…Romans chapter 9 20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” 21Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use? 22What if God, intending to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the vessels of His wrath, prepared for destruction?…
Ever said- “if only”- have you ever said that if only I was born into a different family – things would have been different have you ever thought if I could just go back one year or ten and have another go at that year or decade – If only.
The circumstances of our life can be quite limiting and you do meet people brutalised by history and spat out to cope in a strange and mystifying world.
What about this young man?
He was born into poverty. His race was ostracised and his home town ridiculed. He was not good looking and people questioned his friendships. His Father died when he was young. In his later years he travelled the streets and cities homeless. He was misunderstood in his ministry and abandoned in death. He did all of this for you and me. He did it to identify with us in our weakness. But he also did it as a sacrificial act of suffering in our place, in order that we might be made whole.
These are Floyd McClung’s words in the father heart of God.
The only time you ever found Jesus saying “If only” that I know of is when he said if Only you recognised the son of God when he came.
It brings you to the point of accepting your pat and squaring up to your future –
That is what God wants you to do and somehow New years eve does that to everyone as well.
For Christians, it si incredibly important to make fresh beginnings to push the refresh button often and this January which starts tomorrow is a wonderful opportunity.
I chose as a reading for today Jeremiah chapter 18 – The Potter and the clay – although applied here to Israel there are, nonetheless important principles that we can learn from and apply to our lives in making a fresh start.
If you are making a fresh start it is really important to understand where you are starting from.
I think that is what is happening when Jeremiah is going down to the Potters house. Jeremiah 18English Standard Version (ESV)
The Potter and the Clay
18 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: 2 “Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear[a] my words.”3 So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. 4 And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.
There is an important spiritual principle in these words.
: 2 “Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear[a] my words.”3
Arise and go down to the potters house, and I will let you hear my words.
Arise Get up from your existing position – Move out from where you are!
Then don’t go up into a place of worldliness, arrogance and despair but go down to the potters house it is in going down that you hear the word of God but too many today want to go up and they end up going down but those who go down and humble themselves under the word of God go up into the purposes of God their lives.
There was a vessel of clay on the Potters wheel but it was spoiled – In many ways we are like that clay shaped into a vessel but with faults and the first thing God is trying to show us is how we can be great vessels of his but we won’t be reshaped if we think we are already perfect. We might think one thing or another is the problem but really the problem might lie somewhere else and we need to humble ourselves before God to find the truth. Jesus once said you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. So often we are daling with lies disguised as truths.
From Reader’s Digest: A friend of mine awoke one morning to find a puddle of water in the middle of his king-size waterbed. In order to fix the puncture, he rolled the heavy mattress outdoors and filled it with more water so he could locate the leak more easily. The enormous bag of water was impossible to control and began rolling on the hilly terrain. He tried to hold it back, but it headed downhill and landed in a clump of bushes that poked it full of holes. Disgusted, my friend threw out the waterbed frame and moved a standard bed into his room. The next morning, he awoke to find a puddle of water in the middle of the new bed. The upstairs bathroom had a leaky drain. Life is that way sometimes isn’t it? In Jeremiah’s time the people of God found themselves in a bad situation.
I think if we want to make a fresh start with God then we need a clear understanding of how our lives look to him. What we think we are dealing with may not be the truth at all. The reality may be other than where we are looking.
There are two clear mistakes we can make if we are doing this.
One is we can be blind to the real issues in our lives
And two we can be too self effacing. We can put ourselves down when God views us quite differently.
I Chronicles 7:14, "if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land."
Seeking God’s truth is so important
I think what God is looking for is for us to understand his truth about our own lives. Jonah runs away from God about 100 years before Jeremiah he basically is saying to God I am not that kind of Pot. You want me to speak for you in a particular way but I won’t because Ninevah is not worthy of my attention. Jonah wants to be a different vessel to what God has called him to be.
100 years later Jeremiah comes to the potters house and he gets it. The clay needs to yield to the Potters hands. Yielding is so important as it says in romans9 - 20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” 21Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use?
The firstpoint is Discovering our true situation before God -What are the lumps in your clay?
2nd point The key really is preparing for change and to yield to his shaping hands.
To put that positively Change is necessary and change is possible.
God initiates change – it is our task to yield to the forces shaping us
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion is Everything continues in a state of rest unless it is compelled to change by forces impressed upon it.
This from a sermon I read.
With a sobering play on words in verse 11,
God warns that (at this moment in history)
he is molding (or shaping or crafting) disaster—
even for his own special, chosen, elected people—
if they do not stop their rebellion.
So the message is
“Repent! Turn! Change! The clay has sway!”
THE CLAY POTTER (v12)
And yet, it is not to be! For all the freedom the clay may have,
it throws up its hands and says, “no’ash!”
Few translations capture the force of this little Hebrew idiom. It’s the same expression used back in chapter two when Yahweh begs his people:
(2.25) “Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry”
But the people reply:
“[No’ash!] ’It’s no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them.’”
