Rick Renner - A Life Ablaze

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A Life Ablaze: Ten Simple Keys To Living on Fire for God
ISBN: 978-1-68031-423-6
ISBN 13 eBook: 978-1-6803-1424-3

Copyright 2020 by Rick Renner
8316 E. 73rd St.
Tulsa, OK 74133

Published by Harrison House
Shippensburg, PA 17257
www.harrisonhouse.com

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Editorial Consultants: Cynthia D. Hansen and Rebecca L. Gilbert Text Design: Lisa Simpson, www.SimpsonProductions.net

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

D EDICATION

I dedicate this book to my precious friend and fellow minister, Sergei Vasilevich Ryakhovsky. When God called my family to move to the former Soviet Union in 1991, He had already designed this covenant relationship that Sergei and I have now shared for so many years. It was a God connection from the beginning one that has not only enriched our own lives personally, but that has also impacted churches, pastors, leaders, and believers throughout this vast region of Russian-speaking people.

Ive been privileged to personally know many notable spiritual leaders, but Sergei Vasilevich Ryakhovskys consistent spiritual fire for the things of God is a particularly remarkable source of inspiration to me. For this reason, I dedicate this book, A Life Ablaze, to this powerful man of God, whose life that is so ablaze with spiritual fire has mightily influenced untold numbers of people for the Kingdom of God throughout the territory of the former USSR.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my custom to acknowledge those who have helped me put the truths I write about into print. Some of my books are larger and require more help; other books are smaller and require less participation from others. But regardless of each books size, I find every persons role to be vital in the process, and I am thankful for each one.

So first, I wish to express my thanks to Vincent Newfield and Becky Gilbert for their respective editorial contributions to the early stages of this book. Im also grateful for the valuable insights and fine-tuning editorial skills Becky added to the later stages. In addition, I want to thank Andrell Corbin for adding her rich editorial input to this book. Finally, I want to say thank you to Cindy Hansen for her excellent editorial work and thoughtful questions that helped me articulate many important points in this book. As has been true for years, Cindys input with her editorial mind and her ministry heart was a great blessing to me as this book was being written.

Furthermore, I want to express thankfulness to my publisher, Don Nori, and to Brad Herman and the entire team at Harrison House, all of whom work so professionally to help get my books into the hands and hearts of those who are hungry for the spiritual truths God has entrusted me to communicate.

Last but certainly not least, I am thankful to Denise, our sons, and our Moscow leadership team who carefully listen as I formulate ideas and concepts that I eventually put into print for people around the world to read. Your thoughtful responses mean so very much to me, and I am thankful that God called us as a team to serve the Body of Christ.

Never lag in zeal and in earnest endeavor; be aglow and burning with the Spirit, serving the Lord.

Romans 12:11 AMPC

Let us not allow slackness to spoil our work and let us keep the fires of the spirit burning, as we do our work for God.

Romans 12:11 Phillips

C HAPTER 1

A L IFE A BLAZE

D o you struggle to keep the fire of the Holy Spirit burning in your heart as it may have burned earlier in your life? Do you sometimes feel like all that is left are a few small glowing embers and that perhaps even those embers are starting to die out and become cold? If this description hits close to home as you evaluate your Christian walk, I have two questions to ask you:

How do you stoke the embers of the fire within you so that it begins burning red-hot in your heart again?

Once you have that fire burning hot and bright, how do you sustain and grow the intensity of that inner fire for the rest of your time on this earth?

How do you stoke the embers of the fire within you so that it begins burning red-hot in your heart again?

N O F UEL , N O F IRE

In this book, I want to speak to you about the different kinds of fuel you need to stay spiritually ablaze. But to begin with, I want to tell you a story from our familys earliest days in the former USSR that will demonstrate my point about doing whatever is necessary to keep the fire burning.

In the early years just after we moved to the former USSR, my wife Denise and I purchased an apartment in the heart of our city for our family to live in. But when we purchased it, it was abandoned and in miserable condition. Honestly, it was so ruined that it should have been condemned. It was a morass of mold, collapsed ceilings, and plaster falling off the walls. But we could see what it could be with lots of hard work, so we purchased it and went to work restoring it. After the restoration was complete, that apartment became as elegant as it had been nearly 100 years earlier.

When the work was finished, the walls were covered with fine wallpaper and magnificent chandeliers hung once again from giant, hand-carved medallions in the center of the ceilings. The giant-sized crown molding that was wrapped around the ceilings of each room had been meticulously restored. Every room had intricate, new parquet floors to match those that had existed before the Revolution. And the nine fireplaces one for each big room and in each bedroom were the most magnificent features of the apartment. Once restored, those fireplaces looked like they belonged in a museum.

But although our apartment had been restored, every other apartment in that big building still remained in a state of devastation and abandonment. Eventually the entire building would be beautifully restored, but when we moved into our apartment, the other apartments and the central staircase of the building looked like something that had been bombed in World War II. The stairs were navigable, but those areas had been so long abandoned that derelicts actually slept in our entryway.