Gold Purification

Malachi 3;1 "Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD.

If you want to refine gold today, you need a bunch of permits, you should be a chemist, you should also have a nice, safe lab to work out of and a list of chemicals that are both dangerous and hard to pronounce. You also need a very hot fire, some 2000-ish degrees.

I was thinking and then doing a little reading about refining. The articles say things like, "this will achieve 99.4-99.5 percent pure gold, but if more purification is required..." Some even say, "this will achieve 99.9% but if more purification is required".

I was thinking about this process because I was thinking about the process in my own life and how I want to be refined, but often I am creating a lot of extra work in the process.

Imagine the Refiner working, heating up the gold, adding chemicals at just the right time, letting it cool down, washing it with this other chemical, heating it up again with a different solution added this time; all the while having to make sure that the pollutant don't get into the atmosphere, because they are very harmful, and then imagine ME in the process throwing more dirt into the mix every time I can.

This is how it is with our sin. God is refining us, taking away the impurities a little at a time, carefully extracting the junk away, painstakingly looking for every bit of impurity, so that we might be 100% pure gold, no just 99.4%. The usefulness, and subsequent value, of 100% pure gold is so much higher than the 99.4%, yet every time I have an opportunity to add some more dirt, I go back to my sin, that He just purified out of me, and throw it back into the mix.

We need for God to show us our sin and then we need to get rid of it once and for all. It is His desire that we are pure gold. It is His desire that we are pure, so we can be used for whatever He deems best. He is the only One who can keep us turned toward the cross so that we might run away from sin and cling to joy.

Refine us Lord. Make us pure gold, so we can be used for Your honor and Your glory. Show us our sin and make us hate it, as we grow in our love for You. May we be pure and holy as You are pure and holy. Do this work in us.