Being Refined…
My first thought about ‘being refine’ was that of purifying gold. In dentistry gold was use to restore teeth because it is a precious metal that will not corrode. Yet gold can become dirty shall we say. So before it can be used to cast a crown which will restore a tooth, it needs to be refined. To do that the gold is placed in a crucible heated with a very hot flame. Flux has been added to help remove any impurities. Before being cast by centrifugal force into a ‘gold crown’, the gold is heated with the flux to become as pure as possible. So to purify gold you need heat and flux which is an agent used to remove impureness.
The video below shows how this is done.
I need constant refining. I don’t know about anyone else? To be refined means to remove impurities. Speaking from personal experience impurities are part of my human nature. We are all fallen and imperfect.
This refining process is a life long happening through suffering and tribulations. Or as CS Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain:
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”
“I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ [Hebrews 2:10] is not incredible.”
Dramatically at two months old I was nearly burned to death which left me with lifelong pain. That pain still comes and goes. (For more on my accident see: https://www.dksmith918.com/?page_id=1205) However it was later in life that it became evident that we ALL undergo refining by ‘pain.’ Whether that pain is physical, mental or spiritual, we all suffer. Those who say they never suffer must be deluded. It is through suffering that we overcome and are being refined:
“But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”
Hebrews 2:9-10 KJV
So we are to take up our cross and follow Him in the valleys, climbing to the peaks as well as on those mountain top times…
George MacDonald offers this on HOW we are to refine ourselves…Through repentance …
“What does repent mean? To weep that you have done something wrong? No; that is all very well, but that is not repentance. Is repentance to be vexed with yourself that you have fallen away from your own idea…? No; that is not repentance. What is repentance? Turning your back upon the evil thing; pressing on to lay hold of that for which Christ laid hold upon you. To repent is to think better of it, to turn away from the evil. No man is ever condemned for the wicked things that he has done; he is condemned because he won’t leave them.”