This is a common phrase, “trial by fire.” It is generally referred to as something that someone goes through that challenges them to an incredible degree, he grows beyond it, and his life changes for the better because of it. The illustration is often seen as a phoenix rising from the ashes of defeat.
When most people are faced with a challenge, they have not done much if any personal development. They do one of two things: (1) they think it’s just their lot in life to suffer at the hands of others or (2) they get mad at God for what happened. They never get to the root of what caused the problem in the first place, and as a result they never learn from it. They keep going round and round in an endless cycle, falling into the same traps over and over, never even realizing what they got themselves into.
Napoleon Hill, in his phenomenal book Outwitting the Devil, uses this illustration. When a person is not in control of his mind, he is merely drifting along life’s current. When you’re drifting, you can so easily be caught in the Devil’s trap: a whirlpool called “hypnotic rhythm.” As long as you stay in this trap, you are not in control of your life. The whirlpool is made up of habits. It can work for or against you. You can use it to get good results or bad results. Good habits create good results, and bad habits create bad results. However, to take your life to the next level, even if you are already getting great results in your life, you must break free of whatever habits that are keeping you from that next level.
Many times, this comes only with some purifying in the refiner’s fire.
Into the Fire
In the Book of James, chapter one, verse two, the Apostle James writes, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into diverse temptations.” In other words, you should be joyful when trials, tribulations, and hardships come into your life.
You may say, “Well, how in the world can I be happy in the mess I’m in? I’m in deep financial trouble. My family’s always in the hospital. I’m going through a divorce right now. I’m suffering from depression and anxiety. How is it possible that I can feel joy when my life is so obviously full of sorrow?”
The answer I have for you is one that is an oft-quoted scripture, Romans 8:28, “For all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” There are a few things to note about this passage. First, it does not say that all things will be good when you are a child of God. It says that they will work together to bring good. Second, it says that things will work together for good for the children of God. Third, things will work together for good if you are walking in your calling as a child of God.
This is a lot to unpack, but being a child of God and finding your calling are not the subject at present I will devote other posts for that purpose. For now, the question is, how do we find the lesson in the mess? How do we navigate the fire and get the most out of it? Why is the fire so important for our lives? I will be looking at this in two parts, each in separate posts. First, I will look at this subject from a general personal growth aspect. Then, in my next post, I will focus it in a little, go a bit deeper into it, and add a bit of Bible philosophy into the mix. Believe it or not, both are very much intertwined.
Murphy’s Committee
When I began my quest of personal development, one of the first programs that I listened to was by a man named Jerry Clark. The program is called Creating Magic, and is about the basics of changing your paradigms and your beliefs to get the results that you want. It is a four part series, and the third part is called “Murphy’s Committee.” Jerry Clark bases this program off of two major sources.
First is the oft-repeated phrase called “Murphy’s Law,” which I’m sure you all are familiar with. To refresh your memory, the law states that if something can go wrong, it will. This guy Murphy who came up with this law was evidently not one of the great positive speakers of his day.
Where this comes into play for our conversation is this: whenever you strive to achieve something, there will be many forces trying to push you back to the life you had before. You family and friends will try to guilt you and berate you. “How could you be so selfish, thinking only about yourself and your success. No one else in your family has been that successful, so what makes you think that YOU can?” Your church will try to pull you back. “The Bible says that money is the root of all evil. It also says that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. The book of James says, ‘Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl for the misery that shall come upon you.” Your boss and those where you work may try to keep you from outperforming them. Your spouse may try to guilt you. “Think of our children. Don’t work so hard. You need to have more time for us or I’m leaving!”
One thing that you must remember when you reach this point is to keep going. Most often it is our family and those closest to us that will try to stop us first. They are often the ones that will keep most people from achieving anything of real greatness, because they are family, and we don’t want to hurt their feelings.
Everything that can come against you to stop you, probably will. It may not even be those around you. It may even be your own limiting beliefs. It may be your own self-doubt.
The hardest road we walk is doing something that we know in our heart is the right path, yet everyone around us is telling us something different. You may have told a few people, and they laughed at you. You may be slowly growing yourself, they aren’t recognizing and applauding your growth and change. It may seem that they don’t care. They may not see it for you, and that’s okay. Don’t let someone else’s lack of vision keep you from living the life that you know that you were meant to live. As Les Brown said, don’t let other people’s opinion of you become your reality.
Journey through the Swamp
The second major influence for Jerry Clark’s program is Scott Alexander’s book Rhinoceros Success. In this book, Scott talks about how some people are like cows and some are like rhinos. The book is an interesting one, if not a little cheesy at times (which Scott himself freely admits). The illustration it provides is one of great importance for the topic of personal achievement.
Rhinos are strong, self-driven individuals. They charge after what they want at top speed. They don’t wait for opportunity to find them. They find the opportunity. They don’t get excited about much, but when they do, you do not want to be in their path. Rhinos have thick skin so that bugs, predators, and even the occasional arrows don’t knock them out as easily.
Cows, on the other hand, are passive. They play it safe. They stay in the pasture. They are always complaining about something. “Mooooo. Look at that guy. His grass is greener. He’s so lucky. I wish I could be like him. Careful, son, don’t be like that other guy. He maybe a rich guy, but he is one of the nastiest, stingiest people in the whole world. Money is the root of all evil.”
