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Men of Integrity, Nov/Dec 2001
Once-Raw Materials
Theme for this Week: Tough Times
Sunday, December 9
Key Bible Verse: Our present troubles are quite small and won't last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever (2 Corinthians 4:17).
Bonus Reading: Roman 8:18-19
A man who handcrafted violins focused on the kind of wood that made the best violin. He used fine domestic woods. He imported excellent foreign woods. He used aging processes to harden the woods. Yet the tone he desired from his violins remained beyond his reach.
One day he found a gnarled piece of wood from the timberline—that zone where trees stop growing on a mountainside. The winter storm blasts, the slashing rain and the wind-swept bleakness of a mountaintop had twisted the wood and hardened it. Yet the violin created from the timberline wood produced a heavenly tone unlike anything else ever made.
Ordinary coal in the bowels of the earth is placed under pressure of 1.5 million pounds per square inch at a temperature of 5000ºF. Out of that heat and pressure the beauty of a diamond is born.
We too have the raw materials within us to reflect the glory of God. Those raw materials can become radiant with splendor when we undergo the heat and pressure of the fiery furnaces of life.
—Rick Ezell in Defining Moments
Sovereign Lord, help me to accept my trials as permitted by You to strengthen me.
Adapted from: Defining Moments (InterVarsity, 2001)
For your convenience, Defining Moments is available in the ChristianityToday.com bookstore.
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.
November/December 2001, Vol. 4, No. 6
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Prayer for the Week |
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Sovereign Lord, help me to accept my trials as permitted by You to strengthen me.
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