Living
Stones: It Hurts to be Alive(2)[1]
“In building
the temple, only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, chisel
or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being built.” I Kings 6:7
“You also,
like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house …“ I Peter 2:5
When King Solomon built the temple, he used huge stones that had
been shaped at the quarry so that no noise or sound would be made at the temple
building site when the temple was built. The apostle Peter says that we are to
come to Him as living stones to be fit into the temple of God, a spiritual
house. It occurred to me that when Christ comes into our lives, he must chisel
and shape us, because we aren’t in perfect shape to fit into His body. I can
think of three important points from this analogy.
1.
We are a
work in progress. Although Christ accepts us as we are, we
are yet to be conformed to His image[2].
Although we have been freed from the penalty
of sin, and given the ability to resist the power of sin, we still must deal with the presence of sin. We need daily confession and prayer, strong
fellowship, and Bible reading to bring us to perfection. Remember that it took
seven years for Solomon to build the temple[3] –
we aren’t going to be rebuilt in an instant either. It takes time to reform us
– to change bad habits that have accumulated over a lifetime. And God is not
only working on me, but countless others, to fit together into the living
temple of God.
2.
It hurts to
be alive. God must use His chisel on us, to take away the rough spots in
our lives that rub God and others the wrong way, and He does it, not when we are
“deadened” by sin, but when we are truly alive, having been born again in
Christ. Why couldn’t He have perfected us when we were deadened? Then it
wouldn’t hurt so much to be reshaped. It hurts our pride to be corrected, to
have to admit our faults, or to ask forgiveness from others. And things that
didn’t bother us when we were dead, now seem to matter more to a soul alive with
God’s presence. God works on us, tapping off our resentments, knocking away
grudges, filling in disappointments, so that we become smoother, gentler, and
fit for the Body of Christ.
3.
Our personal
quarry. God works on us in His personal quarry. As the old Negro
spiritual says: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.”[4] Only
God truly understands what we go through and we work on these difficulties in
private with Him, crying when no one hears us. We wrestle in the “silent
gymnasium” of prayer, just as Jacob wrestled with God[5]. God
doesn’t want us parading our problems in front of everyone, day after day, but instead
He wants us to depend upon Him daily – to go into our closet and pray. I think
this is some of what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount, when he said “But when you pray, go into your room, close
the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen.[6]” The
image of being built into a temple means we don’t want to rub other stones the
wrong way, or grind at each other’s nerves, and or get pounded into place.
So God works on us daily, in our
quiet times with Him, so that at His glorious coming, we each will fit
perfectly into place into the body of Christ, the family of God, if we but
yield to Him and allow Him to work on us.
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