A Guide for Young Believers
Tested
by Fire
Wrestling with Faith
For High School Juniors and Seniors
Rooted in the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith
You are about to step into a new season of life. Whether you are heading to college, the military, a trade, or the workforce, you are leaving behind the structure of home and church that has defined your world. That is not a bad thing. God designed it. But it means the faith you have received from your parents and your church is about to be tested in ways it has never been tested before.
This guide was written for you—not over your head, and not behind your back. It is honest about the struggles that lie ahead, because the Bible itself is honest about them. It is saturated with Scripture and drawn from the richest stream of the Reformed tradition, because you deserve better than slogans. You deserve the full weight of God's Word and the wisdom of centuries of Christ's church.
John MacArthur put it this way: "You know you are a Christian not by the perfection of your life but by the direction of your life." What distinguishes a true believer from someone who falls away is not the absence of fire, but who holds you in the fire. That is the theme of everything that follows.
Read it slowly. Read it prayerfully. Come back to it when the fire is hot.
Saints Who Faced the Fire
One of the most dangerous lies you will encounter—whether in a college dorm room or just in your own head—is the idea that real Christians do not struggle. That somewhere out there, serious believers live on a plateau of unshakeable confidence, and if you cannot find that plateau, you must not belong. The truth is the exact opposite. The Bible is full of believers who walked through fire so intense that it nearly consumed them. Church history is full of the same.
What kept them was not the strength of their grip on God, but the strength of God's grip on them. But honesty also requires us to say that not everyone who starts the race finishes it. Some who seemed to burn brightly for Christ walked away and never came back. Their stories are not given to terrorize you; they are given to sober you—so that you guard the faith you have been given and do not treat it carelessly.
Those Who Walked Through Fire and Held On
The great German Reformer coined a word for his experience of spiritual assault—Anfechtung—which cannot be fully captured in English. It included despair, terror of God's wrath, the sense that God had hidden His face, and what Luther called "the hammering of Satan upon the soul." Luther did not come from a sheltered background; he had been a monk, a scholar, a man who devoted himself entirely to God. And yet the darkness found him repeatedly throughout his life.
Luther's remedy was never to look inward for comfort. He preached the gospel to himself: "Christ died for you"—a sermon he needed as much as any peasant in Wittenberg. He drove himself back to the objective promises of God, back to the finished work of Christ, back to the Word that does not change when feelings do. If the founder of the Protestant Reformation needed to preach the gospel to himself daily, so do you.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the most famous Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, suffered from crippling depression throughout his ministry. He did not emerge from his depression so much as he emerged through it—and his sympathy for sufferers became the very tenderness his congregation most treasured.
Spurgeon's depression was not a sign that his faith was weak. It was the furnace in which his faith was refined. He continued to preach, to pray, to trust the promises of God even when he could not feel them. He is proof that you can serve God powerfully and still walk through seasons of deep darkness: "Fits of depression come over the most of us. Cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down."
The author of "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood," and "O for a Closer Walk with God" was institutionalized for mental illness, attempted suicide multiple times, and spent the last three decades of his life convinced that God had personally cast him off. His conversion came at St. Albans Asylum as he read Romans 3:25 and first grasped the atoning work of Christ. Afterward, he moved to Olney and came under the pastoral care of John Newton, who walked with him through every relapse.
John Piper, in The Hidden Smile of God (2001), places Cowper alongside Bunyan and Brainerd as examples of saints whose lifelong struggles with darkness God used for His purposes. Cowper died in 1800 still under clouds—but his last recorded words were, "I am not shut out of heaven after all." His hymns have sustained millions. The darkness never had the final word.
The great Welsh preacher and physician D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones devoted an entire book—Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure—to the problem of the downcast Christian. His diagnosis was devastating in its simplicity: "Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?"
Lloyd-Jones pointed to the psalmist who takes himself in hand in Psalm 42:5—"Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God." That is the very pattern of faith's work. The believer does not passively accept the lies his feelings tell him. He preaches truth back into his own soul.
Stop listening to yourself and start talking to yourself.
Thomas Goodwin was a brilliant Puritan theologian who struggled for seven years at Cambridge before he could say with confidence that Christ was his. Seven years. Not seven days, not seven weeks—seven years of wrestling, doubting, longing, and waiting. His treatise A Child of Light Walking in Darkness (1636) remains the definitive Reformed study of that struggle.
If you are wrestling right now and it feels like it will never end, know that one of the greatest theological minds in church history walked that same road—and came through.
