God's Jewels

Announcer: Thank you for listening to this message from True Woman '08, Revive Our Hearts’ first national women’s conference. It’s our prayer that God blesses you with His Word and His heart as you listen.

Joni Tada: Thank you, Nancy, for you gracious words, really gracious to our friends this evening. And ladies, I just want you to know that I’m just as surprised as you are by this turn of events.

Yes, I have been dealing with pain for quite a while now, and yes, it meant canceling a few other commitments during the summer. But with prayer, and with a lot of physical therapy—I mean, I thought for certain I would be there with you. But as Kristyn and Keith Getty just sang, when trials come, God has a way of changing our plans.

So let’s all just trust Him with it. I promise not to be too disappointed if you promise the same. Let’s believe the Lord’s going to revive our hearts, that He’ll visit us, myself included, in the next 40 minutes or so.

So would you pray with me that the Lord Jesus will take our weaknesses, take my pain, take all our limitations and turn them inside out and upside down to do something far more personal and powerful than we ever even planned for tonight.

Lord Jesus, I ask You right now, as the girls bow their heads, bless us with Your presence, bless us with Your perspective. In Your wonderful name, Savior, Jesus, what a precious name, amen.

Not far from the farm in Maryland where I grew up was this stone quarry. They called it Sylvan Dell. When I was little, my sisters and I would ride our horses by there all the time. Daddy told us to be very careful, to stay on the trail, and that was because the ground, not 20 feet from the path, dropped into this sheer cliff that plunged to the bottom of the quarry.

This quarry was a busy place. There were steam shovels, trucks moving rocks because the flagstone was for the new housing developments going up near the farm. The quarry was noisy—a lot of hammering, a lot of dust, a lot of hard work and sweat.

But that quarry produced flagstone and some pretty, beautiful, Maryland, quartz crystal. We would ride our horses along the trail and anywhere, on either side of the bridal path, there would be these little bits of sparkling quartz scattered everywhere, all shiny and glittery and dazzling.

When I was a kid, I thought we were walking on diamonds—like somebody opened a treasure chest and scattered precious jewels everywhere. I really thought we were walking on real gems, like,

When He cometh, when He cometh to make up His jewels,
All His jewels, precious jewels His loved and his own.
Like the stars in the morning His bright crown adorning,
We will shine in His beauty bright gems for His crown.

We used to sing that song—a Sunday school song it was—and the Bible talks about this very thing, glittering, dazzling, glorious. Malachi chapter 3, verse 16 describes how the Lord has a book in which all the names of those who love Him are written down. And He calls these people His jewels. So how do we become jewels that glitter, and I mean really shine?

Well, I don’t think you ladies, this group, is into “bling.” But I know if I want a rock, let’s say my diamond wedding ring, to dazzle, I’ll ask my “get-up” girl in the morning to take my toothbrush and scrub my ring.

A real stone like this one can take a good scrubbing. Jewelry is not as delicate as we think. So God gets out His toothbrush and says in Zechariah chapter 13, verse 9, “I will refine them like silver, and I will test them like gold.”

That’s me. What can I say? I long, I desire, I want to be a jewel that does not cringe if God chooses to give my soul a hard scrubbing every now and then.

Now, I’m not glorifying the suffering it takes to polish my faith. But ladies, I am glorifying the God whose image is reflected on the surface of any smile, my smile, that might be hard fought for through pain or problems. If you want God’s glory to be your shine, girls, it will be on His terms. His glory will be the glow of His godliness in your life, His patience, and perseverance.

The conviction that the Father is worth trusting and obeying, no matter how painful the trial, His terms call for you to be refined like silver and for me to be tested like gold, that is something over 40 years in a wheelchair has shown me.

And like a good chunk of rock straight out of the quarry, my soul is not as delicate as I would like to think. You know, sometimes I think, “Oh, Lord, it’s quadriplegia, don’t be too hard on me here.”

But no, my soul can stand a good scrubbing, because I have not arrived. This week, when I had to call Nancy and tell her that I could not be with you, when pain was blind-sighting me, it was obvious to me that God thinks my soul can still take a good scouring.

And with this pain, I struggle with claustrophobia and fear—claustrophobia, thinking that it’s going to get worse, and fear that it’s not going to go away, that it’s not going to get better.

