How to Set Your House on Fire
Men, would you know it if your house was on fire? Do you know what it takes to set it on fire? How about this, do you know how easy it is to get distracted by what you perceive to be a fire on someone else’s property while it’s actually your house that is on fire?
I can’t tell you how many days I’ve spent dealing with some man’s petty little issue he has with everything and everyone else but himself, while standing there trying to tell him, “Dude, your house is on fire! The smoke you are smelling isn’t from this house, it’s from yours. We really should do something about it!”
Well men, let’s do something about it.
As a child, I remember carrying out the trash to a fifty-gallon metal barrel where Dad would take a little bit of kerosene, throw it on the trash, and drop a flame on it where it would slowly burn and burn. The fire raged, adorned in black smoke and letting off enough toxins to give Al Gore a heart attack. Finally, having burned and burned, no flames were left, just a hot gooey mess. At that moment, you could add just a small piece of trash and just add one little spark and all of a sudden and the blaze is rolling once again.
My experience of discipleship in our church here at Christ the Lord in Dayton, Ohio has not been much different than the trash burning days of my youth.
Let me give you exhibit A. A man and woman come walking into Christ the Lord, having just come from your local church franchise selling good music and warm fuzzies at a discounted price. This couple smells an aroma that they’ve not smelled before. They see something that looks a little familiar but can’t quite pinpoint what the difference is. The smell they’ve picked up on is a mixture of smells. Fresh to their nose is the aroma of Christ. A people, knowing the Lord, loving the Lord and yes.... obeying the Lord. They smell a community of saints helping each other walk as though Christ is Lord overall and they are enjoying it. What they are smelling is called discipleship. The bag of goods they were sold before, labeled “discipleship,” was nothing more than a stale bag of off brand potato chips. The other smell they note, confusing their olfactory sense, is the fire ablaze in their own household. The smoky smell on Dad isn’t the sweet smell of delightful tobacco from the pipe he just enjoyed, but the smell of relationships burning under his watch, a marriage ablaze, parenting scorched... because no one knows how to actually deal with sin, no one knows what the Bible actually says, nor do they want to actually follow it. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
And so, the church goes to work. Someone gets the buckets, someone calls the ambulance, someone gets the surgeon ready. We’ve got a Bible to read, prayers to be prayed, and much application to be given. Real, true discipleship happens for the first time. Now, after some time goes by, and by no small measure of God’s grace through the work of the saints around them, the fires begin to settle.
The flames aren’t raging any more, no one is rushing to get buckets of water, and all those with smoke inhalation have been given oxygen and released from med. Everyone’s sense of war and urgency begins to calm. Husband takes a breath and relaxes his shoulders. The heap of trash that’s been on fire is now nothing more than a hot smoldering mess at the bottom of the barrel. So now, husband, father, with your shoulders relaxed cause war time is over, those hard commitments and great exercises of self-control to get those fires out has begun to slip. You say, “ah... we are good, we don’t need to read our Bible today. Ah... we can skip this feeding with the church. Ah... I can handle this one with my wife on my own. Ah... we don’t need to go to counseling this week.” You start saying yes when you should say no. Life has become easier and as I’ve heard said, “easy times make soft men.” The muscles you grew while the fire was raging have now gotten soft like a pudgy man with his hand stuck in the Twinkie box once again because you assumed those muscles would stay ripped.
Now enter some unforeseen circumstance. A freshly soiled paper towel gets tossed into the barrel atop the smoldering trash at the bottom. Remember, the flames were out, but you didn’t think about the fact that there was still a hot mess left to clean up. A hot gooey mess that still needed prayer, still needed exhortation, still needed accountability, still needed counseling, still needed the Bible read to it over and over again, still needed repentance and faith. Now, just add a little emotional spark and all of a sudden, the flames are raging again!
“Wait!” you say, “I thought the fires were out! Why are we here again?” But this time it is just a little different. This time, you think just a little more highly of yourself than you did when you first came in the doors. You have just enough confidence to push on through this fire, but not enough humility to remember that you are still the problem, and so what comes to your mind... “It must be someone else’s fault! Maybe the firemen didn’t do their job, maybe the pastors didn’t help us just right.” And I bet, “I can do this on my own.”
There’s a reason Paul tells Timothy that the mature men that lead God’s church cannot be recent converts or “young in the faith,” “He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.” 1 Timothy 3:6 (ESV). The reality is, your church community was over there the whole time–while you were camping, while you were “sick,” while you were at your kids sporting event, while you were too tired to read your Bible, while you were too busy hanging out with your pagan friends, while you were chasing those emotions, while you stopped praying–saying... “there’s still smoldering trash at the bottom of the barrel... there’s still urgent work to be done. Don’t stop now, because if you do, you’ll set your house on fire once again!”
Just one piece of trash, just one spark and it’s all up in flames again. But if you find yourself once again, fires raging and smoke rolling... The danger this time is that you’ve had just enough discipleship to give you confidence, but not enough discipleship to keep you humble. This round of fires comes complete with the ability to confuse your own smoke with what you think is smoke from someone else’s supposed fire. You’ve become puffed up with conceit. “Surely the church is on fire, surely my pastors house is on fire, surely the person who will tell me what I don’t want to hear, his house is on fire... couldn’t be my house.” So, while staring at the smoke rolling past the church, waving your hands and sounding your alarms, if you would just stop for a moment and look around the corner, you would see that the smoke rolling over top is coming from your house upwind.
So let me encourage you men, don’t go soft when the raging fires get put out. That’s the time to do the real hard work... less work on the emergency caused by yesterday’s failings and more work in preparation for tomorrow’s challenges.
This article is adapted from an episode of the Withywindle podcast. Listen to the episode on Apple podcast or Spotify.