Rutherford was confined to Aberdeen from 1636 to 1638 for his convictions, cut off from his congregation and his pulpit. From that isolation he wrote some of the most luminous letters in the English language, admitting, "I have little of Christ in this prison but groanings, and longings, and desires," yet also, "My Lord Jesus is as kind as they call Him."
His faith did not depend on comfortable circumstances. It rested on the character of God.
Adoniram Judson, the great Baptist missionary to Burma, buried his wife Ann in a foreign land. The grief drove him into a depression so deep that he dug his own grave and sat beside it for days. And yet he lived to translate the entire Bible into Burmese—a work that continues to bear fruit to this day.
Judson's story is a reminder that God is not finished with you in your darkest hour. He may, in fact, be preparing you for your greatest work. Each of these believers pressed on—not because the fire cooled, but because the hand of Christ held them in the fire.
Those Who Turned Away
Alongside the saints who endured, there are those who walked away—and their stories carry a warning that every young Christian needs to hear. These accounts are not given to terrify but to sober. Every case shares a pattern worth studying.
Paul wrote a single, wounded sentence in 2 Timothy 4:10: "For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica" (ESV). The Puritans spent a great deal of time on this verse. Matthew Poole wrote that Demas's leaving Paul was his leaving Christ. John Gill concluded that Demas was more in love with the world than with Christ and His gospel.
Demas had been a companion of Paul. He had seen the real thing up close. And he chose the world anyway.
John Bunyan gave us the same warning twice in Pilgrim's Progress. There is Ignorance, who travels all the way to the gate of the Celestial City—only to be bound and cast into hell. And there is Turn-Away, taken from the town of Apostasy and dragged off in chains.
Bunyan was not writing academic theology. He was writing for people exactly like you—people on the road, making daily decisions about whether to keep going or turn back.
Spira was a wealthy Italian lawyer who embraced the Reformation but recanted under pressure from the Inquisition in Venice. He died within a year in what his contemporaries described as unbearable despair, convinced he had committed the unforgivable sin. His story was written up by Nathaniel Bacon in A Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira (1638), a book that Bunyan read as a young man. Bunyan testifies in Grace Abounding (paragraph 163) that Spira's book was to his troubled spirit "as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound."
Reformed pastors from the Puritan era onward have used Spira as a warning against assuming that your doubts will always resolve on the side of faith. What you do with your doubts matters.
Templeton was Billy Graham's closest friend and co-laborer in the Youth for Christ movement of the 1940s. He preached to crowds of thirty thousand before he ever met Graham. By 1948, his doubts about Scripture had hardened. Entering Princeton Seminary to resolve them, he emerged an agnostic, then an atheist, and resigned from the ministry in 1957. His 1996 memoir, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith, recounts a pivotal 1948 conversation with Graham in which Templeton told him he could no longer accept the Bible's account of creation.
In an interview near the end of his life recorded in Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith (2000), Templeton's voice cracked: "He was the greatest human being who has ever lived… Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus… I adore Him!" Then, weeping openly: "And if I may put it this way—I… miss… Him!" He died five years later of Alzheimer's disease.
We do not pronounce on the eternal state of any person; that belongs to God alone. But the cautionary pattern is unmistakable. Templeton exchanged doctrinal conviction for intellectual respectability, and his last days were marked not by peace but by the ache of a love he would not return to.
Ehrman, now a University of North Carolina New Testament scholar, attended Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College before Princeton, where textual-critical questions—especially the problem of evil and suffering—gradually dissolved his evangelical convictions. He tells the story in Misquoting Jesus (2005) and more openly in God's Problem (2008). He now identifies as an agnostic-atheist.
His arguments have been thoroughly answered by James R. White, Daniel B. Wallace, and others. You should be aware of Ehrman's name because his work shapes what many students encounter in college religion courses. Having answers ready is not optional—it is stewardship of the mind God gave you.
Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), publicly renounced his faith in July 2019. Marty Sampson of Hillsong posted in August 2019 that he was losing his faith, though he later walked back the statement. Dan Barker, a former Pentecostal evangelist, co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation; his 1992 book Losing Faith in Faith chronicles his departure.
Each of these cases shares a pattern worth studying: intellectual questions left to fester without honest engagement, emotional wounds in church settings that went unaddressed, and a step-by-step abandonment—first of the authority of Scripture, then the deity of Christ, then the very category of faith itself. The slide is almost never sudden. It is gradual, and it often begins with things that feel reasonable.
The Difference Between Fire and Ashes
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.
1 John 2:19 (ESV)True believers "may, through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the strength of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into serious sins and for a time continue in them." But: "Yet they shall renew their repentance and be preserved through faith in Christ Jesus to the end."
