I Am With You In the Fire | I AM... The God Who Gets Close | Menlo Church Live Stream

I'll share one last thought with you. Have you stopped to wonder why there was a furnace there in the first place? That furnace was actually not designed for punishment. It was a hearth used for metalworking. The furnace can be a metaphor for our suffering, but it can be the place where hope is forged, where the impurities of our illusions burn away and something stronger begins to take shape. Fire is a way of deciding what will be consumed and what will be strengthened. And so the question I pose to you today is this, is your theology just theoretical? Or do you actually believe that there's hope on the other side of surrender? Because trust in God transcends the furnace. It doesn't remove the heat, but it changes what it will produce. [00:54:21] (49 seconds)  #HopeForgedInFire

I think it's worth noting here that the fourth figure in the fire only shows up after the fall. God does not stop the furnace from being lit. God does not prevent the accusation. He doesn't calm the king's rage. He does not intervene to help them go around the danger. Instead, he joins them in it. He gets close. And the peril that was meant to destroy them becomes a very place where God's nearness is revealed. Here's what stands out to me. The promise of God's closeness is not a promise of avoidance. It's a promise of accompaniment. [00:44:45] (37 seconds)  #GodWithUsInFire

And so here's God's invitation to us today. If we're willing to surrender our control and be defined by our faith, we too can embody a steady confidence, not a false assurance that bad things won't happen, not a defensive posture that demands answers for every unanswered prayer, just a quiet rooted confirmation that says, can be calm, I can be brave, Jesus is with me, and I am okay. Despite the brokenness and peril of this world, I believe that humans are wired for the presence of God and that to be near him, especially in our pain, gives us life. [00:51:13] (38 seconds)  #PeaceThroughSurrender

This kind of peace is not the absence of peril. It's the presence of God. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were caught between the peril and the promise. The king had condemned them. The fire was lit. They were bound, and everything about that moment screamed danger. And yet somehow, they were not frantic. They did not bargain. They simply said, our God is able, but even if he does not, we will not bow. That's not reckless. That's peace. [00:52:46] (27 seconds)  #FaithNotFear

When Jesus calls us to take up our cross, he's not asking us to pay for our sins. He's inviting us into the freedom that comes from no longer trying to save ourselves. Because when your life is centered on control, then every threat feels catastrophic. But when your life is centered on surrender, then even suffering becomes sacred. And that's what happened in Babylon. The furnace that was meant to destroy them became an example of how God is with us. [00:50:36] (25 seconds)  #SurrenderOverControl

And here's what makes peril so disorienting. Peril doesn't just threaten your comfort. It threatens your sense of meaning. It doesn't just shake your schedule, it shakes your soul. That's why I I just wanna slow down here for a moment because we live in a world where peril is not rare. It's not hypothetical. It's not some Bronze Age problem. The world is a dangerous place right now. Maybe not necessarily in the same way. There's no furnace in the town square, but dangerous in the sense that so much can change so quickly. A nation can shift in a week. A market can turn in a day. A relationship can collapse with a sentence. Your body or your mind can betray you overnight, and you can do everything right and still find yourself facing something you never wanted. [00:41:06] (46 seconds)  #PerilInModernLife

And there are moments in our lives where that pressure feels dangerous, moments where the cost of saying no might feel too high, moments where the easier path would be to just nod along, moments where keeping your conviction might cost you comfort or reputation or opportunity or approval. And here's a deeper layer. Those moments don't just test what we do, they test what we believe. Scripture defines faith as the substance of things hoped for, but what happens when your hope is threatened? [00:29:31] (28 seconds)  #FaithUnderPressure

And when it comes to faith, all pluralistic societies have the same rules from Babylon to the Bay Area. You can believe whatever you want as long as you also believe everything else. So giving in under pressure when it challenges your convictions isn't just survival, it's surrendering to your surroundings because you can't your hope can't compete with your circumstances. But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego didn't believe that. And it was only a matter of time before their refusal became visible because allegiance is always obvious when everybody else bows. [00:37:07] (31 seconds)  #AllegianceRevealsYou

And we may not bow to gold statues in Silicon Valley, but we bow. We bow to performance. We bow to platforms. We bow to productivity or portfolios. We bow to whatever promises us security. Whatever tells us, if you give me your time and your attention, I'll keep you safe and I'll make you successful. And that's exactly the sort of pressure we live under. We want safety. We want assurance. We want hope that it's all gonna be okay, and anything that can give us a glimpse of that might be worth it. So giving in sometimes just feels rational. [00:36:00] (33 seconds)  #ModernIdols

The diagnosis does not instantly reverse. The market does not automatically rebound. The relationship is not magically repaired overnight, but there's a presence in the middle of it that changes what the fire is allowed to do to us. God's presence transforms our peril because it reminds us that we're not alone. They were not alone that day, and neither are we. We are what we are witnessing in Daniel chapter three is not just divine intervention. It is divine proximity. The fourth figure does not appear outside the flames but in them. [00:45:21] (31 seconds)  #PresenceTransformsPeril

