Love and Light Devotional Series – Day 3

For Day 1’s devotional, follow this link. For Day 2’s devotional, follow this link. 

This is a devotional series on encouraging love and light in your daily walk with God. This is day three’s devotional on the nature of love being like a fire.

Love is a Fire

Fire burns, generating heat and producing smoke with whatever it comes in contact with. This chemical reaction can be symbolic of the reaction love makes with what it contacts as well. Love, like a flame, burns away many of the temporary elements. Each elemental interaction produces a reaction that sends a clear message to those observing or held in its way.

Like fire, it can sterilize and clean, prune and cause growth, spread like wildfire, and leave scars that can heal tougher than the original material. Pure love from our Heavenly Father causes these effects symbolically and spiritually.

God is love (1 John 4:8) and God is an all-consuming fire (Hebrews 12). When we combine these two truths, we can see through a lens that portrays God as merciful and just.

He is merciful for offering a propitiation for our sinfulness and missing the mark. He is just for enacting and enabling the laws of creation and nature to run their course.

When we realize our finite ability to do anything worthwhile apart from Him and the drastic difference in that He can do whatever He wants to do, we ought to tremble. His selfless act of sacrifice provided the fuel to burn His wrath upon.

It was only out of love that God chose to surrender His one and only Son. Maybe He could have wiped mankind out as He had considered doing before. But He didn’t. And yet, He didn’t have to give up His Son. But He did.

The flame Satan thought was snuffed out for good came roaring back to life on the third day of its absence. It didn’t stay contained either but spread like a rampant bonfire as high as heaven and across the wide world.

It has since purified hearts, pruned and produced growth, spread, and left scars of strength. No greater miracle had happened prior, nor since, and that fire still burns today, in the hearts of Jesus’s devoted disciples around the world.

Love is a fire. God felt the passion in the love He has had for the world since He imagined it and spoke it into existence.

The fire we ought to reciprocate cannot be produced on our own but must be caught by the initial flame that started it all. As we keep our faith tended like a fire, love can burn brighter and larger. We get to carry that flame all the way around the world so creation can know the Father’s love.

Verses to Warm Yourself By:

“So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” 1 John 4:16

“…for our God is a consuming fire.” Hebrews 12:9

Love in Action:

How is God speaking to your heart today? What is His love prompting and stoking the fire of your faith to do in obedience and in accordance with His word?