…grace and truth came to be through Jesus Christ. ~ John 1:17b NASB
Which Came First? The Hammer or the Nails?
While watching a law enforcement/detective-type television series, an arresting statement in the ‘spirit of truth’ was made to the key character (from someone who loved them and showed them grace week after week) –
“Well, when you walk around with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.”
Since what goes around, comes around, and goes around again – persistently, since people inhabited the earth – such a telling statement begs the question for those in Christ’s body who truly desire to make a godly difference:
Which came first, dearly loved one? The hammer in your hand or the nails designed to pierce, causing pain?
We’ll come back to that in a bit. We flesh it out in our natural world, but there is always a spiritual truth in grace.
What Comes Naturally Still Needs Training
My husband and I have three adult children with families of their own. When they were toddlers and youngsters, we noticed what they were instinctively drawn to and most captivated their attention. In each one, what was present then became, as adults, a draw to the vocations in which they have been employed. They would be the first to say, as my spouse and I testify for ourselves too, what comes naturally still needs training.
An example with actual hammer and nails is the story our brother-in-law told us about one of his grandsons. When he was a young boy, grandpa was running construction. Laughing, our b-i-l shared that ‘nothing keeps a little boy busy like handing him a small hammer and showing him how to hit the nails into the wood’. He would pound to his heart’s content; without a clue such repetition was building skill and what would become his vocation. He now has his own family and other interests too but is an exquisite finish craftsman in high demand.
Proving Ground
Then there is my husband’s story in our first few years of marriage, long before he became a counselor. Not only does what comes naturally still need training, the time comes when administered tests are the proving ground.
After teen jobs and a too-brief desired stay at a Bible school, he returned home and enrolled in welding courses. For two years of night class after his day job, he practiced and practiced his welding beads. While we were still engaged, he was hired in at the aluminum smelter that would employ him our first 28 years of marriage. His goal was to win a bid onto the welding crew. He would work a year unrelated to his trade training.
Eventually, the coveted bid came up, for not just one but six openings. To prepare for the series of welding tests to prove that he possessed the qualifying skillset, he signed up for a refresher welding course.
The test consisted of welding three pieces of steel together in the flat, vertical, and overhead positions. When cooled, the steel would ‘stretch’ – with one of two outcomes. Two ‘coupons’ to be tested were cut from each of the three positional weldments. One coupon was for a root test. The other was for a crown test.
Imagine a piece of paper folded and creased, with the ‘stretch’ now the position of what was once flat. Crease stretch down was the crown test, taking less pressure to test it by curving it in the roller-press into a full ‘U’ shape. The root test was administered on the stretch up (like our creased paper). The root test not only had to apply pressure to first flatten the up stretch but continue further, pressing it down into the full ‘U’ shape. Both were proof tests, with undeniable results concerning the steel’s integrity and weld. In either the crown or the root test, when the metal test piece was pressed to its lowest point and held, it produced a pop. Or, it snapped.
Some years and many tests before my young husband took his, no one had passed it, i.e. their test plates broke. Because weldors were needed, the company lowered the standard and advanced ones who had failed the test. This had occurred enough times that by the time my husband came along, the steward of the weldors – himself a weldor who administered the tests – said he ‘suspected the test could not be passed.’ The metal, also suspect.
My husband passed his tests with flying colors; right behind him was another who had just finished his initial welding courses during his refresher course. By diligent training and practice, Wayne broke up the company’s fallow proving ground. Others followed and the ‘un-passable test’ was no longer a legitimate argument. The next 25 years paved a long, hard, hot, miserable road in preparation for walking through hell alongside others.
Log and Speck, Inc.
“A pupil is not above his teacher;
but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher.”
“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye,
but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” – Luke 6:40-41
There’s a holier use for a hammer in one’s hand than smacking everything that looks like a nail in one’s sight.
It’s taken a long, healing, refining time, but I can say in Christ that neither He nor I care how religious you think your hammer is. Nails are designed to pierce – and that they did, through the hands and feet of Jesus into the wood of His cross for all of humankind. He endured the pain of our hammered nails, stripped Satan of his power.
In the Spirit of Truth and Grace, the days of getting a free pass with a propensity to slander are narrowing. If we simply do not think it matters how we speak or think, in public or secret, it’s not others with Whom we’ll reckon.
The same God toward Whom you hold anger or distrust is the only righteous, loving Judge who’ll heal the nail piercings in your heart and defuse the desire to swing hard that hammer you’re carrying in your hand. I know. If we say we love Him and hate our brother or sister in Christ, we do not love God. 1 It is a ‘pick your pain’ choice. Continue in your old pain with that heavy hammer and rusty nails or go through the pain with Jesus to freedom.
Name the Nails
Shortly after joining my husband in Shammahs Field/Ministries, I spent an intensive week with a counselor. The assigned homework he gave me made an impact, both in my cognitive reasoning and relationship with the Lord. Though the phrase came to me for this writing, he essentially had me ‘name the nails’ I felt from certain others’ words / actions; silence / inaction. Counseling’s A/B trauma: absence of good things / presence of bad things.
It was that Word document I assigned a password I’d remember. Pages long, I still can’t remember it to access it. The Lord’s Word is true: As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. 2
Because I care and know the power of Holy Spirit’s effective working in our human spirit, I invite you to sit yourself down with the Lord and something to write on to ‘name the nails’ in a slight variation of what I did.
First – name every personal nail you know Christ died for in your place, that helped nail Him to the cross. Emotional pain, sickness, curses, out of control anger, unfaithfulness, dark thoughts, hatred, retaliation, control and intimidation, victimization, … be specific.
Second – name every nail you can remember and are presently aware of that you have hammered into others or over situations of which you do not have full knowledge. The list, though different in areas, may read similar to the above, for most often the mouth speaking or thoughts shared reveal the battle waging in the heart, recognizable in others too. The pain we despise even while held bound to it with our own nails, is what we often won’t stop hammering on.
Just like Jesus’ command to some to drop the rocks, so too there is a time and place to put down the hammer and leave the nails in His cross. He moved on from there to the tomb to God’s resurrection power, so we can.
~ Gracefully Free
1 I John 4:20 2 Psalm 103:12
Photo Credit: Pexels-Pixabay-33783
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