[Darris McNeely] Over the last two weeks my wife and I have been travelling. We took some vacation time but prior to that we were asked to go out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for an Ambassador Bible Center Continuing Education weekend with the members out in Oklahoma, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Ken Graham and I teamed up to present about 10 hours of ABC material to the congregations out there and it was really enjoyable to visit with the members from all over Oklahoma.

They have a lot of stories. You always love to sit down and get acquainted with a new group of people wherever you travel, and hear their stories of life in the Church and life in general, which we did on that trip, and thoroughly enjoyed the two solid days that we spent with the members there.

We also had the chance to come back through Missouri and drop off for a day in my hometown, Cape Girardeau in Missouri, and spent a day visiting with friends and family, which I try to do at least once a year. And it is always instructive for me to go back to my hometown and to see family and people that I haven’t seen for either a year in most cases, or in some cases as I was this time, sitting in a restaurant with my family for lunch one day and looked across and I saw a High School classmate I haven’t seen in 43 years. And so I just recognized him instantly and didn’t have a chance to talk to him because of the conversation we were already in, but you just, in a small town street like that, you pass people that you had seen in your youth in my case, and I am not like a number of you that stayed around where you grew up. I left where I grew up at age 19 and have not lived there since and so at times when I go back after 4 or 5 decades I am seeing people and it is almost like, wow, what happened to us!

For me it is also instructive not only to see where I grew up and kind of reflect on things with family and friends but also just to listen as I said, which we did in Tulsa with Church members, and listen to their stories and all that they have been through and just to listen for hours at a time to people talk and to make observations like that. And in doing so, after two weeks of this, and then just a bit of vacation time ourselves and travelling around this area, some thoughts have kind of gelled in my mind that I would like to share with you here this morning because it kind of began to take shape a week ago when Dwayne Phelps gave the sermonette in the PM congregation and he referred to a scripture. He didn’t turn to it. He referred to a scripture that set me to thinking about a principle that God brings out in a particular passage of scripture and so I would like to give Dwayne credit for inspiring the sermon here this morning and I’ll take full credit, whether it works or not, but at least he inspired it.

What I brought in this morning is a piece of pottery from our very, very small pottery collection in the McNeely home. This is a piece that my wife picked up. I believe she told me she got this in Portugal on a Feast trip about three years ago, and it is a little clay dish, highly decorated and not unlike any other type of clay dish or a clay pot or piece of pottery that we all might have a form of in our homes.

Pottery is an interesting piece of art, isn’t it? There’s a fascinating story and as I researched this sermon I learnt things that I didn’t know and I thought I knew a few things about pottery but because it is something that we don’t use as much in our life and in our world today beyond a decorative use, there are things that we don’t learn. And in the Bible God talks a little bit about pottery that teaches us certain spiritual matters.

There was a time in life and in the world where pottery was an every day piece of functional item in people’s lives. There was a time also when it wasn’t there, way, way, way back, and people basically, what they carried, ate and kept, was in their hands. But somewhere along the line somebody learnt that you could make pottery and a vessel and in it you could put water and you could carry a day’s worth of water on your head or on your shoulder from the local water supply. Or you could store your grain in it and take it with you; or store a week or a season’s worth of grain in pottery or whatever else that you would need to put into it. I am sure that you are familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls that were found, I think in 1948, in a cave next to the Dead Sea in the desert of Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls were stored for nearly 2,000 years in pottery and preserved there.

So the invention of pottery and the use of pottery was a major advancement in civilization and as I said, a time where it was very, very useful in the world. When you study anything into the field of archeology you will learn very quickly that archeologists will date a civilization by the type of pottery that they find in a particular layer or an area where they are digging and they classify various ages and times by pottery. When they learnt to do that then they could make sense of what they were unearthing in Egypt, Mesopotamia, whatever part of the world. As people changed the way they made pots and clay jars that reflects a different culture, a different society and so it is measured and it is understood that way.

As I say, it was a time when people used it as an everyday part of life. We don’t do that today. This sits on our shelf. We rarely use it. It is beautiful, very beautiful, as much pottery is, but we don’t use it. We use Tupperware today and we use you know, in stead of carrying our bread, our grain, in a clay pot or whatever, we carry it in a paper bag from the grocery store or a plastic bag. Not very beautiful is it? In most cases plastic bags are not very beautiful. They are functional and they are useful but they are not beautiful.

