Burning or burnt out? 

They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem (Luke 24:32-33).

A bruised reed He will not break,

And smoking flax He will not quench (Isaiah 42:3).

I have never forgotten a brother telling the story of a local church which caught fire. Everyone in the village helped in trying to put the fire out, and the pastor of the church worked hard passing buckets of water to throw on the fire. As he was doing this, he realised he didn’t know the man next to him, who was also helping. The pastor said to the man, “I have never seen you at my church before.” The man replied, “Your church has never been on fire before.”

After spending time in the Lord’s presence listening to Him explaining how the Scriptures always spoke of Him, the two disciples in Luke 24 said that their hearts burned within them. They were filled with an overwhelming sense of the Saviour’s presence in love and power. They had very likely seen the Lord Jesus die upon the cross and laid in another man’s tomb. All their hopes and expectations were crushed, and they were filled with sadness and confusion. His ministry had set alight their hearts as they followed Him before His death, but the flame had almost gone out. But the resurrected Lord Jesus came alongside them as the great listener, great understander and the great explainer of His sufferings and glory.

The Lord began His ministry using the word of God to defeat Satan. In resurrection, He uses His word to draw His own to Himself, filling them with His presence and dispelling the sadness and dismay in their hearts. The Lord Jesus taught His disciples, and us, a great lesson on that quiet night. He taught us that we find our Saviour in the pages of Holy Scripture. His word brings us into the reality of His presence. Their hearts burned within them before they knew it was the Lord speaking to them. The word was spoken by the One who is the Word. It ignited in them a responsive devotion to Christ and compelled them to share their experience of Him with their fellow disciples and ultimately in witness to the world. Today the Holy Spirit fulfils this same ministry and glorifies Christ in our hearts, empowering us to live for Him.

I can still remember the old grates and coal fires in houses in the 1950s. I used to stay with my grandmother and often sat in front of a dying fire. She could turn over the last smoking ashes, and find embers from which she could begin a blazing new fire. Isaiah writes of this skill, and Jesus recalls it in Matthew 12:20. It is a picture of a candle wick about to go out. Sometimes we feel the weakness which this illustration describes. It is not always a weakness we share with others but bear in our own souls. We can feel burnt out. The Saviour knows how to come close to us when we feel our utter weakness. He can revive the joy and power of our salvation, and restore our souls. It is the Person of the Lord Jesus, revealed to us through the living word of God, who sets our hearts on fire again. The Lord’s love can never be extinguished:

Many waters cannot quench love,

Nor can the floods drown it (Song of Solomon 8:7).

The love that saved us is the love that keeps us. Christ’s love has never stopped burning and He wants it always to burn in our hearts.