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Living Hope SDA Church

Christian Martin

The Vital Necessity to Be on Fire

The message I want to share with you today is entitled, The Vital Necessity To be on fire.

Let's bow our heads together as we open God's word.

Father in heaven, yes, we do worship you for who you are.

And today, Lord, we're gonna examine an aspect of your character that compels us to be still and know that you are God.

Open our eyes, Lord, so we can see who You are.

And may the Holy Spirit now join us, Lord, guide us ever closer into Your presence.

When a scourging fire burns, you can only go so far.

It reminds me of a time when I discovered that some yellow jackets had chosen to nest in the ground under a round hay bale in our backyard here in Warrington, Virginia.

And let's just say that I disturbed them.

Of course, I had no idea that they were there to begin with.

Well, at that very moment, I decided that there was only 1 way to bring an end to these vicious, venomous, stinging wasps.

Believe me, I had 21 stings that led me to that irrevocable decision.

And so I droused the round hay bale with Lots of gasoline, lots of it.

And then I proceeded to light a paper tube stuffed with straw, and I proceeded to toss it onto the hay bale.

The fire was seriously, seriously intense.

And as we stood there, mesmerized by the flames, feeling the heat of that fire, I stood there and just my mind started going in different directions.

I couldn't help but imagine at that very moment how the Israelites must have felt when God warned them that he was about to show up.

He was going to appear to them on the top of the mountain And God gave them a heads up.

They said, he said, you're not going to want to come close to the top of that mountain.

You're going to, in fact, want to set boundaries around the mountain so that you will be careful not to get too close.

You know, the text in the book of Exodus records that the top of Mount Sinai was engulfed with flames.

Back in 2001, my wife and I went to this peninsula.

And we went to the site that is recognized as the very south site of Mount Sinai.

We went around and saw that place and then we stood at the foot of Mount Sinai.

And what I couldn't help but notice was that Mount Sinai is this gigantic granite peak.

In fact, the mountain range is primarily made up of granite and sandstone.

And here's an interesting fact, that neither 1 of those, neither granite nor limestone or sandstone, rather, is flammable.

In fact, the mountaintop is not covered with trees, with highly flammable sap inside of them.

As they were in Oregon, when we lived in Oregon for some years, believe me, every summer we had forest fires and wildfires.

There was flammable life there that caused lots of these fires.

But in Mount Sinai, there is no such thing.

The mountaintop is not covered with trees.

We're going to examine this a little closer because something is amiss.

There was something, something to notice.

And it's in Exodus chapter 24 verse 17 that we find this account.

It says, And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel.

The sight of this fire was all-consuming.

It was lighting up that mountain on the very top.

But It's what I read in verse 23 that gets my attention.

Let's see, that would be Exodus chapter 24.

What gets my attention in the record is that God instructed them to put a boundary around the mountain, put a boundary around that mountain and set it apart as holy.

And I don't want us to miss that because here's God who tells Israel, I'm going to appear.

And I don't want you near the top of that mountain.

And I want to make sure that you don't come near to the top of that mountain.

So I'm going to instruct you to set a boundary around it, a boundary, so that you know how close you can get, but no further.

But what strikes me very interesting is that God not only says, don't come close, but He says, for I will sanctify it, I will set it apart and declare it holy.

I find that intriguing and I hope you don't miss that.

Because Mount Sinai is surrounded on all sides by higher peaks in the mountain range of which he's a part of.

It's 1 of the many mountains in that range.

But only the mountain on which the Lord descended in fire was to be set apart and declared holy.

Declared holy for God was there and His presence in fire sanctified that mountain top.

And for the thousands of people watching this, you can only imagine, they were terrified.

They were terrified as they saw this sight.

In fact, the Bible says that all the people were in the camp and they trembled.

Maybe because Moses had seen this before.

This glorious, fiery presence was not the first time that Moses saw such a sight.

In fact, a few months earlier, prior to the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, while Moses was watching over his flock, The Bible says that he turned aside to look at a mysterious sight that caught his attention.

This was something that he had never seen before.

In fact, it was a sight that would have been considered very rare in this rocky mountainous area where there's nothing flammable.

When Moses saw this burning bush, the Bible says that he looked and he looked again.

And the reason why this bush caught his attention is because there was something about this bush that was mysterious, because the bush was burning, obviously, But it was not burning at the same time.

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The Vital Necessity to Be on Fire

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