Perseverance is not the absence of fire; it is the refusal of the fire to consume. Every saint we looked at in the first category walked through flames as fierce as anything the apostates experienced. What made the difference was not their inner strength but the Mediator's grip.
"If you feebly cast yourself on Christ's finished work, your weakness in the act of reliance does not change the fact that you have fallen into strong hands which will surely save you."
Charles SpurgeonYour Wrestling Is Not a Failure
Every church that raises its children in the faith will, by God's design, have young people who reach a point where they must wrestle with whether the faith of their parents is their own faith. This is not a failure of parenting. It is not a sign of creeping rebellion. It is the predictable, God-ordained season in which inherited belief is tested, owned, and confirmed—or, God forbid, exchanged for the world.
If you are in that season right now, you need to know something: you are not strange, and you are not alone. You are on a well-worn road. The question is not whether the wrestling will come. The question is what you will do with it.
Examination Is Commanded—Not Feared
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves.
2 Corinthians 13:5 (ESV)This is not an invitation to endless anxiety. It is a summons to honest self-examination so that you can arrive at a settled, confident assurance.
John Calvin, commenting on this verse, distinguished sharply between healthy examination and destructive doubt. Paul does not mean, Calvin wrote, that believers should be tormented with continual anxiety. Rather, he invites them to a serious inquiry so that they may have a sure and settled confidence in Christ. Matthew Henry added that it concerns every one of us to inquire whether we are in the faith—and to test the truth and reality of it before we can be sure of our salvation. John Gill observed that the examination must be not only of our conduct, but of the principles of grace—of faith, hope, and love, and of whether we have received the Spirit.
In other words, the examination is not a license for perpetual uncertainty. It is a summons to look for the marks of regeneration so that a settled assurance may follow. The goal is not doubt. The goal is confidence rooted in truth.
Milk to Meat: The Journey Is Supposed to Happen
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it.
2 Timothy 3:14 (ESV)Scripture depicts spiritual maturation as a journey from milk to solid food (Hebrews 5:12–14), from childhood trust to tested conviction. Notice the order: learn, then be firmly convinced. Assurance is downstream of learning and personal engagement. It does not usually arrive fully formed.
The crucible you may be experiencing right now is actually the pathway to genuine conversion or genuine confirmation of the faith you already have. It is not the enemy. It is God's ordinary means of turning an inherited religion into a personal faith.
"The problem is not that these children are leaving Christianity. The problem is that most of them, by their own admission, are not Christian."
Voddie Baucham—Family Driven Faith (2007)Surveys such as Christian Smith's Soul Searching (2005)—which documented what Smith called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" as the default religion of American youth—confirm that many young people raised in churches have never personally embraced the gospel. They have absorbed a vague positivity about God without ever confronting the claims of Christ. Do not be content with an inherited religion. Make it your own.
Baucham put it memorably: "If I teach my son to keep his eye on the ball, but fail to teach him to keep his eyes on Christ, I have failed as a father."
Honest Doubt Is Not Apostasy
There is a world of difference between the doubt that drives you toward God and the doubt that drives you away from Him. Scripture is remarkably gentle with the first kind.
The father of the boy with an unclean spirit cried out: "I believe; help my unbelief!" (ESV). Jesus did not turn him away. He healed the child.
Thomas declared he would not believe unless he saw and touched the risen Christ. Jesus did not banish Thomas—He invited him: "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe" (ESV).
John the Baptist himself, from prison, sent messengers asking, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (ESV). Jesus' reply began not with rebuke but with gospel evidence, and ended with, "Blessed is the one who is not offended by me" (Matthew 11:6, ESV).
Gurnall taught that Satan's most common attack on the young soldier is to convince him that his very struggle is proof he has no grace—which is, as Gurnall put it, a lie from the father of lies. If you are wrestling, the wrestling itself is not the problem. The question is whether the wrestling drives you to Christ or away from Him.
"I am not what I ought to be; I am not what I wish to be; I am not what I hope to be; but by the grace of God, I am not what I once was."
John NewtonAnd have mercy on those who doubt.
Jude 22 (ESV)The Longing for Autonomy
Late adolescence is, by God's design, a season of stepping out of childhood dependence. You are not wrong to want to think for yourself, make your own decisions, and own your own convictions. The sin is not in that longing—it is in where it leads. The goal is the full agency of a disciple who chooses Christ freely and with conviction, not the false autonomy of Genesis 3:5—"You will be like God"—which is just another way of saying, "I will be my own god."
Baucham put it clearly: "The key is to understand that our children don't belong to us—they belong to God." You do not belong to your parents. You do not belong to your youth group. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to the God who made you, and the freedom He offers is not freedom from Him but freedom in Him.
