Jeremiah 18-20
Jeremiah visits the potter. The pot the potter was working on was marred, ‘So he formed it into another pot, shaping it as it seemed best to him’.
We are the only barrier to God doing good in our lives. If as a result of our living adversely to His ways, He then intends to uproot us, if we simply repent of our wrong, He will relent and not inflict what He had intended. Conversely, if He has intended to build us up and then we choose to ignore His ways, then He will reconsider the good He intended.
In both cases, He is the potter to do with us as it seems best to Him but we as the living pot in His hands influence what He chooses by the choices we make. We cannot tell Him what kind of pot we want to be, but we do determine whether or not He shapes us into a pot that is useful to Him.
We cannot say, ‘Lord make me a fancy tea pot’ which everyone will see and admire; He may have in mind a cast iron pot that is placed in a hole over a bed of coals and covered with dirt. The tea pot may be pretty but its contents are not vital. The iron pot is nothing to look at but oh my, how vital the contents.
This is exactly what was going on with Jeremiah. ‘Oh Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me’.
Though I am not ridiculed all day long, nor mocked, the Lord has taken me to a place in Him that not everyone can identify with. Like Jeremiah, I am sometimes tempted to say, ‘I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name’, but ‘His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot.’