That’s the thing about pottery. Good pottery is both beautiful and it is useful. I want you to remember those two terms, useful and beautiful, because it helps us to understand something about pottery, not only in the ancient world, but as God teaches us using the analogy and the example of pottery today in our world because God is in the process of making vessels that are both useful and beautiful; useful and beautiful.

From the very beginning in the book of Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7 where we read about God stooping into the dust of the ground and shaping man in His own image we begin to see how God, through His hands, shaped the first human being, Adam, out of whose rib - He took a rib and created a second - Eve. But the creation story begins with God scooping together some dust and no doubt some water with it and then beginning to fashion and mold it when He said in Genesis 1:26, “Let Us make man in our image”. And God formed man out of the dust of the ground or we could just as well say out of the clay of the ground, into a physical image. There is far more to that than just the physical, there is also the spiritual.

How is God still forming you and I today? Are we allowing Him, through His hands, to shape us in His image? Is His mind in each of us? That’s the question and that’s why God told one of His prophets, the prophet Jeremiah, one day, to go to the potter’s house. We will turn over to Jeremiah 18.

Jeremiah 18:1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying:

V.2 - “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause you to hear My words.”

V.3 - Then (Jeremiah says) I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was (the potter), making something at the wheel.

It is a potter’s wheel that goes round and round with a lump a clay on it and on which a potter begins to shape and mold that piece of clay into something decorative, something beautiful, as well as something useful.

He goes on to say:

V.4 - And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.

V.5 - Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

V.6 - “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the Lord. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel!

Here is a remarkable lesson from every day life that Jeremiah was told to go and to observe. You see, God had a problem at this point and His problem was the people of Judah and their sins, and their inability to live up to their calling and to the law and to the covenant that had been made. They were a people who bore His name. They were in a covenant relationship with Him to live and conduct themselves by His law and they weren’t doing a very good job at this time. Other prophets had gone before Jeremiah and Jeremiah was now in the process of speaking directly at the heart of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, the capital, reminding them that they were to become a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.

The problem was they were not doing what they were called to do. They were supposed to be a kingdom, in a sense like the Kingdom of God on earth, a type of the Kingdom of God, representing God, living by His ways and a model nation but they and their predecessors, Israel the nation, had not done that. Jeremiah was sounding an alarm. God’s problem was Jeremiah’s then, and the problem was this: How do you get their attention? That is the continual problem of all the prophets in the Bible. How do you get people to pay attention to the message from God and do something about their particular condition?

And so in this case God on one day said to Jeremiah, go down to the potter’s house and I’ll teach you something about life. There in the potter’s house you’ll learn a lesson and so he did and what was, even for Jeremiah - he lived every day with pottery. He drank water from a large pottery item no doubt; saw the grain being scooped out and made into bread; oil being poured from a clay vessel. It was an everyday part of his life and so he knew about it and probably there were more than one potter’s shed in Jerusalem at the time because everybody needed it and they needed multiple pots of clay. So it was no doubt one of the biggest businesses in the region to supply the needs that people had. That’s another reason why God sends him there and when Jeremiah went down there he then began to understand. He had an “ah hah” moment.

In our media department discussions about our messaging we kind of call that a Beyond Today moment. A BT moment. When someone begins to - the light comes on and they wake up and they realize, yeah! What I am doing now impacts my life beyond today and if I change my behavior then I can have a better life or I won’t be suffering as I am suffering today. If I change my life beyond today it will be better. We call that a Beyond Today moment; to try to define the message that we are imparting of the gospel of the Kingdom and the message of God to the world today. We want people to have a beyond today moment, to wake up, to realize, yeah, I can understand how life is. I can understand what my life is all about.

Well, Jeremiah had in the potter’s house a Beyond Today moment. Now Jeremiah was a type of person who could make the connections of the things that he saw in every day life. It is reasonable to assume Jeremiah was perhaps an artistic person where he could see something like a piece of work that was art, whether it was a drawing or a piece of pottery, and see not only how beautiful it was but understand what went on to make it and perhaps, even a little bit of into the mind of the person, the artist who created it and could see that it was something that was not only beautiful but also useful and had a function as a part of life, to enhance life, to make life better and therefore help people understand life. I think Jeremiah had that imaginative capacity about him. You see that in his writings and he could make the connections between the actions of the here and now and what that will mean down the road, ten years, twenty years or even forty or fifty years down the road. Actions, decisions that are made at one point in time in a person’s life can have such far-reaching consequences.

