The Story of the Pearl

MUSIC BLOG

MAY 16, 2024

The Story of the Pearl

It is a well-known fact that oysters have no legs.  They have no arms.  They have no head or belly button.  What they do have is a shell.  Oysters must breathe, but not like you and I.  To get life-sustaining oxygen into the shell, they open and shut the shell, forcing water in and out of the shell.  Oysters live for most of their lives on the seabed.  Over a day, week, or month, I imagine that there are times when the outside water has been stirred up. Because they don’t have arms or legs, they are left to endure whatever sea creature happens by and stirs up the water.  We might think of it like being in a burning house with no escape.  The smoke might stifle us, and so the oyster sucks in the sandy water and tries its best to expel it, sand, and all.  However, we know that not all the sand is expelled.  Occasionally a grain of sand remains, or in the case of cultured pearls, an article is introduced into the shell. Here’s where it gets good.  The sand remains and it irritates the oyster.  So, the oyster produces a covering to smooth out the roughness of the sand.  Every day it puts on another layer.  Over time the piece grows.  If the oyster is harvested and opened it becomes clear that the piece of trash, the irritant, has been transformed into something wonderful and rare.  That piece of trash has become a pearl.

God has given each of us a day to use for His glory.  Yet things will happen during our usual tasks of this day.  An angry thought might pop into our head, a lustful desire, or a bitter feeling.  God has not done this.  But rather the devil has put this into our path.  It is our piece of sand, our irritant.  Now we have a choice. Do we allow that irritant to ruin our day, destroy our witness, and grieve the Holy Spirit, or ask our loving Heavenly Father for the help we need to persevere through the trial?  When we rely on the Holy Spirit to give us the help and strength, He has promised our lives begin to take on a luster like the sheen of a pearl.  Over time that luster becomes more pronounced and more beautiful.  Paul put it like this in Philippians 3:

¹² Not that I have already grasped it all or have already become perfect, but I press on if I may also take hold of that for which I was even taken hold of by Christ Jesus. ¹³ Brothers and sisters, I do not regard myself as having taken hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 

Paul learned the secret of not giving in to the trial but persevering through the trial. I have looked through scripture and I have not found one Scripture that tells us to give up and quit when it gets too hard.  There, however, are multiple admonitions in scripture to stay the course, share in the sufferings of Christ, have faith, and the list continues.  I recently read in a study that Holy Scripture is not encouraging or demanding us to grit our teeth and bear it, or to “press on” because of a guilt complex.  Our usual method might look like becoming obsessed with our frantic actions and then distressed and guilty in our ultimate failure as we try to accomplish God’s work in our strength.  We should press on, we should persevere but not without grace, or mercy, or forgiveness. Not in a spirit of striving, desperately driving ourselves, even punishing ourselves at a pace we can never maintain (Vicki Heath: First Place “Grace for the Race” p. 61) God is not the eternal taskmaster.  God is LOVE.  He loves you, He loves me. He works tenderly in us and through us to accomplish His goals; Christlikeness in every part of our lives.

Today could be a pit, a stone, an irritant or it could be a pearl.  If we determine to make this day a pearl and we begin to string those pearls together, just imagine the beautiful strands of pearls we will be able to shower Jesus with when we see Him face to face. 

Blessings,

Marty