No’ash in this uage declares that the people are powerless to change into being how God wants them to be. That in itself, is a lie – they are not powerless – but they are strongly in the gravity pull of sin.
You are not powerless against the forces that would encourage you to live in a pattern of sin. Quite the contrary there are more forces of good bearing on you to put into motion powerful forces of Good.
“Repent! Turn! Change! The clay has sway!” This means you have the choice you will change. The question is will you change for good?
Sin would persuade us that we are powerless and that we are condemned to a life of sin and separation from God. The scriptures would persuade us - Romans 6:23New International Version (NIV)
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[a]Christ Jesus our Lord.
Turning from sin and old habits and patterns sets you free to yield to the shaping hands of God. Isn’t that what the Prodigal son is about?
When he goes down to his Fathers house really he goes up into the place of his Fathers blessing.
Have you ever watched clay in a potters hands the beauty of clay being turned this way and that under the skilful hands of the potter. This is how God wants us to yield to him.
It is only when we fully yield to god that God can make us into a beautiful vessel. You may not feel important or valuable but you know the difference of value between a $1 bucket from the warehouse. and a 1000 vase is of little importance if both are full of Gold.
A thief in Manhatten stole a bucket of gold and everyone wanted what the bucket contained because the gold in the bucket contained 1.6 million dollars worth of gold.
No one was that concerned about the bucket everyone was concerned about what it contained. You contain something much more valuable than gold when you carry God , his word and living water around in your life.
It is not your function that is important God’s primary purpose is to bring you to himself his primary desire is a personal relationship with us.
His hands personally touching and shaping us.
To change metaphors John 10 My sheep those who hear my voice and follow me.
Now if we go to our two principles – To go down to throw yourself on the potters wheel –
Job 42 I know that you can do everything and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted the devil may rage and roar the world may oppose but God’s purposes will be fulfilled.
God will work out his purposes but the question is will you allow yourself to be an agency of working out his will?
Third point – Grasp God’s vision as to what kind of vessel he is shaping you into
you yield to God’s hands – His vision as to what he wants you to become will gradually be rvealed.
I saw an advertisement _ "How to reverse vision loss."
I think one of the things about potters is, as you watch what the potter is doing ,you begin to see what the Potter is creating. As you understand what God is making you into then yield to tha,t and be that, and you will be a useful vessel for God.
I saw a picture of a beautiful vase but seemingly it contained the poison Arsenic it was beautiful and yet it was deadly – it’s magnificent exterior didn’t change the fact that it carried terrible contents. We only need to think of some of the villans of the last century to realise the truth of that – peolle like Hitler – Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin and millions of others have been pots used for less than noble purposes
Then I found a picture of this Pot.(dead sea scroll pot)
Pottery, first century B.C.E. - first century C.E.
Some of the scrolls found by Bedouin shepherds in 1947 were discovered in cylindrical pottery jars of this type, which are unknown elsewhere. Many authorities consider the discovery of these unique vessels in the Qumran escavations as well as in the caves, as convincing evidence of the link between the settlemetn and the caves. These jars, like the other pottery vessels recovered at Qumran, were probably manufactured locally.
Ordinary Pots buried out of sight for centuries but containing the word of God which caused the world to marvel at the accuracy of God’s word in an age of doubt.
History is full of people like that as well.
One such person was Robert Raikes whoinspired the birth of Sunday Schools in 1811.
Raikes was concerned about the effect that the Industrial Revolution had upon children, especially boys. He saw that because of a six-out-of-seven day workweek, they had no means of moral, religious or educational development. Many adult factory workers were illiterate. Furthermore, either exhaustion or social circumstances prevented them from attending church. In the worst cases, fathers had ended up in jail or the workhouse, as they were too impoverished to pay their debts. Raikes visited these institutions regularly and was appalled at the conditions, including the lack of food.
Raikes was so unsettled by the social conditions in Gloucester’s slums that he asked the Revd Thomas Stock of Ashbury, Berkshire, for advice. Surely, a day-long school session held on Sundays and using the Bible as the textbook would teach the boys how to read and introduce them to Christianity.
So, in 1780, a Gloucester woman, Mrs Meredith, opened her home to start the first Sunday School. Raikes publicised the new venture in the Gloucester Journaland it quickly caught the attention of Englishmen nationwide. In a recent biography of Raikes, the Telegraph recounted the story (emphases mine below):
In beginning Sunday schools, he worked with a local clergyman, at first paying four women to teach children in their houses. In 1780 he started a Sunday school in his own parish of St Mary de Crypt, hearing the children’s reading and awarding prizes.
Writing about the success of his venture in his own paper, Raikes attracted the attention of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The idea spread. “I find these schools springing up everywhere I go,” John Wesley noted in 1784. By 1786, 200,000 children were said to be involved.
Different Pots with very different results.
God is waiting to use you to carry his word and his love to a broken world.