Those were some of the things that Jeremiah began to see that day in the potter’s shed. He was well suited to make that observation about something as common as an every day piece of pottery.

Jerusalem, in Jeremiah’s day, was the place you would go to learn certain practical things in life because a lot of people would have gone in and out of a potter’s shed, buying, selling, talking, drinking probably whatever they drank at that time. It wouldn’t have been coffee necessarily but it may be a cup of tea and they exchange the gossip of the day in the streets and in the city of Jerusalem.

There was a time in my life - I’ve mentioned growing up in my father’s gas station. The gas station of my youth was one of the places where people stopped in every day to talk and you learnt what was going on in the city. You learnt what was going on in people’s lives. It could have been a cafe. It could be today a McDonald’s or a Hardy’s or a place where a certain group of people will gather every day to have coffee, biscuits and gravy and exchange the gossip of the day.

The potter’s house was like that. That’s my point. That’s where people went to learn what was going on and in doing so you saw different types of people. Vendors, salesmen, men and women coming and going, a cross-section of life, the experiences of the day, and in such a place like the potter’s house a person with imagination or a trained eye could observe people and draw various conclusions about life. That’s where Jeremiah was when he went and looked at that potter working with a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel.

The lump of clay was the starting point, only the starting point of what would then eventually then be created and come into being. All lumps of clay on a potter’s wheel we can kind of associate with life. The wheel that goes round and round on which that lump of clay would sit is kind of like life. Sometimes people say, well, I need to go up a merry-go-round in life but it’s the place on which the work is being done. And the potter, the master potter, is shaping that.

God is shaping us. God begins to shape a person into something useful and into something beautiful. Let me give you three points about this process of the clay that we can begin to wrap our minds around.

The first one is the choosing of the clay.

A good potter is going to choose clay that is workable. Useful in a sense of what he wants to create in making a specific piece of pottery. There are many different types of clay. There are many different colors of clay depending upon the region from which they are taken. It doesn’t take much to study into it to find out that it is an entire process and a science in a sense. The types of clays that are available - from common clay that you might even find in your backyard.

I was told when I moved here into Clermont County that there is a type of soil here in Clermont County, called Clermont Clay, and when it rains I find out what it’s like. It never dries out but when it does it is as hard as something that’s like clay. I haven’t seen any type of soil quite like that. There are other types of clay from which one might then begin to choose something to make a piece of pottery and each type of clay will have its distinctive purposes.

But a potter, a master potter, is going to choose his clay properly and that is what God does with us. He chooses us.

1 Corinthians 1:26 Paul writes: For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.

V.2 - But God has chosen - God, has chosen.

That is an important point. No matter whether we were foolish, wise or whatever category we fell in. The important point to know is that God has chosen us, just like a master potter chooses the type of clay that he wants to work with into a particular fashion, and God has chosen us. He has chosen us to make into something that He desires.

In Romans 9 Paul makes a comment about this process of working the clay. Paul says:

Romans 9:20 But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?”

V.21 - Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?

The Maker chooses and then decides how it will be formed and fashioned and some vessels will be used for honor and some will be used for dishonor. The New Living Translation puts it this way:

V.21 - When a potter makes jars out of clay, doesn’t he have a right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for decoration and another to throw garbage into?

Very blunt. Very blunt. Some might be used for decoration. Maybe some will hold some very fragrant oil and then another just holds garbage. That is what pots were used for at one time. We put garbage in paper bags today and throw it out. There was a time, when perhaps if he had plenty of pottery, he put garbage into it.
 
Paul is making the point: God chooses. God decides and the point out of all of this is that God hasn’t chosen any of us at random. He knows what he has done when He chose you, when He chose me, as a lump of clay to begin to fashion and He knows what we are capable of being fashioned into and it is His work, with His hands upon us, that is being done and as Paul says, who are we to question what is being done in ourselves? Or might I add, in the hand of someone else? That is not our job to question how someone else is being formed for their use, for their purpose. Maybe they are being used. Maybe someone else is being shaped and fashioned for something more decorative while I am being fashioned for something more utilitarian, like garbage or something perhaps a little higher up the scale. That is a conclusion we really do need to ponder and think about and come too, because it is God who chooses.

