The Secret of Those Who Burn for God | A. W. Tozer

There is a terrifying difference between those who merely study God and those who absolutely burn for him. History is marked by a handful of men and women who were so consumed by the manifest presence of God [music] that they became dangerous to the kingdom of darkness.

But look at the modern church. We are dying of spiritual hypothermia. We have substituted the consuming fire of the Holy Spirit for cheap emotionalism, fog machines, and superficial entertainment. We read about the fiery revivals of the past. Yet we cannot even sit in a room for 10 minutes to pray without checking our phones. We are a generation playing with strange fire because we have lost the agonizing beautiful secret of those who truly burn for God.

Today we are going to confront this apathy through the prophetic voice of Awtoer. [music] He was a man who despised mechanical religion and lived entirely in the blaze of God's presence. Listen carefully because the secret to burning for God is not a formula. It is a funeral. It is the absolute death of your flesh on the altar of the secret place.

Before we dive into this devastating truth, please take one second to leave a like on this video. It tells the algorithm that this generation is still hungry for true biblical [music] depth. And let us know where the remnant is watching from. Leave a comment below with your city and country.

Now let us address the coldness in your own spiritual life. God provides the fire, but you must provide [music] the wood. He will not send his fire upon an altar that is in ruins. If your prayer life is inconsistent, if you are paralyzed by spiritual apathy, and if you have no structure when you close your door to pray, you must rebuild your altar. Your Bible is your ultimate foundation. But if you need a tactical battle plan to conquer your flesh and build the discipline of prayer, we created a tool for you. It is called the Warroom Room Manual, and it is linked in the pinned comment below. It is a tactical guide to help you silence the noise, focus your mind, and stay on your knees until the fire falls.

Now, prepare your heart. Let us listen to Awtoer. I want to speak to you today not as a lecturer, not as a theologian arranging doctrines in neat and comfortable rows, but as a man who has stood near enough to the fire of the living God to know that it is not a metaphor. It is not a poetic device invented by religious writers who needed dramatic language to fill their pages. The fire of God is an awful, holy, transforming reality. And the tragedy of this present hour is that millions of people sit in buildings they call churches and have never once felt even the faintest warmth of it upon their faces. They have heard about it. They have sung songs that allude to it. They have read the accounts in the book of Acts and nodded with polite religious appreciation as a museum visitor nods at a painting of a battle he will never fight. And then they go home unchanged, undisturbed, and utterly cold.

I must say something that will offend the merely religious, and I make no apology for it. There is a kind of Christianity that is the most dangerous thing in the world, not because it is openly evil, but because it is so convincingly close to the real thing that it inoculates entire generations against the authentic fire of the Holy Spirit. It is a Christianity of correct theology without living encounter. It is orthodoxy without oxygen. It is the right words about the right God spoken by people who have never trembled in his presence, never been undone by his holiness, never wept at the foot of the cross with the kind of grief that comes only when a man sees himself honestly in the light of an absolutely holy God. This is the condition of the modern church and it is a condition that ought to make every serious Christian fall on his face before heaven and cry out for mercy.

Now, I want you to understand something foundational before we go any further. Because if you miss this, everything else I say will be merely interesting information and nothing more. The burning that I am speaking of is not an emotional state. It is not the worked-up enthusiasm of a crowd responding to a gifted speaker. It is not the spiritual equivalent of adrenaline. That feeling some people mistake for the presence of God because it moves through a large room and makes everyone feel simultaneously alive. No, the burning I'm speaking of is ontological. It goes to the very root of what a man is. It is a fundamental reorientation of the entire person, mind, will, affection and spirit toward the consuming fire who is God himself. And it costs everything. That is precisely why so few people have it and why those who do carry it become, as the narrator so rightly said, dangerous to the kingdom of darkness.

Let me take you back to the beginning of all things because the fire of God is not a New Testament innovation. It is woven into the very fabric of divine revelation from the first pages of holy scripture. When God appeared to Moses in the wilderness, he appeared in a bush that burned but was not consumed. Notice that the bush was not the source of the fire. The bush was merely the vessel through which the fire made itself visible. And Moses, to his eternal credit, turned aside to see this great sight. He did not continue on his way. He did not observe it from a safe intellectual distance and file it away as an interesting phenomenon. He turned aside, and in that turning aside, in that willingness to leave the ordinary path and draw near to the extraordinary fire, the entire history of redemption was set into motion.

