Text: Philippians 3:10
By Harold Mawela
Akasia, Pretoria
I was sitting in my study late one night, the kind of Pretoria quiet where you can hear the geyser ticking and the occasional bark of a nervous dog. Load shedding had hit again—Stage Four, because of course—and the only light in the room came from a single candle and the pale blue glow of my cellphone. I watched the flame dance, and a thought settled on me like a winter blanket:
Fire does not only destroy. It also purifies.
We are, all of us, living in a furnace right now. Look at the headlines. We read about another child found in a drain in Tshwane. We see the statistics on gender-based violence that make your stomach turn. We watch the politicking and the looting and the decay of what we thought was a promised land. The economy groans. Friendships fracture. Marriages grow cold. And in the quiet of our own hearts, we nurse wounds that no one else can see.
The question is not whether you will pass through fire. The question is: Will the fire make you gold, or will it make you ash?
Paul, writing from a dungeon, gives us the formula in Philippians 3:10. He doesn't pray for deliverance from suffering. He prays for participation in it. "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings."
Let us sit with that paradox for a moment. It is a Harold Mawela kind of truth: You cannot know the height of His victory until you have known the depth of His sorrow. The resurrection power is not for those who avoid the cross; it is for those who carry it.
The Wound That Whispers
I remember a season, about seven years ago, when my world tilted on its axis. A betrayal came from a direction I never expected. It was a church matter, as these things often are. Someone I had discipled, someone I had invited into my home in Akasia, twisted my words and my character to a group of people I respected. The accusations were public. The defence was private. I felt like Job—sitting in the ashes, scraping my wounds with a piece of broken pottery.
For weeks, I rehearsed the injustice. I played the conversations over in my head. I composed angry emails I never sent. I lay awake staring at the ceiling, asking God, "Why did You let this happen? I was serving You!"
And then, one morning, during my devotion, the Holy Spirit interrupted my pity party. He brought me back to our text: "Participation in his sufferings."
I had been treating my pain as a problem to be solved. God was treating it as an invitation to be accepted.
I realized: Jesus also knew what it was to be misunderstood. He knew what it was to be betrayed by a friend—not with a gun, but with a kiss. He knew the loneliness of standing before an unjust court. He knew the silence of God when the nails went in.
My suffering was not just my suffering. It was an opportunity for communion. It was a doorway into the very heart of Christ.
The Alchemy Begins
This is the alchemy of affliction. The world looks at your pain and sees a problem. The devil looks at your pain and sees a weapon. But God looks at your pain and sees raw material.
He takes the lead of your loss and begins to heat it. He takes the copper of your disappointment and hammers it on the anvil of His grace. It hurts. Oh, it hurts. But He is not trying to destroy you; He is trying to reshape you into the image of His Son.
Think of it this way:
· Loneliness can become the hermitage where you finally hear the voice of the Bridegroom.
· Failure can become the classroom where you finally learn that His grace is sufficient.
· Injustice can become the pulpit from which you preach a gospel of forgiveness that stuns the world.
I learned to do something in that season. I learned to invite the wound in for conversation. I stopped running from the grief. I stopped medicating it with Netflix or pretending I was fine at the Sunday service. I sat with it. I wrote about it. I talked to Jesus about it. And slowly, imperceptibly, the lead began to turn.
The Hammer and the Testimony
This brings us to the second part of the alchemy. What God forges in the furnace, He intends you to use as a hammer.
The Scripture says, "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony" (Revelation 12:11). Notice: it is the word of their testimony. It is not the memory of the wound. It is the declaration of the healing.
Your testimony is the story of what God did in the furnace. And that testimony has power. It has the power to break chains off other people.
I see this in my ministry here in Akasia. I meet young men who are angry at their absent fathers. I sit with them, and I don't give them a lecture. I tell them about my own father—a hard man, a migrant worker who was rarely home. I tell them about the years I wrestled with resentment. And then I tell them about the day God gave me a heart of flesh for that man, and how I learned to honour him not because he was perfect, but because God commanded it.
When I share that, something shifts in the room. The young man realises he is not alone. He sees that the chain that binds him has been broken in someone else's life, and he dares to believe it can be broken in his.
This is the law of the hammer: You cannot use a tool you have not picked up. You cannot minister deliverance from a prison you have never unlocked. Your greatest ministry will always come from your deepest pain, surrendered to the deepest grace.
The Whispering Hearts
As I drive through Pretoria—from the chaos of Marabastad to the quiet streets of Sinoville—I am acutely aware that every car I pass contains a war I have not fought.
· That woman in the taxi? She just got a call that her application for a job fell through. Again. She is wondering if God sees her.
· That man in the boardroom? He is successful on paper, but his marriage is a graveyard. He hasn't touched his wife in months.
· That teenager with the earphones? He is drowning in noise because he is afraid of the silence where his own thoughts accuse him.
Every heavy heart is whispering a war you have not fought.
This is why we must be gentle. This is why we must be kind. We are not interacting with problems; we are interacting with people. And people are fragile. People are fighting battles we know nothing about.
Your kindness might be the only Jesus they see today. Not your theology. Not your correct doctrine. Not your tithing record. Your kindness.
A Word for South Africa
We are a wounded nation. We carry the trauma of apartheid in our bones, even those of us born after it. We carry the disappointment of a freedom that has not fully delivered. We carry the anxiety of a failing grid, a faltering economy, a fraying social fabric.
But hear me, my fellow South African: Your pain is not a prison; it is a pulpit.
The world does not need another angry South African. There are plenty of those. The world needs a healed South African. It needs a South African who has sat in the furnace with Jesus and come out not bitter, but better. It needs a South African who can take the hammer of their testimony and break the chains of corruption, of apathy, of despair.
We have a choice. We can let the affliction make us hard, cynical, and tribal. Or we can let the affliction make us like Him—wounded, but whole. Broken, but not destroyed. Dying, but behold, we live.
The Prayer of Participation
Let us pray the dangerous prayer. Let us stop praying for easy lives and start praying for meaningful lives. Let us stop asking God to take us out of the fire and start asking Him to meet us in the fire.
Because He is there. The Fourth Man is in the furnace. And when you come out, you will not even smell of smoke. But you will carry in your hand a hammer, forged in the heat of affliction, ready to build the kingdom of God.
Prayer:
Lord, give me the grace to grieve well. Do not let me waste my sorrows. Take every wound, every disappointment, every injustice, and transmute it by Your alchemy into wisdom, into compassion, into power. Make my scars into doors. Make my testimony into a hammer. And let me use it, not for my glory, but for the freedom of others. In the name of Jesus, who suffered first, and who suffers still with us. Amen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-alchemy-of-affliction/id1506692775?i=1000751341867
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