The Ember

Paul writes to a younger man he loves, a true son in the faith, and the counsel he gives is not what we might expect from an apostle to a promising disciple. He does not tell Timothy to acquire something he lacks. He tells him to stir up something he already has. The gift of God is in thee, Paul says, and the word he uses for stir up is the word for rekindling a fire, for fanning coals that have burned low back into flame. It is a fire word. It assumes a fire already lit, real and given, but banked down, dimmed, in danger of going out for want of tending.

This tells us something we badly need to know about the life of grace. A fire, even a true one, does not keep itself. Left alone it burns down. The brightest blaze becomes, in a few unattended hours, a heap of grey ash with a few red coals buried in it, and then, if still neglected, cold ash and nothing more. Timothy’s gift was genuine, given by God through the laying on of hands, no counterfeit. And yet it needed stirring, for even the genuine cools. This is the plain and humbling law of the spiritual life, that it does not hold its own temperature. It warms or it cools. It is tended or it dies down. There is no standing still at the fire.

HOW THE FIRE COOLS

We imagine that if a soul is ever to grow cold it must be by some dramatic fall, a great sin, a deliberate turning away. But it is rarely so. The fire cools by neglect, not by rebellion, by coals left unstirred rather than by water thrown on the flame. A prayer skipped, then two, then the habit gone. A word left unread. A first love slowly taken for granted. None of it feels like apostasy. Each small neglect feels reasonable, even necessary, and the man does not notice he is growing cold because the cooling is so gradual that each day feels much like the last. The Lord said to a whole church that had done nothing scandalous, thou hast left thy first love. Not thrown it away. Left it, the way one leaves a fire untended and comes back to find it out.

And there is a further stage, worse than cold, which is the lukewarm. The Lord’s sharpest word on this went to Laodicea. Thou art neither cold nor hot, he told them, and then said a terrible thing, that because they were lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, he would spue them out of his mouth. It is a striking judgment, that the lukewarm should be more offensive to him than the cold, but the reason is plain enough. The cold man may yet feel his coldness and cry out for fire. The lukewarm man feels nothing lacking. He has enough warmth to be comfortable and not enough to be changed, and he calls his tepid state health. Of all the conditions of the soul it is the hardest to stir, because it does not know it needs stirring.

WHOSE FIRE, AND WHOSE WORK

Now we must hold two truths together or we will go wrong on one side or the other. The fire is God’s, and the stirring is ours. We do not kindle the gift, for it was given, not manufactured, and every attempt to whip up a fire of our own by sheer effort produces only the crackling of thorns, a zeal of the flesh that flares and dies and leaves the heart wearier than before. We cannot make the holy fire. But we are commanded to tend it, and here we are not passive. We stir the coals. We clear away the ash of neglect. We add the fuel that God has appointed, the reading of his word, the discipline of prayer, the remembrance of his mercies, the company of his people, the return to first works. We do not create the flame, but we keep the hearth, and to the tended hearth the fire returns.

Under the old covenant God gave a command about the altar that speaks straight to this. The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar, he said, it shall never go out. But that ever-burning fire was not maintained by miracle. The priest was to lay wood on it every morning, faithfully, before the light. The fire was holy, given from heaven, but it was kept alight by a man laying on wood day after unremarkable day. So it is with the fire in you. It is holy, and it is kept by the daily, ordinary, unglamorous laying on of fuel, the plain disciplines done whether or not they feel like anything on the morning they are done.

FAN IT INTO FLAME

How, then, is a cooled soul rekindled? Not by waiting for feeling to return, for feeling follows the fire, it does not lead it. The way back is the way the Lord gave to the church that had left its first love. Remember, he said, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works. Remember, repent, return. Not some new and thrilling thing, but the first works, the plain early disciplines that were there when the fire burned hot. Go back and do them again, coldly if you must, without the old warmth, laying the wood on the dead-looking coals in bare obedience. Fervor is restored not by novelty but by return. The heart that once burned on the Emmaus road, saying, did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us, and while he opened to us the scriptures, will burn again where it burned before, in the presence of Christ and the opening of the word.

THE SPIRIT OF POWER

Paul does not leave Timothy merely commanded to stir the fire; he reminds him what the fire is. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, he writes in the very next breath, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. The gift that had cooled in Timothy was being smothered, it seems, by fear, the timidity that shrinks and hesitates and lets the coals go grey rather than risk the flame. And Paul answers the fear by naming the Spirit given, a Spirit not of cowering but of power, not of coldness but of love, not of a scattered and anxious mind but of a sound one. The fire we are to stir is nothing less than the Holy Spirit’s own presence in us, and he is not a spirit of fear.

This matters greatly, for much that passes for humility in the cooling soul is really only fear, the fear of presuming, the fear of failing, the fear that shrinks from the fervent life and calls its shrinking modesty. But God did not give a spirit of fear. The banked fire is not made holier by being kept low. The gift is given to be used, the flame to burn, and the timidity that hoards it unlit is not reverence but a quiet disobedience. Stir it up, Paul says, against every fear that would keep it smoldering in the name of a false modesty.

FERVENT IN SPIRIT

The Scripture nowhere commends a cool and cautious religion. Be fervent in spirit, it says, serving the Lord, and fervent is a boiling word, a word for water brought to the heat where it seethes and steams. We are not called to a lukewarm decency but to a boiling love, and the whole counsel to stir the gift assumes that the proper temperature of the soul toward God is not tepid but hot. We have grown suspicious of fervor, having seen it counterfeited by the shallow and the showy, and so we settle for a respectable coolness and call it maturity. But there is a true fervor, deep and steady and unshowy, the quiet heat of a soul genuinely alight, and it is this the Spirit kindles and this we are to guard.

Guard it, then, from the two enemies that would cool it, the sudden waters and the slow neglect. The sudden waters are the discouragements, the failures, the cold rebuffs that come to douse a burning soul, and against these the way is to keep the coals covered and burning low rather than let them be put out, to hold on through the drenching until the flame can rise again. But the slow neglect is the deadlier of the two, for it kills without ever seeming to attack, simply by leaving the fire untended one ordinary day after another. Watch that neglect above all. A fire is far more often lost to inattention than to any flood.

So take heart, you who feel your fervor gone. The Spirit given to you is not a spirit of fear, and the fire is not out, only banked, and the God who first kindled it delights to kindle it again. Refuse the timidity that would keep the gift smoldering. Refuse the coolness that calls itself maturity. And tend the flame with a holy stubbornness, laying on the fuel of the plain disciplines whether the fire feels hot or cold on the morning you lay it on, until the seething love returns and burns in you again as it did at the first.

So take stock of your fire. If it has burned down to embers, do not despair of it, for embers can be fanned, and the gift is still in thee, buried under the ash but not gone out. And do not wait until you feel warm to act, for that is to wait forever. Stir the coals now. Clear the ash of the neglected weeks. Lay on the wood of the plain disciplines this very morning, and keep laying it on, day after ordinary day, as the priest did before the altar. The fire is God’s to give and his to rekindle, but the tending is yours, and to the tended hearth he has never failed to return. Stir up the gift of God which is in thee.