The Mirror of the Word and other works by C.E. White can be purchased on her website, cewhitebooks.com or on Amazon

“The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests hearts.”

—Proverbs 17:3

None of us are pure except by the ransom paid by the blood of Jesus, but the Bible tells us many times that going through the refiner’s fire burns off the dross.

When the Lord allows hard things and discipline into our lives, if we let them, they will melt away all the unnecessary parts—the things that have us focused on this life.

The crucible and the furnace are painful, but they are also beneficial. They will test our hearts and reveal to us the places we have not yet allowed God in but are still holding to our earthly desires, selfishness, and the cares of this world.

When we look back at fires we’ve gone through and the dross it left behind, we can usually tell what the Lord was doing; there was a place we’d been allowing the devil a foothold, a fear that was controlling us, or sins we hadn’t given up.

And each time we go through the fire, the impurities it brings to the surface are diminished.

As we mature in the Lord, he often reveals sins that five years earlier, we wouldn’t have had the slightest pang of conscience over. But he tests hearts, and he knows where that sin still resides, even if it comes out in more and more subtle ways as we are sanctified through him.

If our goal is to be like Jesus, we can expect the refiner’s fire to come, and we can welcome it when it does. It does not burn indiscriminately but burns away that which is impure and unnecessary for the kingdom of God

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