When The Fire Returns
What the refiner’s fire reveals about the heart
This reflection continues from an earlier article about how God walks with people through the fire.
You can read Part 1 here: God Walks With People Through the Fire.
I was confident about the person I thought I was. I believed I knew my character, my intentions, and how I related to others.
When my life fell apart, I began to see what had been building in my heart for years.
That was when God began revealing the man I had been.
My first marriage lasted nearly twenty years. Then the life I had built began to collapse. Everything that had once felt normal started to fade. As the life I knew disappeared, the distractions that occupied my days began to fall away.
When the structure of my life vanished, I could no longer ignore what was in my heart. I began to see motives that I had never noticed before. The way I thought and reacted started to make more sense.
Scripture speaks directly about this. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick (Jer 17:9 ESV).
I began to see how easily the heart can hide its true condition, even from the person living with it. As God removed what surrounded my life, parts of my heart I had never seen before began to appear.
What I began to see in myself wasn’t easy to face.
Control began to appear in areas of my life I had never really examined before. I could see how I used guilt to influence situations so they would move in my direction.
Selfishness changed the way I lived, where my comfort and interests took priority. My anger created tension and distance inside the home, and I could see how easily I dismissed the feelings of the person I had promised to love.
I didn’t recognise these behaviours while my marriage was still intact. When life still carried its familiar structure, I believed my reactions were justified by what was happening around me.
Only after my life collapsed did the control, anger, and selfishness become clear.
With nothing left to distract me, God began to reveal and refine what had been in my heart for years.
Over the years, I rebuilt my life. Eventually, I remarried.
By that stage, I believed the struggles God had exposed in my previous marriage were behind me.
When I remarried, behaviours I thought were gone began to appear again. At first, I didn’t understand what was happening.
I became frustrated and even angry with God because I thought He had already healed me from the past.
Only later did I begin to see patterns in my life that I believed God had already removed years earlier.
It was difficult to see the behaviour return, even though I thought it had already been dealt with. I had assumed that once a behaviour had been confronted, the work was finished.
Yet my growth with God did not move in a straight line.
Over time, I began to see that God had not repeated the same work in my life. God was revealing deeper layers beneath the behaviours in my heart.
I had recognised anger in my life before, but over time, I began to see what was beneath it.
Control in my life was rooted in fear. Some of the selfishness I saw in myself was connected to wounds that had shaped how my heart tried to protect itself.
The behaviour had been exposed before, yet the deeper roots in my heart had never really been seen.
The first fire revealed behaviours and attitudes in my heart that I had never recognised. When the fire returned, it began to expose what was beneath the behaviour.
As I looked back on the fires God allowed in my life, I began to see they were part of the same refining work.
God was revealing deeper attitudes in my heart that had formed the man I had become. What I thought had already been healed was only the beginning of a deeper work God was doing in my heart.
Over time, I began to see that God was dealing with more than my behaviour. God was exposing and purifying the attitudes of my heart, which had been forming for many years.
He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver (Malachi 3:3 ESV).
That was when Malachi began to make sense to me.
When I began reflecting on the words Malachi wrote, one detail stood out to me. Malachi doesn’t describe God watching from a distance.
The refiner sits beside the fire while the silver is heated, watching the metal closely as heat reveals hidden impurities rising to the surface.
As I looked back over the years, I began to see that God sat at the heart of the work.
When silver is refined, it is placed in a crucible and heated. As the metal begins to melt, impurities rise to the surface.
The silversmith carefully removes the impurity before returning the silver to the fire. The process continues as heat reveals what is still hidden in the metal.
Each time impurity rises, it is removed before the silver is returned to the fire.
The image of the refiner helped me see what God had been doing in my life. A silversmith doesn’t rush the process, and neither does God.
He revealed the impurities in my life at the right time. Like the silversmith, He refined my heart. God was changing my heart so I could become a godly husband.
The fire came more than once in my life. Each time the fire returned, deeper attitudes in my heart came to the surface.
As the silversmith refines the silver, God was at work in my heart.
The fire revealed impurities in my heart that had been hidden for years.
Beautiful article. I’ve read that the silversmith knows when the silver is pure when he sees his own reflection in the silver. I have behaviors that God is bringing to the surface again, and it’s a painful process to go through that refiners fire. But oh so worth it when we can reflect Jesus in our lives. Thank you for such a thoughtful post!
The silversmith analogy is great. Thanks for sharing.