We had another great time in the Lord during service on Sunday and here an excerpt from yesterday’s sermon I wanted to share. The text was Matthew 6:25-34 and the topic was “Engineered by God” with the subtopic “Do Not Worry”:
“Now some of you may be saying right now, I have been praying, I have been seeking His kingdom, I have been reading scripture, I have been fasting and my situation still has not changed and I still struggle with worry. I am here to tell you to hold on and that your breakthrough is coming. Your experiences are part of how God will prepare you for and deliver to you greater things.
A class I enjoyed a great deal in college was Engineering Materials. The main draw was that with the class we got to destroy a lot of things, burn a lot of things, create loud crashing noises all in the name of higher education. But in the midst of all of that mayhem some finer points stayed with me. One way man manipulates materials is heat treatment of metal alloys. Different elements have traits that are less than desirable. Pure metal is soft and malleable, while the other additives in alloys are stiff, but typically brittle. Combine them however and you get an alloy stronger than either of the materials you started out with, but it is not that simple. To get the most out of the ingredients they must be put through fire. There are two steps in heat-treating, the first is obviously the solution heat treatment itself and the other less mentioned step is the quenching process.
Quenching can be viewed as the process used in removing heat after being pulled out of the fire. One would assume the sooner you could remove the heat the better, but that is not the case. I will briefly describe three common quenching processes.
Quencing by water: Water will cool the alloy quickly, but unless you are dealing with only the thinnest of allows it is often too severe and will result in spotty, inconsistent results making the end product prone to cracking and failure.
Quenching by air: Air is another quenching agent, but it often takes too long which will cause the solution mixture to separate and cure unevenly, losing the intended gains of the combined materials and will be too soft to be any good.
Quenching by oil: The third quenching agent is oil which cools more quickly than air so the alloy will retain it’s stiffness. Oil cools more slowly than water allowing an even cure, which will keep it from becoming brittle. These traits allow oil quenching to retain the best traits of all the ingredients.
Our walk is like this heat treating process. There are times when we are going through the fire and we see no end. But during these times the Lord is using the heat we are enduring to make us stronger than we were when we began. Often we pray for God to deliver us quickly from these situations, but God has a greater purpose in mind for us. He knows what we can endure and He knows that if he takes us out of the fire and cools us too quickly like water quenching we will become brittle Christians that will crack under pressure whenever trouble comes our way. God will not remove the heat too slowly like air quenching because He knows that we will become too weak to be of any good, and will bend to the tricks of the enemy. Thank God that when the time is right He will quench us in the oil. He will lift us out of the fiery snares and anoint us so that we will be strong Christians better than we were before we went in to the fires of trouble and tribulation. God is the perfect spiritual metallurgist.”
God bless,
Eric