There is something else about the clay that is chosen and that is, as a good potter knows, that clay ages and improves with age. With maturity of a clay there can be better products. One of my favorite lines from my favorite movie - it happens to be the best movie ever made, number one on my list - The Lonesome Dove. One of the characters says: The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

That is something about again, many things, isn’t it, but it also applies to clay. There is a quote that I’ve had in my files for some years by an individual that in my quick internet research showed as the kind of the Yoda of pottery, modern pottery makers, a man by the name of Bernard Leach. His classic work on pottery is called A Potter’s Book. I couldn’t find it for anything less than about $150. I wasn’t going to buy it and I couldn’t find a Kindle version of it so I couldn’t download it, and they said there was a copy in the UC Library, in Northern Kentucky U-Library, but I didn’t have time to go down there but I have a quote from it and doing enough reviews off of it to recognize that this man is indeed the Yoda of modern pottery makers.

But he had a quote about clay and he said: “Clay is improved by long storage. It gains in plasticity and its composition continues. It changes color and may even begin to stink with age. I’ve been told of old potters who speak of such matured or soured clay with a quiet impressiveness of epicures discussing vintage wine. The storage of plastic clay over long periods increases its plasticity by combining the process with decomposition whereby the pure clay content is increased. The older the clay, the more pure it is, and the better to be shaped and molded into something that is useful.”

He goes on to say: “It may even give off a bad smell but it’s the finer clay.”

There is something about aging, whether it is clay, wine, a musical instrument that provides experience. Aging comes by experience and frankly it may take many years of experience before we would even get to the point where we can be finally shaped and molded by God. I want you to think about that.

If the best clay, before a hand is even laid upon it to begin to shape it into whatever use, may have to sit there for a long period of years before it is ready through the aging process to be used, what should we need to learn from that, in terms of our years of experience?

I wasn’t trying to be coy in commenting about our maturity and our experience here in this congregation, really as well as any congregation of God’s people, because after 40 - my wife and I are celebrating 40 years of marriage this month. Clay and Stephanie Thornton are as well. Some of you have been married a lot longer than that, I realize, but 40 years of marriage is kind of a milestone. It is the same number of years I have been in the ministry and I’ve been in the Church longer as that, as a kid as well as have all of us here in many ways, many of us. There is something that after a period of time, I think, any person who has been through a lot of experience, you get to a point, whether the experience is marriage, time in the church, or just life experience, you get to a point where you take a step back and you are able to survey the past and where you are today and better prepare for things in the future from that perspective than you could have done at any time previous to that.

I am amazed at how little I know today. There was a time I thought I knew an awful lot and I am amazed how little I do know about certain things and feel like I am just now getting to the point where I can learn and I say that with all sincerity. I am not the first one to say that and I know that others of you are nodding your head, and saying the same thing. You get to a certain age - and I think that that’s a lesson as we look at how a potter even begins to select and begin then the process of shaping the clay. The maturity of that clay is going to then begin that process.

You know I thought about Job in this regard, Job 42, where after all of that - 41 chapters of Job and finally he said, now I get the point. I’ve heard of You. Now I see You and I understand You.

I’ve told the story probably here before. A couple of years ago Debbie was reading through our annual Bible Reading Program and she got to Job and she really slogged through Job. At one point, about chapter 35, she says, “What is the purpose of this book?” I said, “Keep reading.” At about chapter 40 she says, “Are you sure there is a purpose in this book?” I said, “Keep reading.” Its check is in Job 42. You’ve got 41 chapters of experience and then finally the light comes on for Job after all of that and then he was ready to be used and then you read to the end of the book and the latter story of Job, as it says, he learnt and had more than he had before. And that is something for us to think about, the aging and the maturing and God’s decision when to choose us, to put us on the wheel but even perhaps when to even begin to turn the wheel.

And then begin the process of forming us, which is point 2 in this process, of in the potter’s house.