I want you to sit with that image for a long moment. The fire of God was present in that wilderness long before Moses arrived. God was not waiting for Moses to discover him. God was revealing himself. And Moses was the one man in that moment who had the spiritual sensitivity to recognize that the burning bush demanded a response beyond mere observation. He drew near and God spoke. This is the first and most essential secret of those who burn for God. They are people who turn aside. They are people who, in a world that is in perpetual frenzied motion, have cultivated the terrifying discipline of stillness. They have learned, and I use the word learned deliberately because it does not come naturally to the flesh. They have learned to stop, to be quiet, to draw near, and to wait. Not to wait passively as a man waits for a bus with his mind scattered across 10 different concerns, but to wait actively, alertly with the whole of the inner man oriented toward the throne of grace with an intensity that the world would consider madness. Psalm 46 and verse 10 says, "Be still and know that I am God." The Hebrew word translated be still carries within it the meaning of letting go of releasing of ceasing to strive. God is not saying merely quiet down for a few minutes. He is saying release your grip on everything you have been clutching. Your plans, your reputation, your comfort, your agenda. And in that releasing you will discover that I am God.

Oh, but we live in a generation that has decided stillness is a luxury it cannot afford. We have convinced ourselves that our busyness is a form of faithfulness when in truth it is often a sophisticated form of spiritual avoidance. We stay in motion because motion keeps us from having to be honest about the state of our souls.

Now let me speak directly about the Holy Spirit because no sermon on the fire of God can be complete without an honest, reverent and biblically grounded discussion of the third person of the Holy Trinity. I have said for many years and I will say it again now because it is as true as it has ever been that the Holy Spirit is the most neglected person in the modern church. We speak of God the Father with a certain comfortable familiarity. We speak of Jesus Christ the son with the language of devotion and sometimes with genuine love. But the Holy Spirit, the very breath and fire and wind of God who dwells within every true believer, has been relegated to a corner of evangelical theology where he is acknowledged in the creed but largely ignored in daily experience. And this neglect has produced the catastrophe we now inhabit. A church that knows about the spirit but does not know the spirit. A church that can define the doctrine of the spirit but cannot demonstrate the power of the spirit. A church that has, in the words of the apostle Paul, a form of godliness but denies its power.

The day of Pentecost was not a religious ceremony. I want you to understand this. It was not a scheduled liturgical event that the disciples attended because they felt it was their duty. Those 120 souls were gathered in that upper room because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but wait. They had been told by the risen Lord to wait for the promise of the Father. And so they waited. And what fell upon them on that day was not a gentle spiritual warmth. What fell upon them was a violent rushing wind and a fire that divided itself and sat upon each of them individually. The Greek word used in Acts 2:2 for the sound that filled the room is the word for a violent or forceful rushing. This was not a quiet spiritual experience. This was heaven breaking into earth with terrifying and beautiful force. And those who received it were immediately transformed from frightened, hiding disciples into men and women who walked out into the streets of Jerusalem and began to turn the world upside down. This is the fire. This is what it does. It does not make you more comfortable in the world. It makes you a stranger to it. It burns away the attachments that keep you tethered to earthly approval and earthly ambition. and it replaces them with a singular holy obsession with the glory of God and the advance of his kingdom.

But here is where I must say something that I believe is among the most important things I have ever said and I ask you to receive it not with your intellect first but with your spirit. The outpouring of the spirit at Pentecost was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of a way of living that was meant to be perpetual and progressive. The baptism of the spirit was not a one-time historical event that belonged exclusively to the first century church to be appreciated but not expected by subsequent generations. Paul's command in Ephesians 5:18 is in the present continuous tense in the original Greek. He does not say be filled with the spirit as though it is a singular transaction. He says, "Be being filled. Be continually, habitually, progressively filled with the spirit of God." This is not automatic. It does not happen by mere theological agreement with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It requires on the part of the believer an active ongoing costly cooperation with the work of God in the soul. And the nature of this cooperation is what I mean when I speak of the altar and the wood and the fire.

