Living Building Materials

Men like to make things out of materials that are uniform and straight and fit together without much trouble. God likes to make things that are alive be built together into something that seems misshapen and asymmetrical and poorly attached to each other from our carnal perspectives.

Peter wrote: “Coming to Him, a living stone—rejected by men but chosen and valuable to God— you yourselves, as living stones, are being built into a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
(1 Peter 2:4-6 Holman Christian Standard Bible®©)

Paul wrote to the congregations in Ephesus something that I infer to mean that the mortar that holds living stones together as they are built up is love and peace: “I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, accepting one another in love, diligently keeping the unity of the Spirit with the peace that binds us.”
(Ephesians 4:1-3 Holman Christian Standard Bible®©)

What Paul wrote to the Corinthians in what we call 1 Corinthians 13 was introduced in the last verse of what we call chapter 12 as “a more excellent way” to attain the unity he had been writing about beginning in chapter 11.

Love the rest of the difficult stones into their destinies. It will be temporarily costly and eternally valuable.