Hey, it is James Goll of God Encounters Ministries sharing with you on God Today. Do you have a heart on fire? Do you want to have a burning heart? In Church history, a man named John Wesley in England, his mother Susannah had something like 17 children. He was on the third story of their home. Their house catches on fire and below them, there were people with a blanket. And John Wesley, as a young man, had to leap – do the leap of faith – from the way I remember, the third story of the home. To leap out of the fire, to trust that he would be caught in the blanket held by the people below.
That marked his life. He would use the phrase that he was a “brand plucked from the fire”. Huh. Later in life, as he grew in his ministry and things of that nature, people came to John Wesley and they said, “How do you gather a crowd?” And John Wesley, using the example of his life that had marked him, responded to the question, “How do you gather a crowd?” And John Wesley would say, “I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.”
In Luke 24, after the resurrection of Jesus, and He is on the road to Emmaus, and He opens the scriptures and they don’t yet know this is the resurrected Messiah. In Luke chapter 24 it says this, “And they [the disciples], said to one another, ‘Did not our heart not burn within us when he talked to us on the road and while He opened the scriptures to us?’” I’ll give you a key to have a burning heart: open the scriptures.
It is really hard to have a heart on fire if this book is closed. But if you get this book, the Bible, the scriptures, you too can be a person of a burning heart. I pray for you, as it was with John Wesley, that you will be so set on fire that you will be contagious. And I speak over you a hunger and a thirst for the Word of God. And that the Holy Spirit will open the Word of God to you and you too can be amongst those who have a burning heart for God. This is James Goll, God Encounters Ministries with God Today.