In the 18th chapter of first Kings, you have one of the most dramatic and theologically instructive accounts in all of scripture. Elijah the prophet stands on Mount Carmel against 450 prophets of Baal. And the contest is simple. The God who answers by fire is God. The prophets of Baal dance and cry and cut themselves from morning until evening and nothing happens because Baal is not real. Because the noise of religious performance, however sincere or however energetic, cannot produce what only God can give. Then Elijah steps forward and he does something that I want you to notice with great care. Before he prays for the fire, he repairs the altar. He takes 12 stones according to the number of the tribes of Israel and he rebuilds the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down. Then he arranges the wood. Then he places the sacrifice and then only then he prays and the fire of the Lord falls and consumes not only the burnt offering but the wood and the stones and the dust and licks up even the water in the trench. The fire of God fell upon a prepared altar. This is the secret. This is the principle upon which the entire architecture of spiritual burning rests. God provides the fire. He has always been the source of the fire. He will always be the source of the fire. No man can generate holy fire through self-effort or religious striving. But God will not send his fire upon a ruined altar. He will not pour out the fullness of the spirit upon a life that has made no room for him that has given him the leftovers of time and attention after the world has taken the best of it. The altar must be prepared. The wood must be arranged. And what is the wood? It is the discipline of the secret place. It is the daily faithful unglamorous work of prayer and scripture and fasting and solitude and silence. the spiritual disciplines that are not exciting in themselves, that produce no immediate emotional reward, that the flesh resists with absolute ferocity, but that prepare the human soul to receive and sustain the fire of God.

I must speak plainly about prayer because prayer is where the battle for the burning life is won or lost. Not the public prayer of the impressive saint who knows all the right theological phrases and can move a congregation with his eloquence. I am speaking of private prayer. The prayer that happens behind a closed door with no audience, no reputation to maintain, no one to be impressed. The prayer that sometimes feels like shouting into an empty room. The prayer that the flesh will resist with every weapon at its disposal, drowsiness, distraction, doubt, the sudden and urgent recollection of every mundane task that has been neglected. This is the prayer that God honors. This is the prayer that digs deep beneath the surface of religious activity and strikes the living water of divine presence. Jesus did not say if you pray your father will reward you openly. He said when you pray he assumed it. He built his entire teaching on the assumption that his disciples would be people of private persistent habitual prayer. The men and women who have burned most brightly for God throughout history were without exception people of extraordinary prayer. This is not a coincidence. It is a causal relationship as certain as the laws of physics. The Welsh revival of 1904, which transformed an entire nation in the space of months, was preceded not by sophisticated evangelistic programs or compelling advertising campaigns, but by a young man named Evan Roberts, who had spent years in agonizing intercession before God, sometimes praying through the night until the fire fell. The Moravian prayer movement at Herrnhut, which launched one of the most remarkable missionary movements in the history of the church, began with a 100-year prayer watch, a continuous, unbroken stream of prayer maintained around the clock for a century. These people were not superhuman. They were not born with a spiritual advantage that the rest of us lack. They simply understood what most of us have not yet grasped. That the fire of God is not dispensed to spectators. It is given to those who press in, who push through the indifference of the flesh and the resistance of the enemy, who refuse to be satisfied with anything less than the living God himself.

Now let me say something about the mortification of the flesh because this is perhaps the most unpopular doctrine in the contemporary church and its unpopularity is precisely the measure of how far we have drifted from the ancient paths. The apostle Paul writing to the Romans in chapter 8 says, "For if you live according to the flesh you will die but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live." Put to death. The language is violent and intentional. It is not manage the deeds of the body. It is not negotiate a comfortable compromise with the flesh. It is put to death. The Greek word is thanatoo, to cause to die, to kill. And the theological community has largely decided that this is extreme language that should be softened for modern consumption. We have replaced mortification with management. We have replaced death with therapy. We have decided that what the soul needs is not the death of the old man, but rather a kinder, gentler handling of his appetites, a reframing of his desires, a therapeutic improvement of his self-image. And the result is a church full of people who are perpetually trying to improve themselves and perpetually failing because the old man cannot be improved. He can only be crucified. The cross is not a motivational symbol. I have said this before and I will say it again because it bears repeating in every generation until the Lord returns. The cross is an instrument of death. And the call of Christ to every man and woman who would follow him is a call to take up that instrument and carry it to the place where the self, the proud, the self-serving, the comfort-seeking, the approval-hungry self is nailed to it and left there to die. "If anyone would come after me," Jesus said in Luke 9:23, "let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." Daily. This is not a one-time crisis experience. This is the daily occupation of the soul that is serious about burning for God. Every morning the flesh rises with fresh demands and fresh arguments for why its comfort should be honored and its preferences accommodated. And every morning the Spirit-filled believer must say no, not in his own strength. God forbid that we should try to crucify ourselves through willpower alone. For that is merely the pride of the flesh wearing a religious costume, but no, by the Spirit. "If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body," Paul says. The Spirit is both the fire that falls and the power by which the altar is maintained. He is not only the reward of the surrendered life, he is the very agent who enables the surrender.