There is the forming of the clay and the potter begins to, as it is placed on that wheel, it is just a lump, shapeless, formless but the artist, the potter, has something in mind that he wants to see in the end and so he begins to wedge it and to kneed it and to shape it in a rough fashion to work it; Moving out the lumps, squeezing out the air bubbles, to make the clay more pliable and all this has to be done before it even begins to take shape into a platter or a vase or a larger vessel of some sort that will be shaped on the wheel.

If you go back to Jeremiah 18:3 - When Jeremiah walked into that potter’s house he saw the potter making something at the wheel. He was making something at the wheel and that wheel begins to turn.

Richard Kennebeck was telling me the other day how on a trip to Turkey a few years ago, on one of these educational trips the Church put together, they stopped at a major pottery works and watched the ancient art of pottery right there being made with potter’s wheel and the entire process. If you have never been to a potter’s house to see that, you can certainly see it on a video and it is that process of that wheel beginning to turn and the hands beginning to shape and mold it. The wheel turns faster and faster and oil might be added to it, water might be added to it to make it more supple and easily shaped, but God said to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 18:3 there, he is making something at the wheel.

Now oil and water are a symbol of God’s Holy Spirit and that begins to be added to our lives and it is there and it begins to have to work its way into our life. The working of God’s Spirit within us is still one of those great mysteries that all of us, I think, could grow in understanding and knowledge about in the Church; the actual working of the power of God in our lives. Oil and water are physical symbols that are used in Scripture to explain the Spirit but how that works into our lives and what it produces is another vast field of study but as it works with a piece of clay, it makes it workable.

We have to yield to God in Spirit. We have to yield to God in His hands as He shapes us.

The prophet Isaiah also used the making of a pot as a point in his story.

Isaiah 64:8 … We are the clay, and You (speaking to God) our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand.

We are the clay; You are the potter; we are the work of Your hand, Isaiah says here. Think about that. The Master Potter shapes it by His hand.

One of the sources I was looking at that had a lot of information about the making of pottery said that “In the making of pottery it is really all about the hands.” It is all about the hands. “Those hands shape, mold and create whatever the clay will become. Without a soft, without a sensitive touch, a master potter on a lump of clay”  - it is not going to take shape into its intended form and it will not be useful and it will not be beautiful. Too much pressure, not enough experience in the hand, then it can become just a lopsided lump very quickly on a fast moving potter’s wheel. It takes skill for that hand to be working.

God is very skillful and He knows when to apply the pressure. He knows when to flare out the hands if you will, to create a shape and a form that He wants and when to do it. When the clay is ready to do that, when we as vessels are ready for that, and He knows when to apply the pressure and when to then let off. It takes experience, the experience a master potter has and as God works with us and we become the work of His hand.

There is another interesting point. I learnt about this in the study of pottery and that is that, as you look at pottery, it will begin to reveal a lot about who made it; the hands of the person who shaped it and the culture in which it is formed. That is why I said, remember, in archeology today, the study of archeology, as they dig into a huge mount of earth called a tell and they unearth the layers of civilization as they very carefully categorize and catalogue the pottery that they pull out of that site, because it will tell them the type of culture that was there at a particular time because of the shape of the pottery and the types of pottery.

Different ages and different cultures have different shapes of pottery. If you go on through a museum today and you look at a display of pottery you will find, you know as I have in some trips in the past - this has usually been the quickest part of my museum trip but after working on this sermon it is going to become one of my slower parts in the future - but you’ll pass Japanese pottery, Ming dynasty pottery, okay, and you will see different Chinese pottery. Go to the Egyptian section and there will be different pottery there that reflects the Egyptian culture. Go to the Babylonian part and it will be Babylonian pottery and it will look different.

Each culture anciently, and today, has pottery that reflects its culture. We didn’t bring in a picture that we have, given to Debbie a number of years ago by a group of ladies in one of our past congregations, and it is one of these water pictures of a bowl that people at one time would have poured water in, and you washed in a bowl. Unfortunately the bowl was broken. I didn’t bring that in but it is in a shape that I would guess, I would call a Victorian shape. It is one of these very ornate pictures, unlike anything we would create today. It was created in a particular time. I think it is Victorian, at least the style. It wasn’t made back then, it is a modern piece but it is made in a Victorian style and that is the point about what shapes a piece of pottery is an individual living at a time and place who reflects that time and that place whether it is Japanese, Greek, Egyptian or whatever.

