By Shirley Wiggins
Where are you?
I am in the quarry of life, dear friend, in the quarry of life.
It helps me to remember often where I am; because I am not yet home and should not be surprised that I do not always feel the peace of being at home in my true home: my heavenly Home.
This morning the words in my little devotional* spoke so sweetly this gentle reminder to my troubled heart. The beginning words were written as though spoken by stones from the wall of a mountain, describing the effects of “fire and water [which] have worked on us for ages, but made us only crags. Human hands have made us into a dwelling where the children of your immortal race are born, and suffer, and rejoice, and find rest and shelter, and learn the lessons set them by our Maker and yours. But we have passed through much to fit us for this. Gunpowder has rent our very heart; pickaxes have cleaved and broken us, it seemed to us often without design or meaning, as we lay misshapen stones in the quarry; but gradually we were cut into blocks, and some of us were chiseled with finer instruments to a sharper edge. But we are complete now, and are in our places, and are of service. You are in the quarry still, and not complete, and therefore to you, as once to us, much is inexplicable. But you are destined for a higher building, and one day you will be placed in it by hands not human, a living stone in a heavenly temple.”
Long before the mountain wall could be a habitat for humans to dwell in, the effects of time had weathered it, but left it only “crags” … a sharp detached fragment of rock.”¹ A place unfit for service for humans to “find rest and shelter, and learn the lessons set them by our Maker and yours.” It was only when the mountain had “passed through much” at the skilled hands of another, when “with finer instruments” each crag was cut and shaped to “a sharper edge” that it was then fit for its purposeful service.
A quarry, says Webster’s online dictionary, is in its noun form “an open excavation usually for obtaining building stone, slate, or limestone; a rich source.” The transitive verb form means “to dig or take from or as if from a quarry <quarry marble>; intransitive verb is “to delve in or as if in a quarry.”¹
What a picture the words, as penned by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman* in this years-old devotional, draw for me! I see in it many things, among them the chiseling work required by our Master God in the lives of His people.
As I liken my life to a quarry, an open excavation site where there is stored a rich source of building materials with which to construct an everlasting life that will outlive its human body, I am reminded that along with that vast store can also lie hidden rock, good-for-nothing rubble and debris, which will have to be hewn out and discarded.
In much the same way as the chiseled out crag fragments had to be reshaped to become a suitable dwelling place for people, so our God chisels each of His own dear children to a sharper edge to fit our unique places of service.
I am also reminded of the vast number of “inexplicable” events in human life: all those events and situations and circumstances that “are incapable of being explained, interpreted, or accounted for.”¹
What about you, precious friend, what inexplicable things in your own life are you dealing with at the moment? Or, what things have you already experienced that you still cannot make sense of even though they are in your past?
Do you ever feel as if you are being quarried? That the impurities of life are being relentlessly removed from your inner being, and perhaps by some pretty rough measures?
We must remember that God will see to it that all things work together for good to those who love Him, to those who are the called according to His purpose. (Please see Romans 8:28.) Even those seemingly senseless things that happen in our lives and cause us pain as if they were without design or meaning.
I so desire to constantly and continually live in the Spirit, to be holy and pure and to serve the Lord’s Kingdom in a useful way. Yet, too often I have to confront selfish motives and ugly attitudes lurking deep within me.
Whether any other person ever knows about these sins does not matter for I am acutely and painfully aware of them. Most importantly, my heavenly Father knows them for what they are and not one of them can be hidden from His eyes. (Please see Hebrews 4:12-13.) I know that I cannot serve my Lord if secret sin resides in my heart. Sin must be rooted out and it can’t matter how much it hurts; it has to go.
“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me; but certainly God has heard me; He has given heed to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, Who has not rejected my prayer nor removed His mercy and loving-kindness from being [as it always is] with me.” (Psalm 66:18-20 Amplified Bible.)
Why should it matter so much – these sometimes so seemingly small sins?
