Tuesday October 11, 2011

Pottery has always been a hit or miss with me. There is some pottery that I have seen and I would never pay any money for the pottery that is being sold. There is other pottery that is interesting to me and I have shelled out the money to buy a coffee mug, or a set of dishes. I remember my favorite pottery coffee mug that I had for years that I drank my daily coffee from. I would wash it daily so that the next day I could use it. In college the washing of the cup was less than sanitary at times. Eventually it was cracked and had to be thrown away.

I have always been fascinated with passages in the bible that relate to the potter and the clay. They always have symbolized God being the potter and the clay being us. Jeremiah wrote about the potter and the clay when he said, “So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. (Jeremiah 18:3-10 NIV).

Sometimes we think we are in control of our destiny and our life, but God is the potter and we are the clay. He can at any time choose to take us when he sees us marred and seek to reshape us. In this passage, we as clay need to be willing to be reshaped and not fight against the remolding process. We have a choice in whether we choose to be remolded into His image and His purpose, but He has ultimate say in our destiny if we choose to rebel and not repent of our destructive ways.

On this journey, it is most helpful to choose to be moldable clay for the master to use in the way He wants to use us.