When God sits by the Fire

Today, a dear friend shared something on social media with me. It’s a well-known sermon illustration tied to Malachi 3:3: “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver…”

To better understand these words, a woman visits a silversmith to understand how silver is refined. The smith explains that the silver must be held in the center of the fire — right where it’s hottest — to burn away all impurities. He sits and watches the process closely, never leaving, because if the silver is left in the fire even a moment too long, it will be ruined.

When asked how he knows when the silver is fully refined, the silversmith replies: “When I can see my image in it.”

I sat with this for a while and then wondered… Does God allow us to go through suffering, pain, and loss to refine us — until His image is reflected in us?

Because if you’ve lived a little, you know life doesn’t leave us untouched. Over the years, we gather experience, opinions, patterns, pride. We learn how to survive, how to stand on our own two feet. We become self-reliant, efficient, even impressive. But in the process, we can also become distant — layered, defended, weighed down.

The world taints us. It influences our thinking, our values, our pace. It teaches us to strive, to perform, to compete, to prove ourselves. And slowly, we begin to draw away from what really matters. For many of us, our faith becomes a duty instead of a relationship, because we support the world’s systems without even realizing we’ve stopped seeking God’s ways.

Then life interrupts. A loss. A crisis. An illness. Something shatters, and suddenly, the scaffolding we built our lives on crumbles — and we’re left standing in the heat of it all, wondering: Is this the refining fire?

And maybe it is. Because when we go through hardship, something happens: We are often stripped of our pride, ego, and the illusions of self-sufficiency.

Our attachments to worldly things — status, wealth, reputation, even our well-worn beliefs — are exposed as fragile.

Our inner life comes to the surface: our faith, our fears, our identity, our capacity to love.

It’s with this stripping away that we can become more open to faith, love, compassion, humility, mercy, and dependence on God.

Romans 8:29 puts it plainly: "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son..."

That’s the refining process. That’s what all the fire is for.

Not to destroy us, but to conform us to the image of Christ. Not suffering for suffering’s sake, but transformation through surrender. A becoming. A revealing. Until one day, when God looks at us, He sees something familiar. His reflection.

And that makes the fire, while still painful, not pointless.

So if today feels hot… if you feel pressed, stripped, broken, exposed… remember your Silversmith. He sits by the fire. He watches. He never leaves. Because you matter too much to be left unattended.

And He knows the moment your heart starts to reflect His own.

Find a quiet moment today and ask:

Is there something God may be refining in me — not to harm me, but to bring something deeper to the surface?

Let that question sit with you in the stillness.