So yesterday we in central Arkansas worried about snow. Today and tonight we’re thinking about freezing rain. It has all the hazards of snow but none of the beauty or enjoyment. Nobody likes freezing rain. Nobody likes frozen anything!

Of all frozen things, the one that is most dangerous is not a frozen road or a frozen engine: it’s a frozen heart. When the Gospel is preached and the hearer needs to respond but doesn’t, what do we say? We say that’s a man with a hard heart. That’s a person with a calloused conscious. But it’s also a frozen man. It’s a man brittle and unmoving. It’s a man unwilling to melt with the warmth of the Gospel message.

A frozen heart is a slippery one because it leads the soul down a path to further and further rejection of the Word. Have you ever known a person who needed to respond but didn’t, though they heard the message preached to them over and over? Eventually what often happens is they end up not even coming to worship to hear the message. Their frozen heart slipped them further away from the Truth.

The only way to combat a frozen heart is to keep our hearts always resting by the fire of God’s Word. Paul told the Thessalonians to “quench not the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). The meaning is “don’t put out the fire of the Holy Spirit.” The Word of God is a fire that needs to be roaring in order to keep our hearts warm and melted. The longer we are away from God’s Word the colder our hearts become.

So…have you read your Bible today? Have you stoked the fires that warm the heart?