PLIABILITY
JEREMIAH 18:1-6
Pliability is the quality of being supple enough to bend freely or repeatedly without breaking; it is the capacity to yield to others. God wants to create a masterpiece of His workmanship in your life as He seeks to bring you into conformity with the image of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Just as a potter works with a lump of clay, so Christ works in your life fashioning it into His chosen vessel. In order for a potter to successfully complete his project he must have clay that is pliable. The clay cannot be too dry or too wet in order to have the right pliability. It must be free of impurities or objects, which would keep it from being flexible in the hands of the potter. Likewise, as believers, for Christ to accomplish His work in you, you must be pliable. When you lose your pliability you hinder what God wants to accomplish in your lives, just as the clay was marred in the potter’s hand resistant to the master touches that were being applied to it. The word marred means corrupted, spoiled, injured, and ruined. When there is resistance to what the Master desires to accomplish in you and you become rigid to His touch you become marred. What causes one to become inflexible and resistant to God’s working? I believe that we become rigid and lack pliability when we…
I. Hold on to Pride
A. James 4:6 "But he gives more grace. Wherefore he saith, God RESISTS the proud, but gives grace unto the humble."
B. Proverbs 30:12-13 "There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness. [13] There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! And their eyelids are lifted up."
C. Before God can change us we must realize we need changed. The feeling that “I’m O.K. the way I am is nothing more than pride.
D. Romans 9:19-20 "Thou wilt say then unto me, Why does he yet find fault? For who has resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art you that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast You made me thus?"
E. Habakkuk 2:4 "Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith."
F. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
II. Hold on to Possessions
A. Luke 12:15 "And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things, which he possesses."
B. “If there were no mixture in your soul, the soul would instantly rush toward the all-powerful, irresistible God within to be lost in Him. But if you are loaded down with many material possessions-or ANYTHING ELSE-this attraction is greatly hindered. Many Christians seize some part of this world or some part of the self with so tight a grip that they spend their whole lives making only a snail’s progress toward their Center.” - Madame Jeanne Marie de La Mothe Guyon (1648-1717)
C. Matthew 6:19-20 "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust does corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: [20] But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust does corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:"
D. Matthew 6:24 "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."
E. Matthew 6:33 "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."
F. I once heard of a child who was raising a frightful cry because he had shoved his hand into the opening of a very expensive Chinese vase and then couldn’t pull it out again. Parents and neighbors tugged with might and main on the child’s arm, with the poor creature howling out loud all the while. Finally there was nothing left to do but to break the beautiful, expensive vase. And then as the mournful heap of shards lay there, it became clear why the child had been so hopelessly stuck. His little fist grasped a paltry penny which he had spied in the bottom of the vase and which he, in his childish ignorance, would not let go. – [Helmut Thielicke in How to Believe Again. Leadership, Vol. 6, no. 2.]
G. 1 Timothy 6:17 "Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy;"
III. Hold on to our Pleasures
A. Matthew 16:26 "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
B. Luke 8:14 "And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring NO FRUIT TO PERFECTION."
C. James 4:4 "Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity (a point of conflict, resistance and friction) with God? Who so ever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."
D. There are very few who in their hearts do not believe in God, but what they will not do is give Him exclusive right of way. They are not ready to promise full allegiance to God alone. Many a professing Christian is a stumbling block because his worship is divided. On Sunday he worships God; on weekdays God has little or no place in his thoughts. – [Dwight L. Moody in Weighed and Wanting. Christianity Today, Vol. 41, no. 11.]
E. 1 Peter 2:11 "Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;"
F. Gordon MacDonald (1939-) wrote, “Are we driven people, propelled by the winds of our times, pressed to conform or compete? Or are we called people, the recipients of the gracious beckoning of Christ when he promises to make us into something?”
G. 1 John 2:15-17 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust thereof: but he that does the will of God abides forever."
IV. Hold on to our Past
A. Some are just afraid of change. They are comfortable with the status quo and don’t want to rock the boat. They are steeped in tradition and habit.
B. Mark Twain said, “The only person who likes change is a wet baby.”
C. Colossians 2:8 "Beware lest any man SPOIL you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ."
D. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering we are where and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.
E. 2 Corinthians 5:17 "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
F. Listen to these examples of inventions and ideas that some people said "couldn’t be done" so they resisted the new.
1. The first successful cast-iron plow, invented in the United States in 1797, was rejected by New Jersey farmers under the theory that cast iron poisoned the land and stimulated the growth of weeds.
2. An eloquent authority in the United States declared that the introduction of the railroad would require the building of many insane asylums, since people would be driven mad with terror at the sight of locomotives rushing across the country.
3. In Germany “experts” proved that if trains went at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour, blood would spurt from the travelers’ noses and passengers would suffocate when going through tunnels.
4. Commodore Vanderbilt dismissed Westinghouse and his new air brakes for trains, stating, "I have no time to waste on fools."
5. Those who loaned Robert Fulton money for his steamboat project stipulated that their names be withheld for fear of ridicule were it known they supported anything so "foolhardy."
6. In 1881, when the New York YWCA announced typing lessons for women, vigorous protests were made on the grounds that the female constitution would break down under the strain.
7. Joshua Coppersmith was arrested in Boston for trying to sell stock in the telephone. "All well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over a wire."
8. The editor of the Springfield Republican refused an invitation to ride in an early automobile, claiming that it was incompatible with the dignity of his position. – [James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988), p. 407].
G. Psalms 33:3 "Sing unto him a new song; play skillfully with a loud noise."
H. Hebrews 4:12 "For the word of God is quick (living), and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."
I. Isaiah 42:9-10 "Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them. Sing unto the LORD a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof."
Invitation - "Have Thine Own Way"
