayed for fire for years and never received it, it is worth asking honestly whether there is something buried under the floor of your tent that you have never been willing to bring out.

And hear what Paul wrote about the day when every believer's work will be examined. Every man's work shall be made manifest for the day shall declare it because it shall be revealed by fire and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, all built on the same foundation and only fire will finally show which was which. Wesley preached often on the sobering reality that a great deal of religious activity will simply burn away. That we may spend a lifetime building things that look impressive and vanish in an instant when the fire tries them. It is worth asking while there is still time what you are actually building with.

Peter says the same of the trials we so resent. The trial of your faith being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. Your faith is being tried by fire the way gold is tried, and the purpose is not destruction but proof and purification. Wesley suffered mobs, stones, slander, and years of exhausting travel, and he came to regard opposition as part of the ordinary furniture of a burning life. The fire that tests you and the fire that fills you are not enemies. They are often the same fire doing two different works at once.

And consider what the writer of Hebrews says God does with those who serve him, quoting the Psalms, who maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire. A flame of fire, that is what God makes of a servant. Not merely someone who holds a torch, but someone who becomes one. Wesley believed that God intended to make ordinary believers into living flames, and the whole aim of his preaching was to see cold, respectable, church-attending people transformed into something that actually burned. That is still the intention. God is not looking for people to carry fire at arms length. He is looking for people to become it.

David describes the experience exactly in the 39th Psalm in a line that anyone who has ever waited on God will recognize. My heart was hot within me. While I was musing, the fire burned. Then spake I with my tongue. Notice the sequence because it is the entire method in one verse. He was musing, meditating, turning the things of God over slowly in his mind. And as he mused, the fire burned, and only then did he speak. Wesley was a man of long, careful, unhurried meditation on scripture, and he would tell you that we have almost entirely lost the middle step. We read quickly and we speak constantly, and we skip the musing where the fire is kindled. Slow down over the word and watch what happens to the temperature of your heart.

And it is not whether you would like to have this fire. Everyone would like to have it. The question is whether you will do the plain, unspectacular things that men who carry it have always done. Will you rise earlier than you want to and give God the best hour of your day? Will you read the word until it burns in you, rather than skimming it until it bores you? Will you deal ruthlessly with the sin you have been managing instead of killing? Will you obey the next thing God has already told you, the thing you have been negotiating with him about for months? None of this is mysterious. All of it is available, and almost nobody does it, which is precisely why so few burn.

Consider the 10 virgins waiting for the bridegroom. Five of them wise and five foolish. And note carefully that all 10 had lamps, and all 10 had been lit. The difference was not the lamp. The difference was that the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps, and the foolish took no oil. And when the cry came at midnight, the foolish found their lamps going out and had to go looking for a supply they should have secured long before. Wesley would have you feel the weight of that. There is a way of beginning the Christian life, genuinely lit, and running out of supply somewhere in the long middle. And the discovery always comes at the worst possible moment. The oil is secured quietly in advance, in the years when nothing is happening. Do not be the one searching for a supply at midnight.

Look at Elisha's servant waking early to find the city surrounded by an enemy army, horses and chariots everywhere, and crying out in panic. And Elisha prayed, "Lord, I pray thee open his eyes that he may see." And the Lord opened the young man's eyes, and he saw and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. The fire had been there the entire time. It was not summoned by the prayer. The prayer only opened eyes that were already surrounded by it. Wesley would tell you that a great deal of what we call spiritual dryness is really spiritual blindness, that God is far nearer and the resources far greater than we perceive, and that sometimes the honest prayer is not send me fire, but open my eyes.

Consider the words of the song where love itself is described in terms of flame. "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, for love is strong as death. The coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Here is the deepest answer to the question we have been circling all night. The fire God sets in a man is finally the fire of love, and this is precisely why Wesley preached holiness as perfect love rather than mere rule keeping. Duty can be sustained for a while by willpower. Love burns because it cannot help it. And a love like that, scripture says, cannot be quenched by many waters, which is exactly why the men God sets on fire cannot be discouraged out of it.

Wesley understood something else that the modern believer resists, that fire is very difficult to keep alone. He organized his converts into small societies and bands where believers met regularly and asked one another direct and searching questions about their walk with God, their temptations, their failures. It sounds severe to our ears, but Wesley had observed that isolated coals go out, that a believer left entirely to himself will almost always cool, and that fire is kept alive in company. If you have been trying to burn in isolation and wondering why you keep going cold, this may be the plainest answer you receive tonight. Get around people who are on fire and let them ask you real questions.

And consider that the awakening Wesley led was carried not only by preaching but by singing. For his brother Charles poured out hymn after hymn, thousands of them, putting deep theology into the mouths of coal miners and weavers who could not read. Ordinary people walked to work singing truths about God that most scholars could not have expressed, and the singing itself kept the fire spread across a whole nation. Wesley grasped what many miss, that what a people sing shapes what a people believe and how hot they burn. If you want fire in your own house, be careful what you fill it with because the songs that occupy a heart are quietly forming it either toward God or away from him.

Look also at the widow of Zarephath in the famine, down to a handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse, gathering sticks to prepare a last meal for herself and her son before they died. And the prophet asked her to make him a little cake first. Consider the audacity of that request and the faith it required. She gave God the last of what she had before feeding herself, and the barrel of meal did not waste, neither did the cruse of oil fail through all the days of the famine. Wesley lived on very little and gave away nearly everything and he would tell you that the fire tends to fall on people who have given God the last handful rather than the leftovers because such a person has settled the question of who is actually being trusted.

And consider the sheer endurance of the man. Wesley preached into his 80s, rising early, traveling in every weather, standing in fields before crowds when he was old enough to have long since retired to a comfortable study, still going out to ordinary people with the same message that had warmed his own heart decades earlier. 50 years of it. Wesley would want you to understand that the fire is not a burst but a long burning that faithfulness over decades is the true miracle and that God is not looking for people who will blaze for a season and vanish but for people who will still be tending the altar when they are old and no one is watching.

Wesley was in his mid-30s, an exhausted failed missionary who had crossed an ocean and come home defeated, convinced his religion had come to nothing, when the fire finally fell in that small room. Everything the world remembers about him came after the point at which he had concluded he was finished. Consider that carefully tonight because you may be sitting exactly where he sat at the end of your religious effort, certain that whatever God does in other people, he is not going to do in you. That is very often the precise location where God kindles a flame that outlives the man.

Hear the tenderness underneath all of this. God is not withholding the fire from you. He is not rationing it, not weighing your worthiness, not waiting for you to become impressive enough to deserve it. He has been waiting for an altar. He has been waiting for a life laid down, a heart that has stopped negotiating, a soul that will tend the coals in the dark before dawn when no one claps. And the moment such a soul appears, God has never once been slow. Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you. He is not far. He is not reluctant. He is looking right now in every direction for someone ordinary enough and available enough to burn.

So, go and build the altar. Not tomorrow, not when the season calms down, because it will not calm down, and the enemy will make certain of it. Tonight, put something on it. Lay down the thing you have been protecting. Rise early tomorrow and give him the first hour, and do it again the next day and the next when you feel nothing at all. Stir up what is already in you. Blow on the gray coals, and the God who set an unremarkable Oxford clergyman on fire in a small room on Aldersgate Street, and through that one warmed heart shook a nation for 50 years, is entirely willing and entirely able to do it again in you beginning tonight.