Never Perish, Spoil or Fade

A Living Hope Through Fire

Hello there! Welcome to Fiery Word

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to this newsletter. It is free and goes directly to your inbox when you subscribe.

Kindly take a second to subscribe and share with somebody today.

---

Photo by Frank Alarcon on Unsplash

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:3-9)

New birth has never been gentle. It arrives through pressure, through narrowing, through pain that cannot be reasoned away. A mother labors because life insists on coming forth, her body stretched beyond what it has known, breath turned into groans that carry both anguish and purpose. But the child does not escape the trauma either. Forced from the safety of the womb, pressed through darkness into blinding light, lungs burning as they draw their first breath, birth wounds both giver and receiver. Life enters through rupture, not ease. And so it is with those who are born again. Salvation is not God laying something soft upon an unchanged life. It is the tearing open of what once held us, the dislocation of old securities, the violent mercy of being brought into a kingdom we could not enter intact. What lives must first be delivered, and delivery always costs more than we expect.

Peter speaks of trials and grief, but also of fire. Not fire as accident or enemy, but fire as promise. The same flame that threatens to consume is the one appointed to refine. This is what Scripture keeps saying, in different voices across different centuries: those who draw near to God will meet Him in the furnace. Fire is promised to believers, not as punishment but as purification. Not because God delights in pain, but because love refuses to leave us mixed with what cannot survive eternity.

The closer life presses toward its Source, the hotter it becomes. The same heat that hardens clay will soften wax. The same flame that consumes straw will refine gold. God does not draw us near to preserve everything we brought with us. He draws us near to reveal what cannot survive His presence and what must. This is why intimacy burns—not because God wounds for pleasure, but because holiness will not coexist with corruption. Every attachment that feeds on approval, control, or self-preservation is exposed to the flame. What remains is not less of you, but what is eternal in you.

I once asked a mentor why drawing nearer to God always seemed to increase the heat rather than relieve it. I expected language about peace, about rest, about gentleness. Instead, he spoke of furnaces and altars. To draw near to God, he said, is to step fully into the fire, to lay your life upon a burning altar where you are both living and being offered at the same time. What cannot belong to eternity is consumed, and what is born of God endures.

The altar does not ask whether we are sincere, it asks whether we are whole. Only what is given fully can remain, and only what survives the fire can rightly be called alive.

This is the paradox the gospel names without softening. We are called to live, and yet to be laid down. To breathe, and yet to burn. Nearness to God is not an additive process where holiness is layered gently over self. It is a surrendering one, where bodies are offered, lives yielded, wills placed into the fire of divine love. We are not destroyed there, but neither are we spared.

This is why Scripture speaks of salvation as birth rather than transaction. Peter blesses God not for a moment received, but for a people begotten. We have been born again, he says, into a living hope, and birth is never an instant even when it begins in one.

Salvation unfolds because life unfolds. Something has been decisively done for us, something is being worked out within us, and something waits to be revealed beyond us. To reduce salvation to a moment we once prayed is to misunderstand what God has begun. What was pardoned must now be purified. What has been restored must pass through fire. New life has entered us, but it has not yet finished its work. And like every true birth, what has begun in mercy must still pass through labor before it stands fully formed in the light.

We have received salvation in truth, yet we are still receiving it in power. Our sins have been forgiven, our separation healed, our access restored by the One who bore sin without knowing it. The door has been opened and we have been brought near. And yet the life that was welcomed must now be governed. Day by day, the Spirit presses against the flesh that resists His rule, subduing desires that once felt natural, breaking the dominion that darkness once held. This is not regression, it is rescue in motion. What was settled in heaven is being enforced in us.

Redemption is not only pardon from sin’s guilt, it is deliverance from sin’s grip, and that deliverance is worked out slowly, faithfully, under the steady hand of God.

But Peter lifts our eyes beyond what is happening within us now. He speaks of a salvation that is still coming, ready to be revealed in the last time. A completion so thorough that even the presence of sin is removed. A day when the struggle between flesh and Spirit finally ends, when death itself is undone and the last enemy loses its claim. This is not escape language, it is inheritance language. An inheritance that cannot perish under pressure, cannot spoil with time, cannot fade with use. It is kept, not by our consistency, but by God’s power, and we are shielded for it even now by faith. The fire we endure does not threaten that inheritance, it prepares us for it.

For this reason, the fire of trials does not arrive as an interruption to salvation, but as its companion. Peter says we are grieved by various trials for a little while, not because something has gone wrong, but because something precious is being proved.

Fire is promised, not avoided.

The people of God have always met God in furnaces, in deserts, in places where escape is impossible and presence becomes everything. The flames that surrounded the faithful did not consume them because Another stood in the midst. What threatened destruction became revelation. Bonds fell away. Freedom stood upright in the heat. God does not save us from fire by removing it, He saves us in fire by entering it.

And what the flames touch, they do not ruin, they refine.

Fire, then, is not a verdict against us but a mercy granted to us. It is the means by which faith is separated from illusion and hope is stripped of every lesser anchor. Trials do not announce God’s absence, they clarify His nearness. What feels like threat is often invitation—an invitation to trust what cannot yet be seen, to lean into a hope that breathes even when circumstances suffocate. The flames are allowed not to undo us, but to make us whole. What emerges is not a fragile belief dependent on ease, but a faith proved genuine, carrying weight, carrying glory, carrying endurance. This is the perfection fire produces—not comfort, but completion.

It is here that living hope reveals its purpose. Hope is not given after the furnace, it is given for it. God does not wait for the fire to pass before He supplies what will carry us through. Living hope is resurrection life planted in advance, mercy packaged for appointed suffering. The pain of labor is real, but it is never the final word. Birth always looks forward, never inward. So we endure not by denying the fire, but by trusting what it is producing. The mercy of God stands beneath the furnace like a foundation stone, steady and unmoved. What He allows to burn is governed by what He has promised to complete. The fire may shape us, but it cannot orphan us.

Hope lives because God lives. It keeps us surrendered until birth is complete.

And so we return again to birth, but now with eyes shaped by the cross. Peter’s language reaches deeper than metaphor. He speaks of us as begotten, brought forth by the deliberate act of the Father. New life did not begin with our desire for God, but with God’s desire for us. Yet this birth carried a price the Father did not spare His Son from paying. The living hope we carry was labored into existence on the cross, where the Firstborn endured the full weight of fire, sin, and death. He bore the labor so we could share the life.

This is why hope remains alive even in the furnace. We are being purified not as strangers, but as heirs. We endure not toward uncertainty, but toward inheritance. What was conceived by the Father and purchased by the Son will not be abandoned in the fire. What God has begotten, He will bring to fullness, until we stand complete, sharing in what never perishes, spoils, or fades.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

We come as those being born again, knowing the labor You have appointed is real and the fire feels close. Burn away what cannot live in Your presence. Preserve what You Yourself have formed within us. Grant us grace to endure today’s specific fires: the loss that still aches, the relationship that remains broken, the fear that wakes us in the night. Teach us to remain on the altar without fear, confident that what You refine, You also keep.

Where we are weary in the furnace, anchor us in the hope secured by the cross and guarded by Your power. Complete what You have conceived and bring us through every flame into the fullness of Your promise.

We rest not in our endurance, but in Your faithfulness.

In Jesus’ name

Amen.