[The godly] will declare, “The Lord is just!
….He is my rock!
….There is no evil in him!” Psalm 92:15 NLT

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OK, I began this evening by jotting down some thoughts for my opening prayer. But then it became more than an opening prayer! So read on!

This has been one of the coldest days we’ve had in a while. Just as the warmth of the fire in our woodstove will only extend as far as we allow it in the house, so it can be with the warmth of Your Spirit, Father, in our lives.

There is a thing called a damper that retains the heat that would normally escape up our flue. It allows the heat to dissipate into the area being heated by the woodstove. Our wood stove sits in the corner of our living room.

When I need to start a fire, I place two or three logs in the bottom of the stove then place a quarter of a starter brick on top of those. (It’s basically a chunk of sawdust held together by a flammable waxy substance). I add another log or two on top of that, make sure by damper is fully opened, and light the starter brick. The fully opened damper allows the firebox to draw the most air, enabling the fire to start pretty quickly.

Now the fire has to be carefully managed or it can drive you out of the house because it gets so hot. (We learned that the hard way…but that’s another story for another time!) Once the metal casing of the stove gets hot, I usually shut the damper down to its lowest position. This allows only the most minimal amount of air to pass through – enough to keep things burning without letting it get out of control.

Did you know that we are the damper in our relationship with God? Spiritually I really don’t think there’s any reason to ever dampen the Holy Spirit’s work in and through our lives…but we are very good at shutting our dampers down to the lowest positions possible. Unfortunately, we can shut it down so low that the fire that once burned brightly in our lives is almost snuffed out.

On my woodstove there is a lever at the base that I can move left or right, controlling the amount of air allowed in the firebox. Spiritually things that dampen the Spirit’s ability to work in our lives are too numerous to name in their entirety. And they’re different for each of us. One the comes to mind is yielding to temptation. Anything that tempts us, puts a damper on our spirituality. The acts committed do that and more often than not, the amount of time we give to those temptations dampens our relationship with God as well. It takes time away from godly, uplifting activities we could be doing – reading our Bibles, praying, calling and encouraging the disheartened and downtrodden (We all know people who fit into those categories!)

But sometimes it’s not just doing bad things that hinder our spiritual walk. Sometimes it’s the good things that we are so hell-bent on accomplishing that take an exorbitant amount of time. We become so fixated that we quickly work God out of the process. We must be careful.

Lord Jesus, help us to keep our dampers open. May we allow the Holy Spirit to use us throughout each day to bring light and life to the world that is dying around us. Amen.

Jan 6th, 2022, Thurs, 7:12 pm