The God who called Jeremiah while he was still young (Jeremiah 1:6–7), who spoke to Samuel in the night (1 Samuel 3), and who opened Lydia's heart in Philippi (Acts 16:14) is still at work among young believers today. Trust the ordinary means of grace—the Word, prayer, the gathered church, the Lord's Table. Trust the Spirit. He has not forgotten you.
Is God There?
Before anything else, hear this: the very cry you have just uttered is not the language of a heart that has never known God—it is the language of a heart that has. A wholly unbelieving soul does not ache for the reality of God. It ignores Him, or fights Him, or fabricates a tame idol and calls it peace. But a soul that pants after the living God, that grieves at His seeming distance, that is troubled because others appear to taste what it cannot—that soul is already within reach of the hand of grace.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Matthew 5:6 (ESV)Your hunger is not the proof of His absence. It is one of the surest tokens of His presence.
You Are Walking a Well-Worn Path
One of the great comforts of Scripture is that the questions which most tempt us to despair are the very questions the saints ask in the inspired Word. The Bible does not hand us a gallery of serene, unruffled believers. It gives us men and women who cried, wept, and groaned after a God who sometimes seemed to hide His face.
"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God" (Psalm 42:1–2, ESV). Spurgeon, in The Treasury of David, describes this psalmist as a spiritual believer under depression, longing for the renewal of the divine presence, struggling with doubts and fears—but yet holding his ground by faith in the living God. He adds that most of the Lord's family have sailed on that very sea. Thirst for God, Spurgeon insists, is no questionable mark of grace.
Three times in these twin psalms, faith speaks to feeling and disciplines the soul: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him" (Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5, ESV). Lloyd-Jones takes this as the very pattern for all gospel counsel: the believer must learn to stop listening to himself and begin talking to himself—preaching truth back into his own heart.
"O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water" (Psalm 63:1, ESV). Calvin comments that in saying "my God," David observed the best possible order—giving his faith the lead before giving expression to his sorrow. Faith may say "my God" even when feeling says "where is He?"
"But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped" (Psalm 73:2, ESV). He watched the wicked prosper and wondered if faithfulness was pointless. The turning point is verse 17: "until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end." Spurgeon writes that the psalmist left the things of sense for the things invisible, and apparent disorder resolved itself into harmony.
Notice where the breakthrough happened—not in private brooding but in the means of grace: the gathering of the saints, the Word preached, the prayers of God's people. There is a reason the author of Hebrews urges us not to neglect meeting together (Hebrews 10:25). God's reality is often recovered in the sanctuary, not the dorm room.
"Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time?" (Psalm 77:7–8, ESV). These are the questions of a believer, recorded by the Holy Spirit for your comfort. Then comes the remedy: "I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your wonders of old" (v. 11, ESV). Matthew Henry notes that the psalmist's cure was to look back—to remember God's past dealings. When God feels far away, reach for history: the exodus, the cross, the empty tomb, and whatever sure mercies He has granted to you in days gone by.
Psalm 88 is the only psalm in the entire Psalter that ends without any resolution. Its final line reads, "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness" (Psalm 88:18, ESV). Spurgeon writes of Heman, "In what a dark cloud does the sun of Heman set!"
And yet there are two tiny but infinite mercies in this psalm. First, the psalmist begins, "O LORD, God of my salvation" (v. 1)—one beam of light at dawn. Second, the prayer is before God. Heman never stops addressing Him. The Holy Spirit has placed Psalm 88 in Scripture so that believers who cannot feel one drop of comfort may know that their darkness has been walked before—and has been turned into inspired prayer. If you walk Heman's road, you walk it in the best company.
"Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" (ESV). Joseph Caryl's massive exposition on Job dwells at length on this contradiction—a saint who cannot find the God he loves. Caryl reminds us that Job's longing itself was grace, for only a soul touched by God longs this way. Job was not doubting God's existence; he was grieving God's hiddenness. The two must not be confused.
"He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light… though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer" (Lamentations 3:2, 8, ESV). Yet out of this very abyss rises one of the most beloved passages in all of Scripture: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:22–23, ESV). Calvin remarks that Jeremiah teaches us by his example that the faithful ought to struggle against their own feelings and not surrender to them.
If the forerunner of Christ—of whom Jesus said, "Among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist" (Matthew 11:11, ESV)—could send doubting questions from prison, then do not despair over the questions forming in your own heart. And when the disciples cried out in the storm, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" (Mark 4:38, ESV), the Teacher was in the boat with them. They felt His absence while He was closer than their own breath.
