A Thought: Bricks Without Fire

A word from Curt

The Borderlands Team is compiling a devotional book for Refugees. The following is a short devo I wrote. I hope it blesses your

life.

 

Unfired Bricks

 

Bricks without Fire

 

Scripture:  Daniel 3:24-25

24 Then King Nebuchadnezzar . . . declared to his counselors, “Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?” They answered and said to the king, “True, O king.” 25 He answered and said, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”

 

“The experience of what happens to a man is not as important as what the man does with the experience.”   -A. Huxley

 

I had not been to the refugee camp in three years. We were here to inspect the boreholes and visit the churches.

I noticed that many tukuls (huts) were gone.  There was no trace of their prior existence. I asked our local pastor, “Where are the huts that stood here?”

“They were made of mud bricks that melted away when the rains came. They had not been fired.”

I thought about the three heroes of the Old Testament, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, who were tossed into the fire by the evil king, yet were protected by our strong God.

Many of you as refugees have been through the fire of war, famine, death, and loss of all you owned. However, you’ve come through it as bricks that have been fired.

Your lives are now made solid and hard by the grace of God in the fire.  As the rains of being a refugee fall, you do not melt away. You remain strong.  It is God that makes you strong in the fire. As the evil king says in one translation, as he saw the three men standing in the fire,  “I see a fourth man and he appears as the Son of God.”

Jesus still stands by us in the fire, and the result of the fire is a stronger testimony and life.

Prayer:  “Lord Jesus, thank you for never forsaking me in the fire or rain. Thank you for the strength from the fire to face whatever comes my way. Help me to lean on you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Fired bricks at Nimule Baptist Church, South Sudan

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