Under pressure

Jo Penn February 04, 2026 1 1

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Malachi 3: 1-4 (NIV-UK)

1 ‘I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the Lord Almighty.

2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.

I looked up the process of refining, what needs to happen to go from a piece of rock containing parts of silver to get to a bead of pure silver. It reads as a difficult and long process: crushing the ore; heating it up to high temperatures; curating chemical reactions, in order to get to pure molten silver which is then cooled slowly. The refiner needs to be committed to the process to go to all this trouble to reveal the value of the silver from the rock.

I wonder what sort of things in your life God has used to refine you, to reveal your true purpose and giftings in life? One of these processes for me was being faced with redundancy – a three year wait for it to happen, praying about the future options and deciding which jobs to apply for, meanwhile living in uncertainty. I did not want to be made redundant and believed that where I worked was a ‘calling’, but staying was not an option. God had something else planned for me. Would I trust him?

Redundancy led me to working at Scargill which was a step into the unknown with the very real question: Would the charity work financially? (It has!) Yet, there was a sense of joy in my heart when I thought about being part of the adventurous life that was the new start for Scargill, enough for me to apply to join. God has been faithful to that call and refined me in that process of adjusting to the different, and sometimes challenging, way of life, revealing gifts in the process.

The refiner puts the ore through the purification process to reveal the silver and realise its value. Will we submit to God’s refining work in our life?

Prayer:

Lord, 

You love us, and made us in your image. Thank you that you see the potential in all of us. May we co-operate with You as you seek to reveal the precious metal you have made us to be so that it reflects the face of God. Amen.