Refining precious metals is such a fascinating process to me. From watching gold or silver melt, seeing all the impurities float to the top of gold or silver, skimming them out, and repeating the process – I just find it some almost calming to watch. Partly because I love to watch fire burn but also because I like things to be clean – without blemishes – perfect so watching gold or silver become pure is so cathartic.
Refining precious metal meticulous takes care and patience. You can’t just rush the process or do it once and call it done. But you’ve go to heat the metals slowly and carefully. The fire and heat will and must be intense enough to cleanse but not complete burn and vaporize.
Solomon tells us that the process refiners use for silver and gold is the same process God uses to refine us. To weed out of the internal impurities we have, God tests us. He puts us through His fire. So, just like the refining process takes deliberate temperatures and processes for it to work on precious metals, so does God’s.
Thankfully, God is the master refiner. He won’t ever put us in situations we can not handle. He will carefully repeat His refining until we have a heart that’s pure just like silver or gold in the furnace. It’s a long process from both God and us. He won’t stop until our hearts are pure and clean. And because He is our refiner, He knows the exact temperature we need and how many times we need to go through His fire to become clean. And, if we let it – God’s fire will make us stronger than we were before.
But just some gold or silver can fail the refining process or be destroyed if not strong enough, we too can fail the refining. If we stubbornly refuse to give up our impurities or return to them over and over again, we will fail God’s internal refining. He can only do so much – ultimately it is how we react to the process that dictates how pure we become. We can either be cleansed by the fires or destroyed/ cast aside.
So, God is our refiner and He is perfect at refining the hearts of men & women. God’s refining fire never fails – it is our hearts and actions that fail. But thankfully, God won’t give up on us. He will continue to try to turn us into something pure and priceless – if we let Him. If not and we resist His cleansing fire, He will cast us aside because of our stubborn and unyielding heart.
We have to decide what type of metal our hearts will be once God puts them into his refining fires. Either we will come out cleansed, stronger, and transformed or we will not.
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