And because of this, as with all forms of art, a painting or mural or a scratching on a wall in Southern France, whatever it might be, the hand of that artist, and in this case the hand of a potter, imparts the life of his culture to that piece that he is working on. It comes through his hands. He is a product of his time and place and how he creates and what is in his mind, being transferred through his hands into that piece of clay, reflects that time, that place and that culture. That is an important thing to understand as the clay is being formed.

As God works with us, shaping us, forming us as the Master Potter, He is molding and shaping us according to the culture of the Kingdom of God, not any physical time and place that we are in right now. If we are truly being shaped by God, our Creator, He is shaping us not in 21st Century American values and standards and culture, or Western culture, or Eastern or Asian culture or African culture, whatever the culture that we live in. He is shaping each of us that He has chosen and in whose hands we are by the culture of the Kingdom of God.
That is what is coming through. His hands into our life. That is how it works. That was another lesson that Jeremiah needed to pick up when he went to the potter’s house. Are we being shaped by the values and the culture of the Kingdom of God or by the values and the culture of our world and our society right now?

That is the critical point.

In 2 Peter 1, Peter gives us one of these benchmark verses about our creation, what is being done with us, as God has chosen us, His people.

2 Peter 1:3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue,

V.4 - by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

We are partakers of the divine nature, God’s nature, the character of God, the mind of God. Christ in us, the hope of glory. We are partakers of that divine nature and it is being imparted to us as lumps of clay, if you will, by the hands of the Master Potter. Just as the master potter imparts his Portuguese time and place into a dish like this or whatever it might be God is imparting the values of the Kingdom of God through His hands into our life. As we yield to Him we are partakers of His divine nature. That is why it is all about the hands. It is all about the hands when it comes to pottery and when it comes to God working with us in our lives. The study of this subject is fascinating in that way.

A pottery master also has to keep the clay on dead center on the wheel. It has to be balanced there. If the balance gets upset then the clay is going to begin to wobble and in some cases maybe just fall apart. When that happens then it has to be reshaped and reworked. And you know, sometimes that happens, doesn’t it, as the forming takes place. Our lives get out of balance. Something happens. Maybe the clay just doesn’t work well in the hands of the potter and it has to be reshaped. Back in Jeremiah 18 that’s what happened because it says as Jeremiah watched that day,

Jeremiah 18:4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; - It got out of balance. It became misshapen. You can’t go on that way, but with the wet, pliable piece of clay that is not the end of the world. It can be made again as it says:

V.4 - … so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.

Sin sometimes gets us out of balance. Mistakes of life can get us out of balance and we have to be made again. How long does that take? I don’t know. I don’t know. In the way that God works with us for a year, five years, fifteen or eighteen years - is nothing to God. As long as there is a pliability, suppleness to us in our heart, our mind, our spirit, He can work with us and make us again into another vessel as it seems good to Him, even if we get out of shape. With God that can be a long time - many years of our life. Even through multiple mistakes, even through multiple episodes. God is very patient and He takes the time to work with us. That is the beauty of it.

Now there is a third part of the process of making a pottery that we should examine as well, and that is the firing; the firing.

When it is put into an oven, a specially made oven, not one of our General Electric Ranges that we have in our kitchen but a brick oven, heated very carefully to the right temperature and for the right amount of time, but the firing process.

There is an interesting article that I found on a modern master of pottery making, a man by the name of Warren McKenzie. This was an article that wrote about his work as a distinguished art pottery artist and it is talking about the firing of the clay, the pottery, and it says: “Finally there is the element of chance introduced by the kiln. For whatever efforts the potter makes to control all the variables the outcome is never certain.” Once it is put in, the outcome is never certain and he says: “That is a good thing even if it means unhappy surprises as well as happy ones.”

Things happen when a trial hits, or in this case, when the clay pot is put into the oven. The master potter doesn’t always know how that pot will react. There are a lot of other variables that are out of his control. You know God doesn’t always know how we will react when we go through a trial. We do have free choice after all and so He doesn’t always know when He may allow us to go through a fiery trial but He is the Master Potter and He is still working with us.

This article goes on: “All pots must survive trial by fire and all potters must learn to live with that.”  “All pots must survive trial by fire and all potters must learn to live with that”. The artist showed this individual who wrote this, he said: “He showed me a pot that had been blessed by the fire for once” and he goes on to explain the process. A pot that had been blessed by the fire to show that something happened beyond what the potter thought because as the chemicals interacted with the carbon from the flame it produced something totally different and totally better even than the potter thought would happen once he put that piece into the kiln, to begin to be set.

