Focus

Let your soul take a moment of rest as you hear God’s word. Put your busy schedule, wandering mind, stressful thoughts, and burdened heart at the feet of the cross and open up to God’s voice as the Giver of Life tends your soul.

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Read

1 Kings 5:13-18 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

King Solomon conscripted forced labor out of all Israel; the levy numbered thirty thousand men. He sent them to the Lebanon, ten thousand a month in shifts; they would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the forced labor. Solomon also had seventy thousand laborers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hill country, besides Solomon’s three thousand three hundred supervisors who were over the work, having charge of the people who did the work. At the king’s command, they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. So Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders and the Gebalites did the stonecutting and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house.

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Reflect

Peter writes about the living stones that compose the new Temple in 1 Peter 2:4-5,

4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and 5 like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

The imagery of stones being used to build a spiritual house harkens back to 1 Kings 5:17-18. The stones to build the Temple were not simply picked up off the ground and used; instead, each stone was cut from the quarry and dressed. The dressed stone was then taken to the Temple to lay the foundation. To dress a stone means to sculpt it by chiseling and hammering to the desired shape. Each stone was dressed to fit in a particular way in the building. When Peter writes, “Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual household,” he means that there is preparation to be done. We come to Jesus a little rough around the edges, and the Holy Spirit begins to chip away and form us into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Then as Paul says in Ephesians, in Jesus Christ, we are joined together as a spiritual house of God’s dwelling.

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Pray

God, you are the potter and we are clay in your hands. Form us and shape us into the shape we need to be to fit in your Church. Help us to be built and to build your kingdom. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Go with God!