The Furnace of Prayer

When I was just a kid of a boy in high school, I worked summers at a local grocery store as a sack boy. One of my job descriptions was to break down the cardboard boxes that the produce came in, and flatten them, and stack them on a dolly, and pull that load to the back of the store where stood a cast iron furnace where I would burn those boxes. As I opened the heavy door of that raging inferno, my face would be singed from the intense heat, and as I backed away, I would quickly toss those flattened boxes in that hot furnace which consumed them immediately.

It was an experience you never forget. In the Book of Zechariah we see the furnace of affliction in regard to anguished prayer that is answered by the Almighty. This is seen in chapter 13 and verse 9, which declares, And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried.

They shall call on my name, and I will hear them. I will say, It is my people, and they shall say, The Lord is my God. The anguish of prayer is a building, dynamic, with the force of a furnace, where all the energies and emotions rise heavenward with great violence, like that of an erupting volcano, with spewing heart-cries loaded with flaming atoms of faith.

When all is spent, the remaining hot lava flows down the mountain in all directions, igniting everything in its consuming path. The red-hot Christian on fire for God lives his life on a slow burn for Christ and the gospel, and so too ignites everyone he encounters with his burning seal of another world yet to be possessed, but promised nonetheless. But all is fueled by nights of desperation, where faith is exercised and the promises of God tested, where earth meets heaven, where mortal man communes with the angelic region, and gains the ear of the Almighty, who leans over his throne to better hear the unfortunate, anguished prayers, with every intention of a father answering the pitiful petitions of his blood-bought child.

A prayer has power, a prayer has force, a prayer moves the Almighty to action. The burning question remains, are we expanding the effort of prayer? Are we so consumed with eternity and the peril of the perishing, that our central focus in life burns with the embers of a red-hot furnace? Do we sweat and labor in prayer for the lost as we ought, for a day of judgment is fast approaching? Malachi 4.1 speaks of such a day, for behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. Let us pray.