Praise God for the Furnace

I heard this quote this morning on the way to work and it made me think. It’s A. W. Tozer quoting Rutherford. Its entitled “Praise God for the Furnace”. Here’s an excerpt (the whole story can be found here):

“The hammer is a useful tool, but the nail, if it had feeling and intelligence, could present another side of the story. For the nail knows the hammer only as an opponent, a brutal, merciless enemy who lives to pound it into submission, to beat it down out of sight and clinch it into place. That is the nail's view of the hammer, and it is accurate except for one thing: The nail forgets that both it and the hammer are servants of the same workman. Let the nail but remember that the hammer is held by the workman and all resentment toward it will disappear. The carpenter decides whose head will be beaten next and what hammer shall be used in the beating. That is his sovereign right. When the nail has surrendered to the will of the workman and has gotten a little glimpse of his benign plans for its future it will yield to the hammer without complaint.”

Isn’t that great?!? So true! Sometimes I think we forget that perspective. Sometimes we are called to play the role of the nail, sometimes the hammer, and we often forget in whose service we really are. But let each of us, whether hammer or nail, realise that we serve the same Master and we will find our role, whatever that may be, so much easier to fill!