I want to speak now about what I have sometimes called the pursuit of God. Because burning for God is not a passive state. It is an active, relentless, sometimes anguished pursuit. The psalmist cries in Psalm 42, "As the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?" This is not the language of a man who is content with occasional spiritual experiences and a Sunday morning encounter with the divine. This is the language of desperate thirst, of a creature in the wilderness whose very survival depends on finding water. And I want to ask you and I want you to answer honestly before God rather than giving the comfortable religious answer. Does your soul pant for God when you wake in the morning? Is your first and deepest hunger for the presence of the living God? Or is it for your coffee, your phone, your news feed, the entertainment that awaits you at the end of a long day? I do not ask this to condemn you. I ask it because the answer reveals the true condition of the heart and you cannot heal a disease you refuse to diagnose.

There is a great and terrible comfort that has settled over the modern church and it is this: the belief that because we are saved, we need not pursue God any further. We have our ticket to heaven. And so the urgent business of salvation is concluded and the remaining years of our lives can be lived in a moderate, comfortable, respectable Christianity that asks little and gives little and burns not at all. This is not the Christianity of the New Testament. This is not the Christianity of the church fathers or the reformers or the great revivalists. This is a Christianity invented by a culture that has made comfort its highest value and imposed that value upon the gospel of Jesus Christ which is the most uncomfortable document ever written. The gospel does not invite you to be comfortable. It invites you to be transformed. And transformation is always violent in its nature because it requires the destruction of what was before the new thing can come into being. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by making minor adjustments to its caterpillar life. It enters a death chamber. It dissolves and from that dissolution the new creation emerges. So it is with the soul that burns for God. The burning is preceded by a dying and the dying is the thing that the flesh will fight to its last breath.

Let me speak about worship because worship is both the context and the consequence of the burning life and it has been so terribly misunderstood in our day that I feel I must address it directly. Worship has been reduced in much of the contemporary church to a musical style. We debate the instrumentation, the volume, the tempo, the theological precision of the lyrics. And all of these debates have their place. Some of them are genuinely important. But we have confused the vehicle with the destination. Worship is not music. Music can be a vehicle for worship. And when it is, it can be profoundly beautiful and pleasing to God. But worship is fundamentally a posture of the soul before the majesty of God. It is the creature acknowledging with the whole of its being the absolute supremacy and worthiness of the creator. It is the response of the human spirit to the overwhelming reality of who God is. And it requires, let me be very clear about this, it requires an accurate and growing knowledge of who God is. You cannot genuinely worship a god you do not know. You can perform religious music in the presence of a theological idea. And this is what much of what passes for worship in the modern church actually is. But to worship in spirit and in truth, as Jesus told the woman at the well in John chapter 4, you must have the Spirit and you must have the truth. You must have the indwelling fire of the Holy Spirit animating your worship. And you must have a truthful, scripturally grounded, theologically serious understanding of the God you are worshiping.

The men who burned most brightly for God were men who studied God with the same intensity that a man dying of thirst studies a river. Not to produce academic papers, not to win theological arguments, not to establish their intellectual credentials in the religious community, but because they were desperately personally in need of God, and they understood that they could only find the real God. Not a god of their own imagination, not a god shaped by their preferences or their cultural background, but the real transcendent, holy, terrifying, and infinitely loving God only in the pages of his own self-revelation. The scripture is not merely a source of spiritual principles for better living. The scripture is the place where God speaks. And every man who has ever truly burned for God has been a man who sat before the open scripture, not as a student before a textbook, but as a worshipper before a throne. George Whitefield is said to have read the New Testament on his knees, pouring over every word with prayer and tears. John Wesley rose at 4 in the morning for his scripture reading and prayer. And whatever you may think of Wesley's theology at various points, you cannot deny that the man burned and that his burning set England ablaze and spared it from the kind of revolution that tore France apart. These things are not unrelated.