I know you can identify. You’ve got problems that never go away. You pray, you plead until your knees get sore, yet: your pinched nerve doesn’t heal, the pregnancy test doesn’t come back positive, the multiple sclerosis doesn’t halt, your teenager keeps sneaking drugs, your parent’s Alzheimer’s doesn’t regress, the marriage doesn’t get better, the job promotion never comes, the engagement ring never arrives. Well, my paralysis never went away.

Job was right when he said, “Man was born to trouble.” Jesus was right when He said, “In this world you will have trouble.” And ladies, trouble is the textbook that will teach you who you really are.

Trouble is what will squeeze the lemon inside of you—you know, that squeezed lemon that keeps revealing the stuff of which you are made, and it’s not very pretty.

I’ll confess it. When I’m in pain, I implode; I collapse in defeat. And if I let it simmer, not going to God’s Word, not turning to Him in prayer, I become selfish; I become impatient; I become irritated, mean-spirited. I get this—there’s no better word for it—peevish, really sour attitude.

Maybe for you, when trouble hits you, you’ve got a smile for everybody at the supermarket or J.C. Penny’s, or Macy’s, but it stays right there at the cashier’s desk that smile does. And when you head home, you leave it back where you were shopping.

Or maybe for you, it’s a lazy approach to God’s Word. I know that happens to me. Unbelief in prayer, snapping at your kids, your husband, you sit there stewing in church, and you think about the workweek ahead.

You’re tired, indifferent, stale, sour, itching to get things your own way—oh my goodness, get out the toothbrush, because God knows that’s the dirt, that’s the scum and the impurities the Lord wants to scour away.

You see, here it is, plain and simple: The core of God’s plan is to rescue us from our own sin. Yes, He did that back and the Cross, but this whole sanctification thing, He’s got a long way to go with us, and the Father is Heaven bent on conforming us, conforming you, to the image of Jesus Christ.

And first and foremost, that means getting rid of sin. Yes, to be made like Jesus is to become kind and gentle and thoughtful and compassionate, but first, if you really want to be like Christ, then you’ve got to learn to hate sin, because to be like Jesus is to be made sin-less.

God is concerned about your poverty or my pain. He’s concerned about your broken heart or my broken neck, but girls, those things are not His ultimate focus. He cares about that stuff, but those things are merely symptoms of the root and real problem. God cares most, not about making you and me comfortable, but about teaching us to hate our transgression and to grow up spiritually to love Him. That’s the purpose behind the toothbrush. That’s the purpose behind the refining and the chipping and the polishing.

For instance, when I’m in pain, I mean, when I’m really hurting and I can’t take any more Vicodin—I mean, I have repositioned myself in this wheelchair so many times, I’m going to drive my husband and my girlfriends crazy. When I am hurting, I am then able to see sin for the poison that it is, because when God takes His sovereign hand and squeezes my lemon hard, out flows not a trickle of complaints, but a steady stream of frustration.

I mean, I implode, “God, this isn’t right! Come on, I’m a quadriplegic. I mean, isn’t that enough suffering without adding pain to it?”

That’s not very pretty. So, my wise and sovereign God takes one form of evil—that is suffering—and He turns it on its head to defeat another form of evil, and that’s my sin, my self-centeredness.

Girls, God’s an expert at doing this, and when you and I yield to His sovereign plan, I know I can’t help but cling to the man of sorrows for dear life. I cling to the Cross, where every ugly thing is put to death, and before I know it, my sin is sandblasted away, resulting in His image shining out of my soul, tested and refined, polished, a soul that glows with the glory of God.

Now, I know you might be thinking, “That’s nice for you to say, Joni, but still, that sounds a little heavy-handed.” Look, girls, be grateful for God’s sovereignty, because if He weren’t in control, evil would come barreling at us uncontrolled. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t know about you, but I’m not for that. I am happy to leave this issue of sovereignty in the hands of a wise and a good God—a God who uses suffering like one of those skilled hammer men back at the Sylvan Dell quarry.

God wields suffering to break apart your rocks of resistance and mine. Suffering is His chisel in His hand that chips away your pride and your stiff-necked, stubborn rebellion, and the hurting and the hammering is not going to end until we become completely like Jesus, until we can completely reflect that marvelous image or precious, precious Jesus Christ.

It won’t end until we become completely holy like Him, and ladies, there is no chance of that happening on this side of eternity, so I think we just better get used to it.

