The Furnace Does Not Get to Define You
What Jesus Christ Can Do With the Hard Things You Never Chose
Nobody asks for a furnace.
That is probably worth establishing right at the beginning.
If life offered you a menu that said:
Would you like peace, happiness, good friends, spiritual growth, and perhaps a furnace of affliction on the side?
Most of us would skip the furnace.
Yet Isaiah gives us this unusual image:
“Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.”
—Isaiah 48:10
A furnace is hot.
Uncomfortable.
Intense.
It is not where anybody naturally wants to stay.
But there is a reason people put valuable metals into one.
Heat can expose impurities.
It can soften metal so it can be shaped.
It can become part of a refining process.
And that gives us an important way to think about some of the difficult experiences in our lives.
Not every hard thing happens because God deliberately sent it.
That is important.
People have agency.
Bodies get sick.
Accidents happen.
Relationships break.
People make choices that hurt others.
We live in a fallen world where some painful things happen that Heavenly Father would never want His children to choose for one another.
So when something hurts, we should be careful about casually saying:
God did this to teach you something.
Sometimes we simply do not know why something happened.
Nephi understood that.
After seeing things he did not completely understand, he said:
“I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”
—1 Nephi 11:17
I think there is great faith in that sentence.
I do not know everything.
But I know Him.
And I know He loves me.
Sometimes that is enough to begin.
The better question in the furnace may not always be:
Why did God do this?
A better question might be:
What can Jesus Christ do with me here?
That is different.
Maybe He did not cause the experience.
But He can still redeem it.
He can still teach.
Heal.
Strengthen.
Shape.
Deepen.
He can take something painful and refuse to let the pain be the only thing that comes from it.
Elder Neal A. Maxwell called some of life’s experiences “soul-stretching experiences.”
That phrase has always felt accurate to me.
Stretching is uncomfortable.
It pulls us beyond where we were.
And Elder Maxwell taught:
“An experience, to be fully useful, must not only be passed through, but absorbed into the marrow of the soul.”
That is a powerful difference.
There are things we pass through.
And then there are things we allow Christ to teach us through.
You can go through disappointment and become bitter.
Or, with time and Christ, become more compassionate toward someone else who is disappointed.
You can go through failure and simply carry embarrassment.
Or you can allow Christ to teach you humility, persistence, and how to begin again.
You can go through loneliness and become convinced nobody understands you.
Or one day discover that the experience made you the person who notices somebody sitting alone.
You can go through fear and discover courage.
Waiting can teach patience.
Being hurt can teach forgiveness.
Falling can teach you how to get back up.
The experience itself may not be good.
But Jesus Christ is remarkably good at bringing good out of things that were not.
Think about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.
They were threatened with a fiery furnace because they refused to worship an idol.
They told King Nebuchadnezzar that God was able to deliver them.
Then they said something remarkable:
“But if not…”
—Daniel 3:18
In other words:
We believe God can save us from this.
But even if He does not remove it the way we hope, we still belong to Him.
They were thrown into the furnace.
And then the king looked inside.
There were four figures walking in the fire.
That image has always stayed with me.
Sometimes the Savior saves us from the furnace.
Sometimes He meets us in it.
Either way, we are not alone.
There are things we learn about God in a classroom.
And there are things we learn with God in a furnace.
Sometimes the furnace becomes the classroom.
I can look back at difficult seasons of my own life and see things now that I could not see while I was living them.
There were experiences I would never have volunteered for.
There were moments when I just wanted the difficulty to end.
But later I could see things Christ had developed in me through them.
More compassion.
More patience.
A better understanding of people who hurt.
A deeper dependence on Him.
That does not make the painful part good.
It means Jesus Christ did not waste it.
That matters.
Because you may have a scar from something.
Christ can help you carry more than the scar.
You can carry the lesson.
The compassion.
The testimony.
The wisdom.
The ability to help somebody else.
The proof that you survived something you once thought you could not.
One question I have learned to ask when looking back at hard experiences is:
What happened?
What did I learn?
What developed in me?
And who can I now help because of what I learned?
That last question may be one of the most important.
Sometimes part of the redemption of our pain happens when it becomes compassion for somebody else.
The furnace changed you.
But it does not own you.
It does not get to name you.
Your worst experience is not your identity.
Your divorce is not your identity.
Your anxiety is not your identity.
The mistake you made is not your identity.
The thing somebody did to you is not your identity.
The season you barely survived is not your identity.
You belong to Jesus Christ.
The furnace can refine you.
It does not get to define you.
Scripture
“Behold, I have refined thee… I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.”
—Isaiah 48:10
“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace.”
—Daniel 3:17
“But if not… we will not serve thy gods.”
—Daniel 3:18
Reflection
Think of something difficult you have experienced.
What happened?
What did you learn?
What qualities developed in you because you had to walk through it?
Did the experience make you more compassionate toward anyone else?
What have you learned about Jesus Christ that you might not have learned in the same way without that experience?
Today’s Challenge
Choose one difficult experience from your past—not necessarily the most painful one—and write these four questions somewhere:
What happened?
What did I learn?
What developed in me?
Who can I now help?
Do not force an answer.
Some experiences take a long time before we can see anything clearly.
But invite Jesus Christ into the question.
Ask Him to help you see what He has been doing with something you never would have chosen.
Christ-Centered Thought
The most important thing about a furnace is not the furnace.
It is who is with you there.
Jesus Christ knows suffering personally.
He does not stand outside our pain offering theories about what it must feel like.
He entered mortality.
He experienced grief.
Rejection.
Loneliness.
Physical pain.
Spiritual anguish.
And because He descended below all things, there is nowhere you can go that He does not know how to reach you.
Your furnace may not disappear today.
You may not yet understand why something happened.
You may still be healing.
But the experience does not get to decide who you become.
Jesus Christ does.
And if you let Him, He can take even painful material and shape something holy from it.
The furnace may be part of your story.
It is not the author.
Christ is still writing.
For more weekly devotionals and complete Come Follow Me resources designed specifically for teens, visit:
