Sermon Cloud

Life at the Crossroads: In the Potters Hands
    Jeremiah 18:1-10
    FCOCLH 9/27/09
    This is probably one of the most familiar passages from the vast book of Jeremiah.  Everyone loves a good anecdote, and this is a pretty good one.  God tells Jeremiah to visit the potter’s workshop.  God didn’t give Jeremiah a message to deliver to the potter; instead, the potter and his actions would be the message. Jeremiah would witness it and deliver it to the people of Judah.  Nothing special really happened at the potter’s workshop that day.  The potter probably did the same thing hundreds of times over the course of a month.  He took a lump of clay, imagined a vessel that he could make from this lump of clay and put it on his wheel.  As he turned the wheel and the clay rotated between the palms of his hands, he learned that he clay was not sufficient to be formed in the way that he desired to form it.  The clay fell under its own weight.  The potter took the fallen vessel, the clay still soft, and reformed it into a ball, put it back on his wheel and proceeded to form it in a new way.  The implication is that the potter had to accommodate the clay to some  degree because the clay was not worthy of the original design of the potter.  
    God drives the point home to Jeremiah: “Am I not as sovereign over my people as this potter is over the clay?  I have desires for my creation.  For some I desire to destroy them, for others I desire to exalt them.  If at any point before my desires are accomplished the people set for destruction repent of their evil ways, or the people set for exaltation turn away from me, then I will change my plans for them.  I will exalt the repentant, but I will destroy the rebellious.
    This is a great, easy to understand reality parable.  The point is pretty evident.  God rewards faithfulness, but he punishes disobedience.  God is using this event to reveal a set of seemingly contradictory characteristics that make God who he is.  God is completely sovereign.  He will always accomplish that which he desires to accomplish; yet we as individuals can foil God’s plan on some level.  That is where the tension of the story is.  What can we do to foil God’s good designs for us and what can we do to cause God to look upon us with favor?  Let’s see what lessons we can learn from the potter and his clay.
    It’s pretty obvious that clay cannot devise a design for itself; nor can it form itself.  Neither can we.  Neither the clay nor we have control over our form or our purpose.  We are dependent on the potter for that.  It seems pretty obvious.  The clay cannot dictate to the potter what his design will be.  Paul writes these words:  But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'" Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? (Romans 9:20-21) Yet we who are clay will try to take over the function of the potter.  We become proud and we do what seems right to us instead of listening to the obvious word of God.  Isaiah was dealing with this a generation before Jeremiah.  When confronting the idolatry of his day he said:  You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?  (Isaiah 29:16) The verse before that he speaks of those who think that they are hiding from God the things that they are doing wrong.  Can the clay keep secrets from the potter?  Does the clay know himself better than the potter?  Let’s consider some ways we might do this today.
•    We form our own standards of what is right and wrong.  It doesn’t matter if those standards go directly against the will of God or not.  In some way we have decided that we know better than the will of God.
•    Along the same lines we decide that the ultimate good is what feels good to us.
{There are} those who are pure in their own eyes and yet are not cleansed of their filth;  Proverbs 30:12 NIV. We cannot keep secrets from God we cannot pretend to be something before God.  He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight.  (Luke 16:15) Clay has an odd tendency to try to make a better world for itself without its potter.  As silly as that may sound, it is pretty typical.  We’re no better than clay in that matter.
    There is a way that we are superior to clay.  Clay is powerless even to prepare itself for the potter.  We are able, even obligated to make ourselves ready for the potter’s hand.  It is our responsibility to be soft in the hand of the potter.  Isaiah discerned that the problem the potter was having with the clay was not the responsibility of the potter.  It wasn’t that he wasn’t skilled or willing to form a beautiful vessel from the clay.  The problem was that clay was marred.  Perhaps there was a pebble hidden within the clay that weakened the it, or perhaps it simply wasn’t of sufficient quality for such a noble task.  Here is where we can help ourselves.  It is up to us to remain malleable in the hands of the potter.  It is up to us to discern what the pebble is and remove it, or at least let the potter know of its presence so he can remove it himself.  What do we do?  There is a lot we can do to prepare ourselves for the touch of the potter.  I want to focus on two that I think are the most important.  The first is we must grow in our love for God.
    The apostle Paul understood this.  He often prayed for people that their love for God would increase.    He knew it was key to their living a fruitful Christian life.  
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ--to the glory and praise of God.  Philippians 1:9-11  Love will lead you to increase in knowledge of God’s will.  The more you love someone , the more you want to know about them and the more intimate a knowledge of them you want to create.  That knowledge isn’t for no reason.  The reason we get to know the ones that we love is so that we can please them.  A young man in love will want to know what his girl’s favorite color is, what is her favorite restaurant and what she likes to order there.  He will want to know what flowers she likes and if she likes do ride in the car with the a/c on or the windows open.  Now he is not just taking a survey.  He genuinely wants to please his girl.  He will do these things to win her heart.  That is what a genuine love will do.  In the case of our love for God we will want to know him through his word and put into action that knowledge, not so that we can win his heart.  He already has proven his love for us, but so that we can return that love by bearing the fruit – glorifying him and drawing others to him.
the desire to accomplish it and the fruit of it.  It is of primary importance that we grow in our love if we are going to be molded by our potter.
    Secondarily, we must confess our sins.  He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy. Proverbs 28:13 NIV   I believe it is through confession that God does his most effective shaping of our hearts.  Confession is like the clay pointing out to the potter the stone that might mar the vessel.   The potter will remove it and continue working with the clay.  Confession s really all we can do with sin.  We cannot change sin.  We cannot stop sin on our own and we cannot earn forgiveness for our sin on our own.  When we confess our sin God can remove it from our lives and he will shape us as he desires us to be.
CONCLUSION