You know, this whole lesson was brought home to me through a special pair of earrings I have. They were gracing the ears of my girlfriend, Anne, who is one of our board members at Joni and Friends.

Her husband owns a couple of Mercedes dealerships back in Nashville. Anyway, we were at the registration desk of the hotel after the board meeting, and I just looked up at her and said, “Oh, Anne, what beautiful earrings you’re wearing!” To which she immediately began taking them off, and she put them on my ears. I said, “No, no, wait a minute!” I couldn’t protest very hard; my hands don’t work, “Oh, no, no, please don’t give me your earrings.”

Well, to put it shortly here, these earrings became my absolute favorites for one thing. They were precious because my friend, Anne, gave them to me. And oh, my goodness, they were $800 or $900 gold earrings! I couldn’t believe it.

I wore them all the time. In fact, I was wearing them at work, and down the hallway from where we are here is my office. I was leaning up against the telephone receiver. Now, my telephone, because it’s handicap equipped, is hooked to a gooseneck receiver and the receiver rests against my ear.

So I’m leaning against the receiver, talking, and all of the sudden, I feel the earring drop. But I keep talking, because I know when I’m finished, I’ll back up and find the earring on the floor or on my lap. Well, I did just that. I backed up my wheelchair, and it wasn’t on the floor, and so I kept wheeling around looking for it everywhere. I couldn’t see it.

I wheeled toward my office door to yell for my secretary Francie to come and help me find this earring on the floor, and as I wheeled I heard this, “Clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk.” I had impaled this gold earring on the tire of my wheelchair. I felt awful. I mean, these were expensive earrings. So Francie got down on her knees and she plucked the earring off of my tire.

It was, ladies, a mangled mess. I was devastated. Well, that weekend I took the set of earrings to a local jeweler at the mall, and I put the set right there on the counter and said to the jeweler, “Sir, can you please make this mangled earring right here look like this really nice earring here?”

And he rubbed his chin, and he looked at them, and he said, “Well, lady, I can’t make that one look like this one, but I can make this one look like that one!” I couldn’t believe it! I said, “Sir, no, I mean, these are good earrings! These are really expensive!” “Sweetheart,” he said, “don’t worry. I’m an expert at doing this.”

So there he goes in the back with my earrings, and I hear this, “Bang, bang, bang, bang.” When he came out, I couldn’t believe it. The earrings were beautiful.

I mean, because they had so many more crinkles and bends and cracks in them now, they really reflected the light so much more beautifully. Those earrings were never the same. Those earrings were changed into a different shape, and believe me, they are all the better for the battering.

In fact, I’m wearing them right here. I usually don’t wear earrings this big, unless I’m in Texas, but I thought I’d wear them today just to show you these earrings are unique. Like I said, they catch the light in a way that they never did before. They are unlike any other piece of jewelry I have, and that makes them all the more precious.

Girls, when I broke my neck, it was not a jigsaw puzzle that I had to solve fast, nor was it a quick jolt to get me back on spiritual track. Now, God pretty much said to me when I broke my neck, “Sweetheart, I’m an expert. I know how to fix this.” And my spinal cord injury ended up changing me forever. This paralysis became a long, arduous process of God hammering me into a different shape.

I have a girlfriend, Melanie, who discovered when she heard that she was pregnant with a child with multiple disabilities, she collapsed into her husband’s arms and cried, “Oh, things are never going to be the same,” to which he wisely replied, “Well, honey, maybe God doesn’t want things to be the same.”

And it’s true. He doesn’t. For instance, last night, things weren’t the same. I changed. I did—last night. I should explain how. I was in the bed in the middle of the night, and I was awakened by stabbing pain, and I thought, “Oh God, not this. I can’t reach for Vicodin; I can’t wake up my husband; I cannot do this, not now.”

But in the next instant, girls, I decided to grit my teeth and drastically obey rather than collapse and implode in selfishness and fear and claustrophobia. I began whispering the Word of God in my anxious heart, calming that fear and claustrophobia. I mean, I’ve got an arsenal of songs memorized, snippets of Scriptures like Psalm 119, verses 153-54, “Oh, God, look upon my suffering, and deliver me, for I have not forgotten Your law.”

