Let's read a verse in 1 Peter 2:4-5. It says Verse 4: coming to Jesus, who is a living stone; rejected by men, but chosen by God, and precious; but you also as living stones are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So if we can just pick up this, God uses pictures to describe people, so He says you are a living stone, not a dead old stone. You may have been that way before you come to Christ. We were dead in sin, stony hearted, hard hearted, insensitive, unloving, self-centred; and when we come to Christ, the spirit of God comes in us, and we become living, alive and vibrant; the Holy Ghost is in us, and God wants to build us up, to build us, shape our lives, and fit us together to become a great house of God. Notice what it says, if we look in Ephesians 2:20. Ephesians 2 picks up the same picture in Verse 20. It says in verse 19: now you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you're fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being brought carefully together, grows into a holy temple. You also are being built together for a dwelling place in the Holy Ghost.
So you notice that God calls us a living stone, and He desires to shape our life. The shaping of your life is called discipleship. It's called the forming of your attitudes and your lifestyle, so you become possible to be used by God in a great way, and God doesn't just leave us as individual stones. In the Bible, Christianity is about a body of people, it's not just about individual lives and destinies. It's about God working through a body of people, so He builds us together. One of the surest ways to recognise we're quite dysfunctional, is our inability, or reluctance, or resistance, to forming close relationships. Close relationships help us sort out the rough edges on our lives. Close relationships are part of what God wants us to do. Many people in church find themselves quite lonely. I want to just put it to you, to think about what a possible reason is, that perhaps you've got a lot of rough edges on you, and you have not developed the skills, nor the commitment, to build successful relationships. It takes effort, and it takes skill. They don't just happen.
That's why God uses the picture of a building. You don't just throw some stones together and have a building; you carefully shape the stones, carefully insert them, and then lock them or cement them together - a picture of us standing together in committed relationships. You can't have Christianity as being a McChurch, you walk in, walk out, have a meal and go. That is not church. It's not church. It's just a modern version of non-committed relationships; God wants to locate us. So when the Bible talks about positioning, and being positioned, God's talking about your physical location, He's talking about your connection in relationships, and He's talking about your mind set, being positioned or having a certain attitude, way of thinking. So let's follow this thought there with these stones. Notice what the challenge is. He said: will they revive the stones? Is there any chance of restoring stones that got burnt? Well you know the houses that formed a great building of a city, all of these stones, now they're all burnt. I want you just to try and picture just a place full of rubble. You can't recognise the streets any more, the buildings are all broken down. The walls, great stones charred, broken, stones fractured. If you've ever been to the ruins in Pompei, you can see there houses which were once great houses. Now they're shattered, broken down, stones are broken, columns are broken down, nothing like its intended or former glory.
So how is it that we become a burnt stone? How do we become a burnt stone? There's probably four reasons, or four ways that I've considered, that you and I can become a burnt stone. One of the greatest pressures that I have had personally in my Christian life, it's the pressure to let go being positioned where God wants me to be. It's the pressure to let go the commitments I've made to the Lord. It's the pressure to withdraw, in the heat of battle, from that which God called me to live out, and to do. That has been, of all the things, the greatest pressure; and the pressure comes the most when you get burnt in a fire. Fires happen. Some fires are ordained by God, some fires are lit by other people, some fires are lit by the devil, but fires are inevitable in life. We will all have fiery experiences; so the Bible talks about the fiery testing of your faith, so when we walk through a difficult season in our life, it's what the Bible calls a 'fiery trial', or a trial by fire. What is at stake? What is at stake is your destiny, and what's being tested is the quality of your faith in God.