Masterpieces

 "Then the Lord gave me this message: 'O Israel, can I not do to you as this potter has done with his clay? As the clay is in the potter's hand. so are you in My hand.' " Jeremiah 18:5-6....."We are pieces of clay trying to explain to other pieces of clay what the Potter is like." Francis Chan

After His resurrection, Jesus commissioned His disciples to 'tell everyone what you've seen and heard." They were obedient to that command. Are we? Are we really? Someone said that we "say so little about what we've seen and heard because we have seen and heard so little." In other words, our personal contact and knowledge with the risen Christ, the Holy Father, and His Holy Spirit is on such a small scale that we have little to share that's of real value. We can give the standard info we've learned in a lifetime of Sunday School classes and Sunday morning sermons, but we do so without passion. We talk about Him as if He's not in the room. We can't present a God that people would long to know because at root, we don't know Him either.

Chan said that the only way we, the pieces of clay, can tell others about our Potter/God is by the intimacy we've had and have with His hands and heart. A true artist at work on his pottery wheel shapes and molds the piece he's working on with the utmost care and love. As a master craftsman, he seeks to produce a masterpiece. He puts himself into the work he's doing. Such is the way of God. Our problem is, we are rarely willing to submit to being on His wheel. We have no real and deep link to His loving hands and the heart that works through them. We want all that comes with His finished work, but we are rarely willing to tarry in order to be His finished work. So, though we profess to know and be His, the result is a mis-shaped work that looks little like the end He intended. There is little to distinguish us from the unskilled products of the potters of this world. We can't tell them much more about our God then they can.

God created each of us to be a masterpiece. Whether we are or not will always come down to what we do with Jesus Christ, whether we receive or reject Him, and then, to what degree will we yield to His shaping hands? It's true that He creates us with His finished product in mind, but what we miss is the joy and love He expresses in the process of taking us to that end. The shaping, the constant injection of His love into His work. How He places just the right pressure, and where and when He needs to do so. As He shapes His masterpieces, it's not for the purpose of putting us on display in His church's trophy case. It's because He means for us to be finely crafted pieces of clay, shaped by Him, tempered in His fire, and then a work that displays wherever they are the character and love of the One who made a work of beauty from a non-descript lump of clay.

Someone said that God cannot reach the world until He first reaches His church. I think it's time for each of us who take His name to allow Him to place us back on His wheel. To make soft again what has become so hard. To take what has done little more than gather dust, and become at last, the work of beauty that He intended. When this happens, we will be His masterpieces, and we will tell all the surrounding lumps of clay, which we have been, what the loving Potter is like. It begins with our realizing we're clay, then yielding to His wheel and His hands, soaking in His loving care, and then from the wheel to the world. Just as He intended. Masterpieces, shaped by His loving hands and heart.

Blessings,

Pastor O