Who Is Our Planer?

I was in need of a 4 x4 for a project I was working on. I knew just the one that I wanted to use - the old weathered 24 inch piece of a rough cut 4 x 4 that has been outside in the weather for a couple of years. I figured it was an old cedar or maybe a yellow pine that has been around for a few decades. I decided I would take it down to my shop and plane down the four sides and just see what it was. As I examined the piece to see if there were any nails or any other embedded objects I needed to remove, I noticed that the kerf from the saw blade was quite deep. This wasn’t cut on any of the newer bandsaw sawmills, but from the older circular blade sawmills. After examining the piece, I raised the planer to the appropriate level and started planing down one side. The first pass was a real shallow pass and didn’t do a whole lot. It looked to me that the wood was pretty weathered and dark. I flipped it 90 degrees to do the other side and got the same result. I lowered the planer a bit and let it go through again. As it came out the other side I thought to myself, this is either really weathered or it is a different kind of wood than I thought it was. As I looked over the planed side I realized by the grain pattern and the purplish brown color that it was a piece of walnut. In my opinion, walnut is the prettiest wood that is grown in the US. Nothing can beat a good piece of burly walnut. I continued to plane down this piece of walnut until it was perfectly smooth and square. I looked at it and thought, this is a beautiful piece of wood, it would be a shame to use it for the project I had going. So, I didn’t. Instead I used an old block of rough douglas fir. When that was planed down, it looked a lot more useful in the situation that I needed it for.
I still have that piece of walnut I planed down over a couple months ago, sitting there waiting to be used to its fullest potential. As I look at it, I think, are we as Christians sometimes like a chunk of wood? To others we may look rough, gouged, cut, and even stricken with holes, but God doesn’t see us that way. To Him we are beautiful, useful, and perfect. It wasn’t a planer that made us that way. Ironically it was a couple pieces of wood and three nails that led us to become that way. God sent His only Son to die on a cross - two rough primitive pieces of wood fastened together to become the most horrendous execution device ever known to man. As Jesus died, He brought with Him all the sins of the world, past, present, and future upon Him. He cleansed us from those sins as He was resurrected on the third day. Now when God looks at us, He doesn’t see an old weathered piece of wood mistaken to be something it isn’t, but he sees a beautiful, purposeful, perfect piece of wood.
Do you ever feel like a block of wood? A little sanding and shaping and you can be formed into something magnificent. But at the same time, we can fall and get dinged up and have to go through the same sanding and shaping process as before. Sometimes I feel like a chunk of wood that has been worked on so much that I can’t even remember how big the tree was I came from. But I do know one thing, the craftsman that is working on me is the best there is. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can be turned into something beautiful and will be used in many ways.