The first time I heard the poem below was in 1989. It was the only time I heard it. But I have never forgotten the moment or the man who quoted it. When I went searching for it again, I found it quoted by Ray Ortlund on a Gospel Coalition post from May 10, 2019.
But let me go back to that day in 1989. Thirty six years have passed since that day in a chapel at seminary. But the echo of that day, that moment when it was quoted by a young seminarian, continue to reverberate in my spirit.
Read for yourself and then I have a prayer request that is urgent in the extreme.
Stay on the Anvil
When God wants to drill a man
And thrill a man
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest partWhen He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him
And with mighty blows converts him
Into shapes and forms of clay
Which only God can understand.How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes
How He uses whom He chooses
And with mighty power infuses him
With every act induces him
To try His splendor out —
God knows what He’s about.Author unknown.
The temptation when a man is on the anvil of God’s forging is to try to get off. That was Jesus’ temptation in the garden when He prayed for the cup of God’s wrath to be lifted from Him (Matthew 26:39). That is every servant of God’s temptation when God is shaping him into a vessel useful to His Kingdom (cf. Paul in Acts 9:15-17 and James 1:2-4).
I have two friends, pastors both of them, who are on God’s anvil right now. They are going through harrowing pain and suffering. They are being shaped for greater usefulness, and greater reward, and greater glory for them and for the Saviour.
But it is neither comfortable or easy.
Pray that the words of the apostle Paul to all of us from Romans 12 would resound in their hearts and that they would be strengthened with all power by the Spirit of God (Ephesians 3:16) in their time on the anvil.
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:1-3
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