Becoming God's precious stones

I am currently reading Frank Viola’s new book, God’s Ultimate Passion: Unveiling the Purpose Behind Everything, and I was really struck by the imagery where he describes the building materials God intends to use in building His House. The portrait comes from John’s vision in the last two chapters of the Book of the Revelation, where Viola points out that God’s House is a city, built by God using gold, pearl, and precious stones. I’ll let him give you his take on how those precious stones come to be:

Precious stones are produced by a combination of indescribable heat and unimaginable pressure over a long period of time. Such heat and pressure create costly stones. One of the chief methods that God uses to obtain precious stones is to throw a group of His own people together—fallen, damaged, and roughly hewn—and summon them to live as a community. As frightening as that may sound to you, that my dear friend, is the church!

The intense heat and pressure which create precious stones often come from the hands of our brothers and sisters in Christ. The closer we get to them, the more the heat is turned up. The New Testament uses a word for this experience. It’s called longsuffering. Longsuffering is the ability to suffer long with another person. Paul used this word eight times when writing to God’s people, exhorting them to suffer long with one another. Another related word is forbearance, which means to endure. Paul repeatedly exhorted the members of the churches in his care to forbear with one another. The net effect? Precious stones!
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Recall Peter, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. His former name was Simon. This man earned a PhD in failure. Among all of the Lord’s apostles, Peter had shown himself to be faulty clay. He was a very marred human vessel. Despite this fact, when Jesus called Simon to be His disciple, He renamed him “Peter,” which means rock. More specifically, it means little stone.

Near the end of his life, Peter had a revelation that he and every other Christian was a stone designed to be a building block for God’s House. He writes, “You are living stones built up into the House of God” (1 Peter 2:5). Peter understood God’s dream. He understood that God’s eternal quest was to have a House through which to express Himself.

Like the rest of us, Peter began his spiritual journey as a fragile piece of clay. Then God put him into the refining fire and turned up the heat and the pressure. Peter was then transformed into a precious stone for the Lord’s House. At the end of the story line, Peter becomes one of the precious stones that make up the foundation for the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:14, 19).

God’s intention has always been to take us humans, who are created from clay, and turn us into gold, pearl, and precious stone for the building of His House. How does He do it? …by fire, heat, and pressure—all of which come sovereignly from His hand.

One of the sure-fire ways for God to turn up the heat in our lives is to throw us clay vessels together to live as a close-knit community. ((Frank Viola, God’s Ultimate Passion (Gainesville, FL: Present Testimony Ministries, 2006), 201))