N. T. Wright describes partnering between believers and God through describing a stonemason working on part of a great cathedral. This particular worker is not building a cathedral; they are enacting the plans of someone else, and they are focused on their small part to play. They aren’t building their own miniature cathedral, or throwing out the designer’s plans in favor of their own; they are contributing in some small way to a project much greater than themselves. “They are not, themselves, building the cathedral, but they are building for the cathedral, and when the cathedral is complete their work will be enhanced, ennobled, will mean much more than it could have meant as they were chiseling it and shaping it down in the stonemasons’ yard” (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008], 210).
Source: N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008], 210
