The Fundamental Blog

Dad had a custom-made ring with his Army Air Corps squadron insignia on the sides and a big diamond in it. It was the coolest thing that I had ever seen as a boy and as it turns out, it is one of the few things that I have of his, now that he’s gone. The insignias are yellow gold skulls with white gold crossbones repeated on both sides of the setting. The stone is a little over 1 carat; a round cut canary diamond, and as I have learned in my older years, not as high a quality stone as I might have imagined as a kid, but the stone was set in a white gold backing that added to its brilliance, and while it might have not been the Crown Jewels, it was the most extravagant thing I had ever seen.

The thing about gemstones, diamonds in particular, is that if you were to see one in the rough you might think that they were pretty ugly. They can seem like just ordinary cloudy colored rocks that are barely worth noticing. When selected by the trained eye, cut to shape, ground to the correctly calculated number of facets and polished to perfection, the result is astonishing. Even a stone of secondary, or in this case tertiary, quality can be made to dazzle and shine as though it were worth the moon and stars. I heard someone on the radio talking about the process of finishing diamonds and he said that while the cut is important, the real beauty is revealed in the grinding and polishing. I thought, “Isn’t it the same with us?”

We are little more than pebbles in a creek bed, or rocks in a cave somewhere before God calls us. Once we have been selected and God makes the first few cuts, then the hard work of grinding and polishing begins. I mean, God sets us on the anvil and positions the blade and then, “Wham!” a chunk of who we used to be falls away. He turns us and gives us another whack and there goes the foul language that we once defended by saying, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a word.” Another turn and away goes the violent nature we used to struggle with; another and something else is done away with. We get shaped into the image, the starter image, of Jesus as the eye of God sees Him and then we start the grinding and polishing to be made into the likeness of the Son of God.

Of course, in this life we never quite get there, but we are brought a long way toward that end. Even if we are not the perfect stones that the gemologist might hope for, God sets us on a path to do remarkable things with us. Can we look back and remember how we started out? How can we be anything less than in awe of the progress that God has made with us in the short time He has been working with us? (I say short because even a hundred years is nothing to an eternal God.) God makes some formidable changes in who we are and the ways in which we have been living and then we spend the rest of our lives working on becoming the best gems we can for the sake of and glory of the Master jeweler who by His righteous wisdom selected us as being worthy of pursuing.

The funny thing is that the further we travel in our walk with the Lord, the more slowly the refining occurs. God makes some major changes in us at the beginning but the process of polishing our walks takes years, even whole lifetimes to bring us to the point where we can really shine. Even at that, we are never finished; we can never be perfect so we keep coming closer and closer to the goal but never reach the finish line. It’s like the logical explanation of why you can never go anywhere. The concept goes like this: Before you can ever reach a destination, you must travel half of the distance. With half remaining, you must then travel half of the remainder, which is one quarter of the total. Regardless of how many times you repeat this, and since any figure can be halved an infinite number of times, you can never reach the destination because there is always one more half to travel, (actually, an infinite number of halves to travel).

This is how we strive to reach the perfection of Christ, but we always come up just short of the mark. Not only that, but the longer we strive and the more we work at it, the less we travel in each instance. So not only can we never reach perfection, the more we try, the slower our progress! But praise be to God! He has a plan to push us over the line, to carry us to the exact likeness we have strived for in our walks of faith. Our lives in Christ are opportunities to see how close we can get, to prove our perseverance, to grit our teeth and stubbornly refuse to give up or accept some false theology that might try to tell us that there is an easy way to get to the finish line on our own.

Another thing that is worth noting is that the longer we work at this, the stronger the forces that shape us must be. God may be able to hack off big chunks of our past with a single blow of the jeweler’s blade, but when we get to the polishing stages, we find that the grinding powder, the buffing rouge, must take away only a very little bit at a time and it takes years to bring even one facet of who we are into crystal clarity. When I stopped smoking it was instant! Through sincere prayer and faith in a loving God, He had me put down my cigarettes and He took them away. I had no with drawl, no cravings, no – nothing! I asked God to take them away and He said, “Alright, this I will do for you.” God did it for me, I didn’t have to do anything, and my habit was gone as though I had never started, back when I was 10 years old! Over 40 years of smoking; gone in an instant. Anger, envy, pride? These I still struggle with every day.

The last point I would like to make, and one that is extremely important to understand, is that we are not doing the grinding and polishing for our own glory. We do not get to boast about the degree to which we shine because though we may still be semi-rough diamonds, God can surely polish river rock to a degree that would shame us all! No, we are grinding and polishing to be able to present our diamonds as ornaments for the crown of the Saviour on the day when we stand before Him. We shine for Him. As we stand side by side, should we see a spot on the gem next to us we should gladly give it a quick buff to help one another along the way, but never think that any of us are more worthy than any other of the diamonds we find along our walk every day. We might not all be at the same degree of brilliance now, but on that last day God Himself will provide the finishing touches to bring us all to the pinnacle of perfection as we approach the throne of the Lord Jesus.

Don’t ever think that we don’t have value to the Lord. He has made us from the dust of the earth and breathed into us the breath of life, He has set us on His bench and called us to be His own, He has saved us for Himself and is setting us on a course to becoming the best gems we can be all for the sake of His Son. A Son whom He destined to die in our place so that as the brilliant diamonds we become during our earthly walks, the Lord might have us forever as points of light in His crown. Our walks are extremely important. Though we know that we can do nothing to deserve our salvation, nor may we earn it by our own hands, God is using each of us to benefit the kingdom by making us diamonds in a crown that is…


All for the Glory of Christ

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