The Cross and the Refiner’s Fire

Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings. 1 PETER 4:12–13

Madame Guyon did not write about suffering from a comfortable distance. She had been married against her will into an unhappy home, lost her beauty to smallpox, buried children, passed through years of inward darkness, been slandered, shut up in a convent, and at last imprisoned for years in fortresses of the state. When she wrote that the cross is God’s instrument for making us His, she was not repeating a commonplace. She was describing her life.

She had two great pictures for it. One was a pair of mountains; the other was a furnace. Both say that God’s love does not leave us as it finds us.

Two mountains

Her teaching on the cross in A Short and Easy Method of Prayer turns on two mountains. On Tabor, the mountain of the transfiguration, the disciples saw the Lord’s glory and wanted to stay. On Calvary they saw Him crucified and fled.

And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. MATTHEW 17:2

If you love God purely, she says, you will be as willing to follow Him to Calvary as to Tabor. Then she adds a sentence that goes to the heart of the gospel: “He must be loved as much on Calvary as on Tabor, since it is there that He makes the greatest manifestation of His love.”

That is exactly right. The greatest revelation of God’s love is not the shining face on the mountain but the broken body on the cross. She describes people who give themselves to God at one time and take themselves back at another. They give themselves, she says, to be caressed, and take themselves back when they are crucified. Most of us will recognise ourselves. We are eager disciples on the mountaintop and reluctant ones in the valley.

The cross gives God

Her boldest phrase comes a little later. “The cross gives God, and God gives the cross.” It is a compressed way of saying two things at once. Suffering accepted in faith draws us nearer to God than almost anything else; it strips away our false supports and throws us upon Him. And the cross is not an accident in the lives of God’s children. It is one of His gifts, one of His chosen workmen for shaping us into the likeness of His Son.

For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. HEBREWS 12:10–11

Her practical counsel follows. When something presents itself to you as suffering, she says, abandon yourself to God at once for that very thing, and offer yourself as a sacrifice. You will find that when the cross comes, it has lost much of its weight, because you have already accepted it.

Yet accepting the cross, she writes, will not prevent our feeling its weight. Some people imagine it is not true suffering if they feel it — as if a truly spiritual person should float above pain. She will have none of it. “The feeling of suffering is one of the principal parts of suffering itself.” And she adds that Jesus Himself was willing to suffer it in its full intensity.

And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. MARK 14:34

That is a great mercy to sufferers. A Christian in pain may weep, may cry out, may ask for the cup to pass, and still be wholly abandoned to God. And the suffering is not merely something to be endured until it passes. In the state of abandonment, she says, Christ impresses Himself upon the soul and imparts to it His own condition, as Paul bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus. Suffering becomes a fellowship with Christ in which we are made like Him.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death. PHILIPPIANS 3:10

Gold in the furnace

Her second picture is fire, and her writings are full of it. Prayer, she says in her chapter on prayer and sacrifice, is itself a kind of burning: “Prayer is the heat of love, which melts and dissolves the soul, and carries it to God.” We do not come near to a holy God and remain unchanged, any more than wax can come near a flame and keep its shape.

For our God is a consuming fire. HEBREWS 12:29

Her fullest treatment comes in the last chapter of the book, on the way to divine union. There she asks how two things so unlike as the purity of God and the impurity of the creature can ever be joined. Her answer is that God Himself must do it, and He does it by fire. She works this out with the goldsmith’s craft. Gold can be purified only by fire, which gradually consumes all that is earthly and foreign. It is put into the fire again and again until its impurity is gone, and only then is it fit for the finest work.

And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness. MALACHI 3:3

And she makes a point that anyone who has passed through a hard season will recognise. At first, she says, the fire seems to tarnish the gold. So God’s purifying work can seem, while it is happening, to spoil the soul rather than cleanse it. The believer feels worse, not better; more aware of sin, less sure of God, stripped of the consolations that once seemed so certain. It is only afterwards that the purpose appears.

But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. JOB 23:10

What the fire burns

What, exactly, is being burned away? Her answer is the word we met in the chapter on the All and the Nothing: appropriation. The fire consumes the soul’s claim to own itself and its goods, even its spiritual goods. Even works that are good and that God receives, she says, must pass through the fire, so that all that was merely ours may be taken from them.

Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:13

Does this mean God acts without our consent? Her answer is careful. At the beginning, she says, the soul gave itself to God to do with it as He wills; that was an active and general consent to all that follows. Later, when God burns and purifies, the soul does not always understand and would not always choose it. What it gives then is what she calls a passive consent: it endures the work as best it can, neither able nor willing to prevent it. That is a wise account of how believers actually experience God’s discipline. We said yes once, with open eyes; we go on saying yes, often with our eyes shut.

Where care is needed

Her teaching on the cross and the fire is among her best, but it can be bent in unhealthy directions, and she sometimes bends it herself.

First, she speaks of loving souls being hungry after suffering. There is a noble meaning in that: a readiness to follow Christ wherever He leads. But Christians are not called to seek out suffering or to invent it. The cross we are to take up is the one God lays on us in the path of obedience, not one we manufacture to prove our devotion. Nor does accepting God’s sovereignty mean remaining in abuse we could lawfully escape, or refusing medical help.

Second, acceptance of suffering in our own lives must never become indifference to the suffering of others. Madame Guyon was known in her years at Montargis for her care of the poor and the sick; she did not treat other people’s suffering as merely their cross to bear.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. ROMANS 12:15

Third, the fire purifies; it does not justify. Our acceptance with God does not depend on how far the purifying has gone. It rests wholly on Christ. The refiner’s fire is the work of a Father on a child already His, not the work of a judge on a prisoner still on trial.

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. ROMANS 3:24

Fourth, her own purification was long, dark and extreme, and her writings, especially Spiritual Torrents, describe it as though it were the normal road. It is not necessarily so. The preface to the Victorian English edition in the Ochorus library saw this clearly, noting that “it does not follow that this inward death must always be as lingering as in the case of Madame Guyon.” Some pass through long nights; others are refined more quietly, in the ordinary trials of work, family and illness.

With those cautions, her teaching is a great comfort. Our faith was born at a cross; it should not surprise us that it grows there too. And the believer in the furnace is not forgotten. The Refiner sits by the fire, watching, and He does not leave the gold there a moment longer than it needs.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. ISAIAH 43:2

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where are you glad to follow Christ on Tabor but reluctant on Calvary? Name the difference honestly.

2. Think of a trouble you see coming. Give yourself to God for that very thing now, before it arrives.

3. If you are suffering, do not be ashamed of feeling it. Tell God plainly how much it hurts, as the Lord did in Gethsemane.

4. Identify one good work of yours in which you have taken secret pride. Offer it to God and let Him have the credit.

5. Remind yourself that your acceptance with God rests on Christ alone, not on how far you have been purified.

6. Do one concrete thing this week to relieve someone else’s suffering.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have loved You on the mountain and fled from You at the cross.

Teach me to love You as much on Calvary as on Tabor, since it is there You loved me most.

You are a consuming fire, and I have wanted Your warmth without Your burning. I give myself to You again, to be refined as You will.

When the fire seems to spoil rather than cleanse me, keep me from pulling away from Your hand, and make me quick to relieve the sufferings of others.

Burn away all that is merely mine, and bring me out as gold, accepted in Christ and made like Him. Amen.