Now I know scripture refers to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as men, but just keep in mind, in a culture that named you an adult by 13, they were likely teenagers. And with all the self assertion that only cocky, defiant teenagers can truly deliver, they tell the king, we don't need to defend ourselves to you. Our God is able to deliver us. And notice what they don't say. They don't say that God will definitely deliver them. They say, but even if he does not, we will not serve your gods. They might be young, but this is one of the most mature statements of faith in all of scripture. It's not bravado. It's not spiritual hype. It's just clarity. [00:38:50] (35 seconds)  #CourageousYoungFaith

They understood something that we often forget, that the greatest danger to the human soul is not suffering, but losing yourself in the suffering by forgetting who you are. They had been taken captive into another kingdom, one that was trying to assimilate them and rename them and redefine them. And in the moment that mattered most, they remembered who they were. And this tension exists for us today. We live in a world that pushes us to bow to whatever will give us safety or certainty, but underneath all of that is a quiet pressure to forget where our hope comes from. [00:53:13] (36 seconds)  #RememberWhoYouAre

When we face peril in our own lives, it has a way of clarifying what's actually inside us. You don't always know what you trust until what you're trusting in gets threatened. You don't always know what you believe until belief actually costs you something. You don't always know what's holding you up until the bottom falls out. A great poet of our time once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And that's funny until it's not because most of us live with a plan for our life, for our family, for our career, for how things are supposed to go, and then a phone call comes in. [00:40:18] (36 seconds)  #TrueTrustRevealed

And the challenge is that we want God to cooperate with our desires. We want his presence, but we also want our control. We want him close, but only if he moves in our direction. We want miracles, but on our timeline. We want blessings without surrender. Really, every religion has the same path to salvation that sounds something like this. Do the work, climb the ladder, follow the rules, and you'll earn your outcome. And if you do all of that work and suffering still comes to your doorstep, you will feel enraged. You will feel cheated. You will feel like God owes you, or you'll turn all of those feelings inward and assume that you failed somewhere along the line. The furnace, that furnace, will destroy your soul. [00:49:53] (43 seconds)  #ControlVsPresence

Because sometimes we discard or dismiss things not because they lack value, but because we don't recognize the value of it. And so today, I would just humbly ask if you are tending to the garden of your soul, move slowly and deliberately. Don't rush to discard things because of how they look or sound. I believe that God is a lot closer than we think, and there might be something very close and very valuable for each of us today, and I wouldn't want us to miss that. [00:27:22] (28 seconds)  #TendYourSoul

King Nebuchadnezzar often has these dreams where and visions. He wakes up, and then he demands that those around him explain what they meant. And if he doesn't like the answer, those people never get to say another word again. He suffers from both an inferiority and superiority complex at the same time. He is a dangerous leader, and he makes the world a dangerous place around him. The issue with king Nebuchadnezzar isn't just that he's powerful, it's that he's afraid. Afraid of losing control, afraid of losing influence, afraid of being forgotten. And when fear sits on the throne of our lives, it rarely stays quiet. [00:34:10] (37 seconds)  #FearOnTheThrone

Jesus does not offer us a path for protection in this life. In fact, he warns us that pursuing that could actually cost us our soul. We aren't promised a life where we get to avoid the furnace, but we're invited to a life where we aren't ruled by the fear of it. But in order to do that, we have to deny parts of ourselves. And denying ourselves is not self hatred or pretending like we don't have desires or dreams. It is the daily intentional formational refusal to make ourselves the center of the universe. [00:49:15] (30 seconds)  #DenyToFollow

Throughout this series, we've been looking into, different things and seeing a pattern unfold, how God meets us in the desert, God meets us in the fight, and now we see how God meets us in the furnace. But the stories in scripture are not primarily about human strength or heroic faith, but about divine nearness, about a God who refuses to remain distant from our reality and meets us where we are and as we are. And when that presence settles into our lives, something unexpected begins to grow. Not control, not certitude, but peace. The kind of peace that comes from everything, not the kind of peace that works out from everything as we plan, but a true pre peace. [00:51:51] (43 seconds)  #DivineNearness

I wanna invite you to consider the this idea that the existence and presence of God does not eliminate danger, but it changes what the danger can do to you. Another way to say that is God's presence transforms our peril. Today's story comes to us from the book of Daniel in the Bible. It takes place around June BC. Israel has been conquered by the Babylonian Empire. The city of Jerusalem has fallen, and the temple, the physical place where they worship God, has been destroyed. [00:30:31] (29 seconds)  #PresenceChangesDanger

I believe that this is a pre incarnational glimpse of Jesus himself, or as Phil said to us last week, a theophany. What does that mean? It's an appearance of Jesus before we knew who Jesus was. The one who would one day step into our world has already stepped into the fire. And if that's true, then this is not just an isolated miracle story. It's a preview of the gospel. It's the story of a God who does not remain insulated from our suffering but enters into it with us. [00:46:04] (31 seconds)  #TheophanyInTheFire