Trials for us are the firing of us as a piece of pottery. It is interesting to note about the way that a piece of pottery will go through the firing. There can be multiple firings. There can be one, or two or three before it is finished. The first firing will harden the pot and it can’t be altered after that, alright? You fire it and it can’t be altered by the hands but it is usually a low fire that is brought up to the right temperature and then the process of decoration can begin, the painting, the enameling that is going to be done and it will go through another firing to set that. There may even be a third firing to set the entire piece over a process of time as it comes to a finishing.

In the process of trials and the fiery trials of our own life, God knows exactly the range at which we can survive and when to put us in or allow us to go into a fiery trial and what may or may not happen.

1 Corinthians 10:13 says that with a temptation God will always provide a way of escape. He will allow us, through decisions and through circumstances at times, for trials to take place but it doesn’t mean He has forsaken us. He will provide for and make a way of escape.

One of the key verses perhaps on trials again is back here in 1 Peter, to teach us a lesson in this.

1 Peter 1:6 In this (he says) you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while if need be, you have been grieved by various trials.

V.7 - that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ,

“The genuineness of your faith” - That is what is discovered in a trial no matter how low the temperature or how high the temperature. The genuineness of our faith is going to be tested. Will we stick? Will we crack and if we crack we can’t be put back together at that point. The genuineness of our faith. Whenever we go through a time of difficulty or challenge to our faith and our life, health, jobs, other issues that come up, difficulties and challenges that will be in our life on this journey, on this wheel of life that we are on, there are going to be countless opportunities for the final perfecting image of God to be placed upon us as He desires us. And who are we again to question what God is doing? That is the continual question that the prophets and Paul brought up. Why question God? Who are we to question what God is doing even in a time of a trial?

Back in Isaiah 45:9 - Isaiah writes: “Woe to him who strives with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth!

Talk amongst yourselves; strive amongst yourselves is kind of what he is saying here, among the potsherds, but don’t strive with your Maker. It goes on:

V.9 - …Shall the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ Or shall your handiwork say, “He has no hands’?

Again this is what Paul was working off - don’t question what God is doing. Oh, we will, but hopefully we won’t to the point where we just completely take ourselves out of His hands. Don’t do that. Until the final firing takes place in the making of a piece of pottery, at any point in the process even after the initial setting, and perhaps our commitment and our time of - you know we are going to remain faithful and loyal to God and yet our process of being made into something beautiful isn’t done.

This particular piece of clay was obviously fired first and then the painting put into it and that can take a while and then it will have to be fired again.
We can spend many years in the church as we are being set in place, as we are being decorated, made into something not only useful, but the beautifying process. It can take a period of time as we continue to yield to God. Still, things can happen to mar the product. The pot could jerk or whatever or fall and the brush go right across it and what are you going to do at that point? The point is God is going to continue to work to put finishing touches on us throughout this journey until that final firing, whatever it might be. A final trial that will bring us to the end of God’s work with us. 

There comes a time when we begin to look at life and yes, even the inevitability of death as God’s finishing with us and when we come to that point, if we have lived a good life. If we have lived a life of faith and we have been yielded to God on that potter’s wheel then we will not need to fear that.

Our trip out to Tulsa, when we left Tulsa on our way back east, we went a few miles to Claremore, Oklahoma, which was the birthplace of Will Rogers. We stopped at his grave and they have a museum there on a nice setting. Lots of Will Roger’s quotes around there, the great American humorist. One of them, and I believe this one was on his grave, on his tomb that sits there, is to this effect. It said that as long as you’ve lived life right you don’t need to fear death. As long as you’ve lived life right and good, you don’t need to fear death. Death is not something that you need to fear. I am paraphrasing it but it was an optimistic approach and Will Rogers died in an untimely air crash in Alaska.

But as we come to that final firing, whatever it may be, if we’ve lived a life of faith and we understand the process through God’s choosing and how He has shaped and formed us, we don’t need to fear that. You may have a bit of concern and we may not in our own heart and mind be ready for it, but if we understand what God has been doing with us then we will not fear it and we will understand what is going to be taking place and we will then be ready to be finally, after that final firing, to be judged at the judgment seat of God and judged to be on the right hand of God, as you will. And to be judged worthy, a place in His eternal family.

