The Flaming Sword Insights

Installments will be added monthly

Part One

THE FLAME
Detroit, Michigan, and my empty life there hold dreaded memories for me of disgust, cruelty, and distress. By birth-father was killed by the V-3 rockets, our national hero Wernher von Braun engineered for Nazi Germany’s use during World War II. I was only two years old then, and it took another two years to transport his closed casket remains stateside from the harbor of Antwerp, Belgium for the funeral service and internment. Arrangements were made by my mother’s then fiancée. They married soon afterward. My new father was a notorious police officer named “Black Jack” because of his racial prejudice and black jack weapon. My mom became an alcoholic lush; and I was unwanted baggage to my step-father.

So at age thirteen, I drank some beers with my cousin Ted and committed my first Grand Theft Auto. By my sixteenth birthday, I had robbed a gas station and run away from home on a stolen motorcycle. My life went downhill for the next twenty-two years until I pleaded with Jesus to save me, and He did!

Still lost and in my teens, I recall walking beyond the Randolph Street Police Precinct, and heading toward the Capitol Bar and Strip Joint on Broadway Avenue. A bum on every corner, panhandling pocket change, sipping brown bag wine and pimping cheap whores. A white renegade teen in the midst of simmering racial hostility. My bowie knife at hand and an unregistered pistol under the driver’s seat of my nearby car.

I noticed an unusual stirring as people began to move toward the next block and a crowd began to gather. It was pitch black night, but yet there was an eerie glow in the sky that was glistening against the backdrop of low-lying clouds. What I was about to witness was to become a golden moment that would change me in midlife crisis. It was a visual aid to gain insight that the Lord Himself had prepared to be remembered many years into the future. As I turned the corner and stepped into the mob of milling onlookers, I saw a four-story building with the entire top floor blazing. The heat was so intense that we stood across the street as if before an open oven on a blistering day.

An awe-inspiring circus of flames, climbing sparks and billowing smoke filled the atmosphere in a wonder of ruin run rampant. Pick-pockets began working the street, and hawkers were packing local bars with street-side windows to capture the spectacle in air-conditioned comfort. The screaming siren stopped short as the engine pulled up and sent its ladder to the fourth floor inferno. Firemen immediately surveyed the crisis amid the barking of dogs and clamor of the audience as the top floor provided a fourth of July spectacle of miniature explosions. One defiant fire-fighter finally took the hose upward, step by measured step and made his fearless stance, too close to the flames, water pressure now at full throttle. Back and forth he fanned the white-hot flames, steam mingling with soot.

This nonsense delayed for what seemed like an extended period of time, and the people began murmuring and shuffling in dissatisfaction with this lone man not accomplishing a thing. The water produced steam and the inferno raged into the third floor, determined to burn it all to the ground. The whole burning building would soon be destroyed! My own blood-pressure began to rise as I went through a slow burn over the inefficiency of this ridiculous Fire Department effort to quench the fires. This was a pathetic tragedy of wasting taxpayer dollars. This struggle to extinguish the blaze was futile! Destructive criticism and pointless armchair quarterbacking called for this uninteresting fireman to go home, let it burn to the ground and save the City this ridiculous expenditure.

What would I do if I were the Fire Chief? Constructive criticism: It was a rational question to reflect on, and I gave it a lot of thought for a sixteen-year-old runaway. I had it! I would hose down all the combustible material on the third floor, soak it thoroughly and when the fourth floor fire reached the sodden third floor, it would just smolder out. Yes! I would go to the CAUSE and leave the EFFECT alone.

A lifetime later, this remembrance would play an essential role in my management of life-crisis situations in the Name of Jesus. The true life story of the burning building came to an unusual conclusion, one I would have never guessed. But let us go back to the beginning to further grasp the end.

In this depiction of a true life event, the flame represented the EFFECT of the fire. All human effort to reverse or overcome the EFFECT failed because the CAUSE continued to exist and permit the flames of destruction. The CAUSE was the combustible material that continued to catch fire, floor by floor and demonstrate the EFFECTS, sparks and flames. And all human effort to stop the CAUSE was also in vain. That lonely fireman was not equipped to conquer the enemy, and neither are we.

What was the answer to this predicament? What had escaped my notice of this dilemma? The firemen I did not see fighting this blaze on the outside, unknown to me or to those watching from the curb, were deep inside the building’s lower level, hard at work attempting to locate the SOURCE of this puzzling holocaust. The revelation was finally at hand.

Leaving the EFFECT and apparent CAUSE, they had found the SOURCE: a broken gas main! The solution was to turn off the flaming gas line and then turn on the fire quenching water. And so this lesson for problem-solving was made crystal clear. The miserable EFFEC of sin (wretchedness) must be dealt with at the SOURCE (sin) CAUSED by our nature (fallen). The fires of hell must be shut off so that the living water of Jesus Christ might flow. Such is the wisdom of this practical day-to-day revelation. Repent of your sin and unleash the source of salvation, the mighty Word of God. Reconcile the sinful cause to Christ and the consequence of sin will be no more.

You are about to step into your own burning building and share with me the triumph of defying the gates of hell. Its prize is your spirit. But allow me to bring my personal testimony forward a few years to set the scene for the next teaching that follows.