And you know what? In the quiet of the night, He delivered me. I yielded to Him, and He changed me. He gave me courage, and suddenly, I had this peace that passes all human understanding, and I became better for all that battering. And when I woke up this morning, my character looked a little different. It took on a different shape. I was slightly transformed from glory to glory, and girls, growing in the Lord happens exactly that way. You don’t sit in front of a Bible and just hope that it happens to you through osmosis. No, when you obey in small and great ways, that’s when you change.

You begin feeling this sense of freedom, freedom from the bondage of sin and self. Plus, you experience a sense of destiny. You become the Christian that God has destined you to be.

I am more the Joni Eareckson Tada that God has destined me to be since I obeyed last night and whispered the Word of God. I’m a little more unique now. I’m unlike any other jewel written in the book of the Father.

The simple formula is described in 1 John chapter 2, where it says, “If anyone obeys His Word, God’s love is truly made complete in him” (verse 5). This is how we know we are in Christ, and the good news is, God is the master jeweler.

He rules. He orders. He commands. He knows exactly how to handle that hammer, and He is happy to do good toward you. Just remember that His idea of good is to make you more like Jesus, and if our Savior learned obedience through the things He suffered, should the Master expect less from You and me?

In Jeremiah chapter 32, God says, “I will rejoice in doing them good, with all My heart,” and get this, “and with all My soul.” Heart and soul, God is happy to give you and me more than enough help from His end—abundantly more.

And if grace abounds where sin abounds, as the Bible says, then grace abounds where suffering abounds. Oh, I want to be where God’s grace is. God’s grace, the desire and the power to do His will, the desire and the power to obey is sufficient for my paralysis and for your pain and problems, for your struggling marriage or singleness, for your dead-end job, because Jesus Christ is your co-laborer.

All this stuff called suffering, I mean, He has been tempted and tested and tried. He is with you. He is worth it all, and to discover Him and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, oh the sweetness, oh the delight. I tell you, His love is better than wine, “like the stars in the morning His bright crown adorning, we will shine in His beauty, bright gems for His crown.”

Truly, the man of sorrows becomes your Lord of joy. “Therefore,” as it says in Hebrews chapter 12, verse 12, “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet so the lame might not be disabled, but healed.”

Ladies, I’m healed. Health and wholeness, maturity and completeness will be totally mine one day, and it will be yours. And then the hammer and the chisel will be put away, and just two minutes in Heaven will be worth it all.

Maybe you feel as though someone were taking a gigantic toothbrush scrubbing your soul raw today, and it hurts. It’s hard, and you wince at the pain and the disappointment.

I’m with you in that, but let me remind you, you are not as delicate as you think, “for to this you have been called,” it says in 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 21, “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in His steps.”

You’re not a piece of flagstone; you’re not just quartz crystal. You’re silver. You are gold. If you want to know who God’s brightest jewels really are—you know, the ones who really sparkle—the answer is in Matthew chapter 20, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”

If you want to be first in the Kingdom, if you aspire to be a jewel in Christ’s crown, and oh boy, do I aspire to be that, then do not focus on the hammer in your own life. Look at the sandblasting that’s happening in the lives of others. Let’s help them. Let’s serve them. Let’s look out for their interests.

Girls, it’s why I absolutely love what we do at our ministry, Joni and Friends International Disabilities Center. I mean, sure I may be in a wheelchair, but that does not give me an excuse not to think of others more needy than I am.

God has blessed me so much. He’s given me so much, and Luke chapter 12 says, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (verse 48).

God is always asking more of me. Yes, I have a wheelchair, but I’ll tell you there are 18 million other disabled people in the world who don’t have a wheelchair, who don’t have the Word of God.

So I consider it the highest privilege that God asks much of me, that I travel and share the good news of Jesus, to give wheelchairs to needy, disabled people in places like Peru or Poland or China or Cuba.

And yes, my family has been supportive. Yes, I’ve been given much in that regard, as well. Ken is a wonderful husband, but there are families who are splitting apart, and so my husband Ken and I labor alongside of our teams as we held our 20 family retreats this summer.

I wasn’t able to attend them all because of pain, much like having to cancel on being viewed by you in person, but I tell you what, I was praying. I was there in heart and soul, maybe not body, but certainly in intercessions.

If God expects me, a quadriplegic, to be actively engaged in my own sanctification—I mean, if God expects me to give much, what does He expect of you? If you want to increase your capacity for joy, if you want to increase your service and worship in Heaven, if you want to enlarge your eternal estate, then do not focus on the bite of the chisel in your life. Focus on others who need to be quarried out of the dust and dirt of this world. You help them, minister to them, serve them. Look out for their interests.