You know as you think through this process of the choosing, the forming and of the firing of a piece of pottery as we all take a few moments here this morning to have come to the potter’s house to consider this, there a lot that must be going on in your mind as you think it through as it applies to you, and then a number of different concluding lessons that we might draw from such a visit to a potter’s house.

One question that came to my mind is, what, for me, could be the greatest obstacle to being finishing my race, to be a finished product in the hands of God and achieving that crown of life? What could it be for you? For any of us? If you stop and look at what are the matters that challenge us.

One of the things that immediately came to my mind, because it is probably right up there within the top three of obstacles that are perennial challenges to us, is people. People. It can be an obstacle to us finishing that. Other people; other pots; annoying pots; pots we don’t like; pots we can’t get along with; pots who won’t listen to us or try to understand us; pots that we dismiss as irrelevant; pots that hurt us; pots who disappoint us; pots who betray us; pots who abuse us; pots who leave us; pots we can’t see being created in the image of God just like us, all in the same hand of the Master Creator. Maybe that’s why.

To one of the churches in Revelation Christ says, let no man take your crown or we could say, let no pot take your crown.

When Jeremiah first encountered God back in the book of Jeremiah 1:5, God told him that “I formed you in the womb”. I formed you in the womb. In his case God began forming with His hands Jeremiah in the womb of his mother. It is quite a distinction. Maybe I’ll like to image that Jeremiah, the day that he went to the potter’s house, maybe then he finally really did understand what God had said to him. That God is the great shaper of life, of ones destiny and that all of these years as a prophet had taught him a lot, but that one day when he visited the potter’s house, it helped him to put it all together and at that point with a deeper conviction and a deeper understanding he could help the people of Jerusalem, Judah.

He could help them to understand that the decisions they were making on that day, at that time, had consequences and they needed to change. They needed to listen to what he had to say and maybe that’s when his preaching kicked it up a notch or prophesying and all that he said in the streets as he went out from there. Because it all jelled together for him at that moment as he went to the potter’s house and he realized, we are not here by chance. We are not here because we chose. We are here because God chose. We as a people have been chosen by God. We are not here because of our goodness, because we figured it all out. We are here because He chose us and we choose and chose to respond to that calling.

Maybe he began to understand that we are being formed into the image of God by His hand and I think that is what we should understand as we make this trip to the potter’s house, that the events of our life, the things that happen to us, the decisions that we have to come at, the impulses we respond to from our heart, our mind, all are part of God working with us if indeed His Spirit is in our lives.

That correction you received, remember that? Remember the correction that you got from someone else? From your wife or your husband, from your friend, from a minister, from something that you read? Remember that correction that came to you about behavior or a word or an action that you said, that correction you received? That was from God. That was God’s hands telling you to alter course just a little bit, to step back and to consider that it is about time that this action changed. That was God.

That notion that you had to do something kind for someone else, to encourage someone else after a good job or an accomplishment or an achievement, that urge, that notion, hey, I’ll stop and congratulate them or I’ll send a note or I’ll send an email or text out, but I’ll communicate and I’ll say something to them to encourage them when they are down and or when they’ve accomplish something good - that was God shaping you into a kinder person. That was God telling you to slow down just a little bit and pay attention to other people.

That insight that you had? That you came to that was a profound principle of life that you read in an article somewhere or that you came to after you - through an experience? That profound insight - you finally got it? That was God. That was God lifting your edge just a little bit on the vase to give you a little bit more definition and shape and form and if you respond to it in His hands, you are being formed into something that He wants.

That courage that you found to say no, finally, to a sin? You put it out of your life - that was God shaping your pedestal, your foundation on which you as a vessel are going to rest for all eternity. It wasn’t you. It was God through His Spirit that was giving that to you.

Put your life into perspective. Understand how these things happen to us and why and that it is not by chance that we are chosen. We are formed by God. It is in His hands and we are being shaped through the trials and experiences and all of the matters of our life into His final perfecting work that He has for each one of us.

Put your life in perspective. Go to the potter’s house. Do what God said to Jeremiah:

“Arise and go to the potter’s house and there I will cause you to hear My words.”