Mark this well: the cry "Is God there?" is found on nearly every page of Scripture. You are not the first to ask it, and you are not alone.
The Longing Itself Is Grace
Do not despise the ache. It is not the absence of grace; it is grace's very signature. Jonathan Edwards, in Religious Affections (1746), teaches that one of the surest marks of true spiritual life is a sense of one's own spiritual poverty alongside a longing for God. The more a true believer loves God with genuine love, the more he desires to love Him. Spurgeon, in his sermon "The Panting Hart," says that though it is a sign of grace to pant after God as the deer pants for the water brooks, it is an equally certain sign of the need for more grace. The panting humbles us, and yet it comforts us.
John Newton's hymn "I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow" (Olney Hymns, Book III, No. 36, 1779) begins by asking the Lord for growth in faith, love, and every grace. The Lord answered that very prayer—by uncovering hidden sins in Newton's heart and permitting the assaults of hell, until Newton cried trembling, "Lord, why is this?" The Lord's reply: this is precisely how He answers prayers for growth—by breaking our idols, humbling our self-reliance, and driving us to find everything in Christ.
John Newton—"I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow," Olney Hymns (1779)Faith, Not Feeling, Is the Rule of the Christian Life
Christian reality is Christ, known by faith through the Word. Felt experience is the fluctuating by-product, not the substance.
The cry—"I want God to be real to me like He is to others"—assumes that Christian reality is felt reality. But Reformed theology gently corrects this. Horatius Bonar, in God's Way of Peace, writes that the gospel takes us straight to the cross, not to our inward state. Our peace is found in believing, not in feeling. Sinclair Ferguson, in The Whole Christ, makes the same point: we must not confuse assurance of Christ's work for us with the temperature of our emotions.
"You may get to heaven with a thousand doubts and fears; but you cannot get there without the life-giving grace of faith."
Charles Spurgeon"The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (ESV). John Owen, in Pneumatologia, teaches that the Spirit assures us by His effectual application of Christ and His promises, not by new revelations apart from the Word. This is freeing. You are not waiting for some voice, some vision, some inward electricity. You are to lay hold of the promises of the gospel, and the same Spirit who inspired that Word will, in His own time, bear witness with your spirit that you are His.
Edwards warns in Religious Affections against mistaking extraordinary experiences for saving grace: the true evidence of the Spirit's work lies in the Christ-exalting, holy, humble, hungering, persevering pattern of the heart and life.
Yes. He Is There.
He is there—not as He is to the smug or the presumptuous, but as He is to the poor in spirit, to the mournful, to the meek, to the hungering and thirsting (Matthew 5:3–6). He is there as the God who is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27), and who has, in the fullness of time, sent His Son to be Immanuel—God with us—precisely because we are so often unable to be with Him.
He is there on the cross, crying your cry for you: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46, ESV)—so that He might swear to you in His Son, "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, ESV).
I will never leave you nor forsake you.
Hebrews 13:5 (ESV)Calvin writes that on Calvary the Son of God bore the terrors to which all sinners are exposed, so that never again should the believer be truly forsaken, even in the thickest darkness. He is there in the empty tomb, in the promises of the gospel, in the baptism you have received, in the bread and cup of His Table, in the voice of the preacher on the Lord's Day, in the prayers of your brothers and sisters, in the very ache of your soul that will not let you rest in anything less than Himself.
"You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."
Augustine of Hippo—ConfessionsWhat to Do Right Now
The Common Thread
Three sections. Three different settings. One common thread: the God who tests His people never loses them.
The saints who walked through fire, the young believer wrestling toward a personal confession, and the weary soul who cannot feel God's nearness are all held by the same hand and covered by the same cross. The 1689 Confession's doctrine of perseverance is not an abstract idea in a dusty book. It is the lived testimony of every person we have studied—from Luther's dark nights to Spurgeon's fainting fits, from Cowper's lifelong clouds to the graduating senior in your own church who is quietly asking whether any of it is true.
What distinguishes a Bunyan from a Templeton is not the presence or absence of fire. Both were scorched. What distinguishes them is whether, in the fire, they clung to the Mediator—the Christ whose blood and righteousness are the only infallible ground of assurance (1689 LBCF 18.2).
I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.
Daniel 3:25 (ESV)The Furnace and the Fourth Figure
The furnace is hot, but the Son of God walks in it with His people. In Daniel 3:25, Nebuchadnezzar looked into the fire and saw four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, unhurt. That fourth figure is your Christ. He is in the fire with you. He will not let it consume you.
Pant on. Press on. You are already His.
You may be in Christ and still not feel it. You may wait. You may wrestle with many difficulties. You are not strange. You are on the well-worn road.