It matters because sin never stays small, nor does it remain hidden and invisible. Sin is sneaky and starts small, so tiny, so easy to disguise under another name, a name not as starkly ugly as “sin.” Sin---that thing which has death itself as its end result. It can be labeled a “feeling,” a “desire,” a” harmless little thought,” actually, we may tell ourselves.
Sin is like leaven. Leaven: “any substance added to dough to cause it to ferment. … The New Testament figurative references to leaven have in mind that which is small, insignificant, or hidden, but which is of great effect.” … “Also that which has effects greater than its appearance …”²
“Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Corinthians 5:6.)
But like a little leaven, sin if left to germinate hidden and undisturbed in the dark interior of the private heart will one day show plainly and publicly that it too “has effects greater than its appearance.”
Sin is deadly and it leads to death in some form: “Then the evil desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully matured, brings death. Do not be misled, my beloved…” (Please see James 1:13-16 Amplified Bible.)
God loves us so much. He knows that should sin take root in our hearts and remain there great harm will come to us and that it will not stay small nor hidden, but will spill out and over and hurt us and those whom we love the most. God is not willing for that to happen. That is why He will continue to shine the Light of His love into those hidden places in our hearts and will use whatever excavation tool is necessary to rid us of that thing that would work on our souls and spirits as cancer would work on fleshly bodies.
I believe that God is so desirous that we allow His excavation of sin in our lives while it is still personal and purely private, known only to ourselves, that He will, in His mercy, give us time to turn away from it. But, if we continue to refuse His Holy Spirit’s private conviction of sin, then sin when it is grown can erupt and be blown into a public shameful exposure that we could have avoided with a proper and immediate response to God’s private and personal call to repentance.
What kind of people would we be if we had the power to remove a deadly disease from the human race but we refused to do it? What kind of God would allow sin to eat His children alive from the inside out without warning them to repent?
He would not be the holy God of love, the God of the Bible, that we are invited to know and to serve if we choose to live transparently and honorably in relationship with Him. The holiness of God does not limit His loving-kindness, just as His loving-kindness does not impede His holy wrath against sin (see Romans 6:23). God gives warnings to people! People must pay attention and obey Him!
As my thoughts take me to these truths, I wonder why I find it so hard to immediately run to this holy God, Who is my heavenly Father, to seek His face in the matters of my battles with personal sins. He knows them already. He has help available for me and will continue to love and cherish me even after this messy excavation procedure is completed for my soul’s victorious return to the spiritually healthy lifestyle Christ Jesus died to give me. (See John 10:10.)
So why do we so often hesitate, even for a minute, to go to Him for His help to rid ourselves of the blatant or the invisible-to-the-world sin? One reason might be because we wanted to be better than this - we try so hard to be good! But the “goodness” is just not in us: it is in Jesus, our Righteousness. (Please read Romans 3:21-26.)
And, once again as I fall to my knees and acknowledge how desperately I need Him every day just to live, I am caught in His spiritual arms of love and cradled there as He sings over me and reminds me of His great love – His never-ending love for me. (See Zephaniah 3:17 and Psalm 32:7.)
No matter how messy life may get before I get Home, my Father repeats the never-ending promise that He will never leave me nor forsake me. Nothing can separate me from His love:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger or sword? ……No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him Who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:35, 37-39 (ESV)
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation---if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to Him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture: ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame.’ So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,’ and ‘A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.’ They stumble because they disobey the word, ….” 1 Peter 2:1-8a (ESV)
In the still air the music lies unheard;
In the rough marble beauty hides unseen;
To make the music and the beauty needs
The Master’s touch, the sculptor’s chisel keen.
Great Master, touch us with Thy skillful hands;
Let not the music that is in us die!
Great Sculptor, hew and polish us; nor let,
Hidden and lost, Thy form within us lie!”
Author Unknown.*
*Streams In The Desert by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, pages 256-257
¹Webster’s Online Dictionary ©2012 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
²The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, page 648; ©1987 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