The remarkable aspect about this is that we are all born rhinos, but most of us are trained, or brainwashed, to be cows. Let me to explain. You were the first of millions of other sperm to make it to and fertilize your mother’s egg. Your first instinct was to grow and expand who you were – to talk, to walk, to play, to read, to count.
All of those things were encouraged in your early years, but what happened? Those around you had an influence on you as to the picture of what they saw you achieving and becoming, and you took that on as your own. They said, “Sure, enjoy childhood while you can! Once you get older, you will not be able to do that anymore. You will have to go to school for 13 years, that to college for another 4, then work a 9-5 job for the rest of your life until you retire on government benefits and social security.”
The difference between those who are rhinos and those who were timid enough to let their horns to be clipped and become cows is the fact that rhinos did not let other people define who they are. They opened their eyes to the fact that they were not living the life that they wanted, rather were caught up in surviving this life. They were too caught up in making a living instead of designing a destiny. They were building someone else’s dreams instead of their own.
If you have made it this far in reading this. First of all I want to congratulate you. Chances are you are one of those rhinos who has lost their way and want to get back on the right track. I want to encourage you that the life you are living right now that you don’t like does not have to be the one that you live the rest of your life. You can leave the pasture where all of the other cows are to find your own life. I will not tell you it will be easy. Far from it – it will be the most intense and grueling work you have ever done. However, I will tell you that the reward is absolutely incredible, because I have tasted it in my own life, which I get to in the second part of this message.
What is it that separates the safe pasture, and the dream world? It is called “The Swamp.” The swamp is a dangerous place. There are predators, quick sand traps, and no medical benefits. This is where the Murphy Committee primarily works. They are responsible for trying to stop those making it through the swamp. They are the ones that send your family after you. They are the ones who give you financial trouble. They are the ones that are in your head, feeding you false information, telling you that you’re not good enough, that you don’t deserve success.
It is weathering these attacks and learning how to deal with them that will give you the thick skin of a rhino. Eventually, your mind will become strong enough to resist even their greatest attacks. That is the importance of the refiner’s fire.
Since I first heard this message in 2016, my skin has become impenetrable to the forces of darkness. They cannot kill me. I know that I have God’s divine protection. However, they can hurt me as much as they are allowed to the extent that I leave the door open, and they have done so. The winter of 2019-2020 was the darkest few months of my life. As I was pulling up the rotting corpse of pornography in my life, and began to go to the root of why I was dealing with it, the forces of darkness put everything in their arsenal to attack me mentally and emotionally. On the outside, everything seemed to be fine. I had done a few years of personal growth, and I was really good at putting that mask on. On the inside, though, I was a wreck.
I was dying. I now know that what was dying was the old me that was bound by sin and Satan. That is why my book will be subtitled “Freedom from Sin, Satan, and Pornography.” I had this revelation solidified recently from a man who just recently became one of my many mentors that I haven’t met, John Bevere. He was going through the same sort of pain that I was, and when he asked God why he was feeling such pain, God answered and said, “The reason why you are in such pain is because you are dying. There’s always pain in death.”
When you go through these challenges, you may feel like an emotional wreck and not know why. You may feel angry and not know why. You may feel devastated and not know why. The thing I want to say to you, though, is this: just as the fire that purifies gold, so do these fires of affliction purify what’s in your heart.
If you have a block of 14 karat gold bar, 14 of 24 parts of that bar are pure gold. The other 10 parts of that block are other impurities – nickle, iron, etc. If you were to put that block in a furnace and melt it down, all of the impurities start to appear at the surface as slag. It is then that the refiner can take his ladle and scoop off the slag, leaving behind a pure gold bar.
That is the refiner’s fire.
This is the same with the challenges that we face as individuals. If you are put into great challenges, it may be God trying to purify you of any impurity you may have in your heart – pride, shame, guilt, hatred, resentment, fear, boasting, jealously, etc. It will hurt. Do you think that the gold likes it when it’s heated to its melting point? The fire will melt your soul. It will burn you. Do you know that the last few degrees are the hottest that the bar can take before it melts? The last portion of the fire is the hottest, yet that is what it takes to get the impurities out. However, once you are gone through the fire and gotten the impurities skimmed off, you will live a more pure life than you did before.
I firmly believe that if I had not learned what I did about the swamp, and entered the swamp with the mindset of, “I’m getting to the bottom of this porn thing no matter how hard it gets,” I would not have made it out. I would have either died in the swamp or returned to the pasture. I also believe that if I had not learned those things, that I would not have entered the swamp to begin with. That is the thing about it. You will not enter the swamp if you don’t know anything about it.
I don’t know what you are dealing with now. I don’t know what you may be going through. What I do know is that you must have faith that there is something better on the other side of your pain, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I have said this many times and I know it to be true: the ONLY people who fail are the people who quit, or don’t even try at all.
With all of that said, there is one thing above all others that I know will help you to weather any storm. That is being a child of God. If you believe that you are a child of God, the Romans 8:28 passage will have a special light for you, simply because you know that God has your back. You know that whatever you are going through right now is for a purpose. You may not know what that purpose is, but you are willing to do whatever it takes to find that purpose.
This leads me to the next part of this conversation: what does the Bible state about this topic? How should we view the refiner’s fire? With that I will direct you to the second part of this blog. I’ll see you there!
Super Success 