During a recent visit to the Baltimore, Maryland area, my husband and I drove down the old road which still borders Sylvan Dell quarry. Some years ago, that quarry filled up with water from an underground spring.

The trucks have fallen quiet. The steam shovels have left. We pulled over and stopped our car on the side of the road to just listen, rolled down the windows, and the woods were just utterly quiet, except for birds calling. That’s something we never heard when the quarry was active, and we used to go horseback riding there. Sitting there in that peace and serenity, it was like a slice of Heaven.

Just to feel the quiet reminded me of 1 Kings chapter 6. It says there, “In building the temple,” get this, “only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, no chisel, or any other iron tool, was heard at the temple site while it was being built.”

Did you get that, ladies? God wanted the building of that temple to be a picture of preparation for Heaven. God told King Solomon that all the stones for that temple should be chiseled back at the quarry, back at the worksite with all the trucks and steam shovels, not near the temple.

That’s a picture of the way God is fitting you for Heaven. If you are a member of Christ’s family, you are a living stone being built into a holy temple, and this world is God’s worksite. This world is His very noisy, very dusty quarry, and we are being mined out of the stone pit of Earth. It is a place of noise and hammering and sweat and work and chiseling and pain.

God is using your inflictions to shape you so that you might fit perfectly into Heaven’s landscape where there will be no more hammer, no more chisel, nothing that bites or causes pain, no other iron tool, where there is no suffering—only serenity.

No pain, no sorrow, no tears, no death, and because we know that our light and momentary afflictions are achieving for us a glory in eternity that far outweighs them all, we don’t waste our sufferings.

We are believers who want to partner with God. I want you to join me in getting rid of sin and serving others, because, friend, you are not an ordinary pebble with no purpose.

Zechariah chapter 9, verse 16 says that you will—get this, I love this verse—“You will sparkle in His land like jewels in a crown,” and if you want more evidence, Matthew chapter 13, verse 33 tops that. It says, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of the Father.” One day I’m going to shine, one day you’re going to sparkle in His land. You will shine like the sun.

Ladies, how God allowed for my accident to happen is not the point here. The point God wants us to consider is 1 Peter chapter 4, verse 1, where it says, “He who has suffered in the flesh is done with sin.”

My suffering is helping to put behind me the self-focused Joni and to mature into the Joni the Lord has destined me to be, honed and polished by years of quadriplegia.

The bridal path along the edge of Sylvan Dell can hardly be located now through the weeds and all the thorns and all the overgrowth and ivy. But not so with the quarry of God. Our Father is as active as ever, mining out more living stones every day. Are you one of them? I mean, don’t you want to be a living stone in the hand of the Master Jeweler?

You already experience trouble in this world, right? Most likely, you’re already dealing with pain and disappointment. Why not make certain it has a purpose?

So agree with God to leave behind your sin, would you? Don’t waste your suffering. Don’t waste your life, and certainly do not waste it on dry religion, for only Jesus Christ has the words of life. He is the resurrection and the life. He is the Prince of life. He is the way, the truth, and the life, and one day, He will give you and me who trust in Him a crown of life.

If you would but turn from your wicked ways and live—if you do that, if you yield to Christ and embrace Him as Lord and Savior, He’ll make sure the trouble you face is worth it, because He knows how to handle the chisel. He’s got a crown in mind for you.

So, right now, if you are not a believer—and you know who you are—maybe you were dragged here to this conference by your girlfriend who registered you without you even knowing it. Maybe she grabbed you by the elbow and here you are, listening to all these people talking about the Lord Jesus. Well, if you’re not a believer, I want you to become one right now, tonight.

Would you bow your head with me, and just say these words quietly in your heart. Let’s all bow our heads, and if you don’t believe in God, but now you want to change things and you want to put your life in His hands, pray:

Lord Jesus, please come into my life, my heart, my mind, my spirit, make me the person You have destined me to be. I want to experience the life You've promised. Forgive me for my sin. Forgive me for being so distant. Forgive me for being calloused toward You in the past. Help me to turn from my wicked ways and live. I invite You to be the Lord of my life and sit on the throne of my heart. And thank You for the difference that You're going to make in my life. In Your precious name, amen.