“NOT YET” Part 2

“But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him” (Jeremiah 18:4).

 

Continued from yesterday . . .

 

An hour later he handed me a mirror and said ‘Look at yourself.’ And I did. I said, ‘That’s not me; that couldn’t be me. It’s beautiful. I’m beautiful!!!’

Quietly he spoke: ‘I want you to remember,’ then, he said, ‘I know it hurt to be rolled and pounded and patted, but had I just left you alone, you’d have dried up. I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled. I know it hurt and it was hot and disagreeable in the oven, but if I hadn’t put you there, you would have cracked. I know the fumes were bad when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn’t done that, you never would have hardened. You would not have had any color in your life. If I hadn’t put you back in that second oven, you wouldn’t have survived for long because the hardness would not have held. Now you are a finished product. Now you are what I had in mind when I first began with you.’

The moral of this story is this: God knows what He’s doing for each of us. He is the Potter, and we are His clay. He will mold us and make us and expose us to just enough pressures of just the right kinds that we may be made into a flawless piece of work to fulfill His good, pleasing and perfect will.

So when life seems hard, and you are being pounded and patted and pushed almost beyond endurance; when your world seems to be spinning out of control; when you feel like you are in a fiery furnace of trials; when life seems to ‘stink’, try this:

Brew a cup of your favorite tea in your prettiest tea cup, sit down and think on this story and then, have a little talk with the Potter.

 

We see in the second paragraph above, the Potter has reasons for every difficulty He puts us through because He has a purpose for us in all that He does.  He sees the final product and knows that what He has in mind for us is more than we can imagine.  We may scream, “Stop it! Let me out!” but His wisdom and understanding sees “something beautiful” in us.  Paul asks, “Who do you think you are to question God? Does the clay have the right to ask the potter why he shaped it the way he did?” (Romans 9:20 CEV).  Let’s be patient. God is not finished with us yet!

Even though we do not realize now what He is doing, later we’ll understand (John 13:7). 

Like the “tea cup,” we may not like it, but when we cooperate with the Potter and endure the process rather than resist Him, we change on the inside.  And our beautiful cup overflows!

Something beautiful, something good;

All my confusion He understood;

All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife,

But He made something beautiful of my life. –Gloria Gaither