Day 7
That is why no one and no experience is irredeemable. God takes the yielded marred clay that makes up our lives, re-works it and remolds it into something good.
“...can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD, “Like Clay in the hand of the potter, so you are in my hand...” —JEREMIAH 18:6
I have no doubt that all of us who are reading this are aware of being marred clay. There are things in our lives and in our histories that are broken and bruised, and we cannot undo them. There are times we have deliberately taken ourselves into trouble and times when we have been victims of trouble that have left scars in our lives.
God took Jeremiah down to a potter’s house to give him a lesson about the broken nation of Judah. He watched the potter at work, but the clay was marred! Then he watched as, ‘the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him’ (Jeremiah 18.4). Notice that he did not discard the marred pot, but neither did he ‘mend it’ so that it became the old pot after all. He remade it into something else that ‘seemed best to him’. Some things do become broken beyond repair. Some relationships will never be made right again. Some opportunities are lost forever. But that is not the end of the story. The master potter forms it ‘into another pot’. He takes the realities of the situation, and molds them accordingly. But the marvelous thing Jeremiah learned was that although it is made into a different pot, the potter molds it ‘as seemed best to him’.
That is why no one and no experience is irredeemable. God takes the yielded marred clay that makes up our lives, re-works it and remolds it into something good.
Like Jacob, we may have to walk with a limp. Most of us do in one way or another, but at the end of the story, the potter is pleased with his pot! That, in itself, will gratify the pot.
Have Thine own way, Lord,
Have Thine own way.
Thou are the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will,
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
—Adelaide A. Pollard