I want to address something now that is deeply uncomfortable, but that I believe is absolutely necessary for an honest treatment of this subject. And it is this. Not everyone who claims to want the fire of God actually wants the fire of God. Many people want the benefits of the fire, the spiritual authority, the manifest presence, the power in prayer, the sense of divine nearness without the cost of the fire, which is the absolute surrender of every area of the life to the lordship of Jesus Christ. And this is a self-deception so common and so subtle that even genuine believers can fall into it for years without recognizing it. We come to God with our list of the areas of our lives we are willing to surrender and we present this list with considerable religious sincerity and we wonder why the fire does not fall. And God in his patience and his love puts his finger on the one area we have not listed. The one thing we have carefully kept off the altar. The one Isaac we have decided we will not sacrifice. And here is what I have learned and what every man who burns for God has eventually learned. God will always put his finger on that thing. He is not interested in negotiated surrender. He is not interested in a partial lordship that leaves certain rooms of the house locked to him. He demands the key to every room and he will wait in his infinite patience until you are willing to hand it over. But while he waits, the fire does not fall.

This is the meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. And I cannot preach on the burning life without visiting it. God had given Abraham a son, the son of promise, the son through whom every covenant blessing was to flow. The son whom Abraham loved more than his own life. And God asked Abraham to place that son on the altar. Not because God wanted Isaac's death. The ram in the thicket makes that clear. God wanted to know what Abraham would do with the thing he loved most. He wanted to reveal both to Abraham and to history that Abraham's deepest loyalty was not to the gift but to the giver. And Abraham, in one of the most extraordinary acts of faith in all of human history, rose early in the morning, took his son, and went to Mount Moriah with the full intention of obedience. And because of that obedience, that willingness to place the dearest thing on the altar, God not only spared Isaac, but declared that in Abraham's seed, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The surrender of the dearest thing opened the floodgates of the greatest blessing. This is always the pattern. The fire falls where the surrender is total.

Now I want to speak about something that the church has largely lost and its loss has contributed more to the coldness of our age than perhaps any other single factor. I'm speaking of the fear of God, not the reverent, affectionate awareness of God's greatness that is sometimes called the fear of God in popular Christian writing. I am speaking of the genuine solemn, bone-deep trembling that comes upon a man when he is confronted with the actual holiness of the Almighty. When Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple high and lifted up and heard the seraphim crying, "Holy, holy, holy," his response was not peaceful contemplation. His response was, "Woe is me, for I am undone." The word translated undone in Isaiah 6:5 means to be cut off, to be silenced, to be destroyed. The prophet saw the holiness of God and immediately understood that he was utterly unworthy to be in that presence. This is authentic encounter with the holy God. Not comfortable, not affirming, not the gentle confirmation of one's existing self-image, but devastating, humbling, and ultimately transforming. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Proverbs chapter 9 tells us, not one stage on the path to wisdom, not one contributing factor among many, but the beginning, the foundational initiating reality without which wisdom cannot exist. And it is also the beginning of the burning life. Because a man who truly fears God will pray with a different quality of intensity than a man who merely appreciates God. A man who has been undone in the presence of divine holiness will approach the scripture with a different quality of attention than a man who reads it as a collection of inspirational thoughts. And a man who lives under the holy weight of God's gaze will mortify the flesh with a different kind of urgency than a man who has reduced God to a benevolent cosmic companion who is primarily interested in his happiness.

The church in Laodicea addressed by the risen Christ in Revelation chapter 3 was not a church of open sinners. It was not a church of people who had abandoned their profession of faith. It was a church of people who were prosperous, comfortable, and self-sufficient, who had translated their material prosperity into the spiritual category and concluded that because they were wealthy, they were spiritually rich. And the verdict of the risen Christ upon this church was the most terrifying verdict in all of his letters to the seven churches. Not that they were sinful, but that they were lukewarm. And because they were lukewarm, he said, "I will spit you out of my mouth." And undun, the King James translation uses the word vomit. And I think we should be grateful for its brutal honesty. Lukewarmness in the eyes of the holy God who is himself a consuming fire is physically nauseating. It is not a mild disappointment. It is a rejection so strong that it is described in terms of physical revulsion. And yet this Laodicean condition, wealthy, comfortable, self-sufficient, and utterly cold, is the precise condition of the majority of evangelical Christianity in the Western world today.

