Wood on the Altar

Stewarding Your Personal Revival · Week 4 · Pastor Shiela Freed

Our offering to God

"We give you our best when we say, come on in, King. Come on in, Lord."

Those words drew the congregation at Center of Life Church into worship, and Pastor Shiela Freed took the moment as an invitation to go deeper — into the fire that consumes, and into the call to personal revival. Through Scripture and her own story, she opened up what it means to put wood on the altar, and the deliberate, unglamorous commitment our walk with God actually asks of us.

The fire that is never allowed to go out

The message turned on a command given to the priests of Israel.

"The fire on the altar shall be kept burning on it; it shall not go out… Fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually; it shall not go out." — Leviticus 6:12–13, ESV

Pastor Shiela drew out what that meant in practice. The fire was God's to send. The wood was the priest's to carry. Every single morning, before anything else happened, someone had to go get wood and lay it on the altar — because a fire nobody feeds goes out, no matter how brightly it once burned.

She reached for an image from her own cabin life: a wood stove. You do not light a wood stove once and walk away from it. You tend it. You get up in the cold and you feed it. And it is the tending, not the lighting, that keeps a house warm through a long winter.

That is the whole picture of a life with God. Prayer. Time in Scripture. Worship you choose rather than wait to feel. These are our wood on the altar — ordinary, repeatable, and the only thing standing between a living fire and a cold one.

The fire is still God's to send

From Leviticus, the message moved to Mount Carmel.

Elijah stood alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and proposed a test no one could rig. He repaired the altar that had been torn down, laid the wood, set the offering on it — and then had the whole thing drenched with water, three times over, until the trench around it was full. Then he prayed.

"Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench." — 1 Kings 18:38, ESV

Pastor Shiela was careful about what that story is and is not. It is not mainly a story about spectacle. It ends with a people whose hearts turn back to God. And the part that belongs to us is not the fire. Elijah could build, and stack, and soak, and pray — he could not strike the match. Neither can we.

Our work is the wood. The fire is God's.

That cuts both ways, and she said so. It means we cannot manufacture revival by effort. It also means the small, unimpressive offering — the prayer that felt flat, the chapter you read when nothing stirred — is not wasted. Soaked wood burned at Carmel.

Our daily wood

Prayer. Regular communion with God, which asks for an open heart far more than it asks for a long hour.

Scripture. "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword" (Hebrews 4:12, ESV). It does its work when we stay in it, not when we admire it from a distance.

The crush. Spiritual growth is not only nurtured in the good seasons. The hard places press us toward the one thing about God that does not change.

Community. Surround yourself with believers who fan your flame. One log smolders. Stacked together, they burn.

A call to action

The service closed with a charge: go out, and carry the love and hope of God into the world.

So the question Pastor Shiela leaves with each of us is a plain one. What are we laying on the altar today? Not last year, not at our best — today.

Tend the fire. It was never meant to go out.

Wood on the Altar is Week 4 of Stewarding Your Personal Revival. You can watch this and other messages on our sermons page, and if you are new, here is what to expect when you visit.