This morning while I watched several news programs, I realized our nation is a tinderbox ready to ignite. All the emotion and fear that has accumulated over the last few years, along with currently developing issues, are revealing a nation whose tinderbox is full and overflowing with combustible materials ready to ignite creating a volatile and unstable future.  

The word “tinderbox” has been used to describe a situation where all the ingredients are in place to ignite something creating a conflagration. In other words, it defines a potentially explosive situation where just the right match lit and at just the right time will set aflame a situation, a relationship, or a nation.

The original tinderbox was a box kept in each home by the fireplace that contained flint, fire steel, and the tinder used together to help start a fire. Tinderboxes passed into history when friction matches were invented. The ignition potential for creating fire has always been present from the first earth dwellers to the modern age. We have always found a way to ignite a fire.

We have entered a very dry and flammable moment in our nation’s history. As followers of Jesus, we must weigh our words now more than ever to make sure we do not offer ignition to the plans of hell. James wrote about the ignition potential of our words, “And among all the parts of the body, the tongue is a flame of fire. It is a whole world of wickedness, corrupting your entire body. It can set your whole life on fire, for it is set on fire by hell itself” (James 3:6).

The book of Proverbs tells us “The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer” (15:12). To ponder means that we pause before speaking giving us time to hear the word of the Lord before we open our mouths. When facing a tinderbox moment in history our undisciplined emotions will want to speak igniting other matches with their destructive fire. The prophetic voice of the Church does not provoke evil. It reveals truth and brings clarity when lies, confusion, and fear have blinded people from seeing the heart and will of God.

If we are willing to ponder before we speak, our words of hope and love will set the stage for another kind of fire – the fire of God that will burn away the chaff of confusion and set hearts on fire to experience the love and will of God. That kind of fire brings life. The fire created from the materials of a social tinderbox can only bring death. In the coming days, choose your words wisely. Life and death are on the line.