But I do not wish to leave you in the diagnosis. I'm not called merely to describe the disease. I'm called to point toward the cure. And the cure, though it costs everything, is available to every man and every woman who is willing to pay the price. The cure is this. Come to God as you are with all your coldness and all your indifference and all the spiritual apathy that you have been nursing in secret and tell him the truth. Tell him that you have been playing at Christianity. Tell him that you have been substituting religious activity for genuine encounter. Tell him that you are spiritually poor and blind and naked in the very words that the risen Christ used to describe the Laodicean church. And then ask him for the gold refined in fire and the white garments and the eyesalve. Ask him with the desperation of a man who knows he has nothing and needs everything. And do not get up from that place of prayer until something has shifted. Until the altar, however ruined, has been repaired, even one stone at a time. Until the wood, however insufficient, has been arranged, until you have offered whatever you have to offer, and cried out for the fire that only God can send.

The secret of those who burn for God is not ultimately a technique or a discipline or a doctrinal position. Though disciplines matter and doctrine matters enormously, the secret is a person. It is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity who is not a force or an influence or a warm feeling in the chest, but a divine person who can be known and loved and grieved and quenched. Paul warns in 1 Thessalonians 5:19, "Do not quench the Spirit." The word quench is the word used for extinguishing a fire. You can quench the Spirit. You can throw water on the fire of God in your own soul through persistent disobedience, through sustained worldliness, through the refusal to deal honestly with known sin, through the neglect of prayer and scripture, through the love of the world that John warns against in his first epistle. The fire can be reduced to embers. The embers can become ash and a man can go on conducting religious activities with the ash of what was once a genuine spiritual fire and never realize how far he has fallen because the religious activities continue and the social respectability remains and the theological vocabulary is still intact. This is perhaps the most dangerous condition a Christian can be in.

But even the ash is not the end of the story. Because the God who is a consuming fire is also the God of resurrection. He who said to the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel's vision, "Can these bones live?" He who breathed upon those bones and caused them to come together and to stand on their feet, a vast army. This same God can breathe upon the ash of a cold and ruined spiritual life and cause it to flame again. He can restore the years the locust has eaten. He can open the windows of heaven. He can send the rain in its season. But he will not do it over our willful refusal to surrender. And he will not do it without the response of an honest, humbled, desperately seeking heart. The kindling of the fire is always a cooperation between divine grace and human surrender. God initiates. He is always the initiator. But he has chosen in his sovereign wisdom to wait for the opening of the door. "Behold," Jesus says to the Laodicean church, "I stand at the door and knock." He is outside the very church to which he is speaking, and the latch is on the inside. So I call you today, whoever you are, wherever you're sitting, whatever the condition of your spiritual life, I call you to open the door. Not to open it partially, not to crack it and negotiate terms from the safety of the threshold, but to throw it wide open and invite the consuming fire into every room of the house, into the room of your ambitions and your plans, into the room of your relationships and your attachments. Into the room of your finances and your habits and your private thoughts and your secret sins. Into every room without exception and without reservation because the fire of God is not a guest who will be content with the parlor while you keep the rest of the house to yourself. He is a consuming fire and he will fill what is surrendered to him and transform it and what is kept from him will remain cold and dark and dead. This is the terrible and beautiful law of the burning life.

I have lived long enough to see what God does with a man or a woman who gives him everything. I have seen it in the pages of church history and I have seen it in the lives of men and women I have personally known. Ordinary people with no special gifts or talents or advantages who simply decided that they were done with the tepid, mediocre, comfortable Christianity of the crowd and that they would press in until the fire fell and keep pressing in until they were changed. And what God did with those people. What he does with any person who makes that decision and holds to it through the long nights of apparent silence and the seasons of spiritual dryness and the daily dying of the flesh. What he does with such a person is impossible to describe in merely human language. He makes them a burning and a shining light as John was called in the fourth chapter of John's gospel. He makes them people whose very presence carries the atmosphere of heaven. He makes them people who pray and things happen. He makes them people who speak and hearts are broken and rebuilt. He makes them people who, like that burning bush in the wilderness of Midian, burn and burn and are not consumed because the fire is not theirs. The fire is his and it is inexhaustible and it is available to every man and every woman who is willing to become the bush. This is the secret. This is the whole of it. Not a formula, as the narrator rightly said at the beginning of our time together, but a funeral. The death of the self, the surrender of everything, the repair of the altar, the arrangement of the wood, the waiting in prayer, the opening of the door, and then the fire, God's fire, the only fire that truly warms, the only fire that truly transforms, the only fire that the darkness cannot overcome. May God grant you the grace not merely to understand these words but to live them. May he grant you the holy desperation of the burning ones. And may you never again be satisfied with anything less than the consuming fire of the presence of the living God.