Speaker 1: And the question for this week was something like.
Speaker 1: It was like a multifaceted question.
Speaker 1: It was like how does God lead us and guide us?
Speaker 1: Is the future sort of set, and how does God respond to us?
Speaker 1: Or what if I make a mistake, and what if I mishear the will of God?
Speaker 1: And how does God answer prayers?
Speaker 1: And there's a number of these I'm going to squish into one sermon and it's about this passage from Jeremiah 18.
Speaker 1: So buckle up, because we might well, we'll see.
Speaker 1: We have a lot to cover, but we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1: So are you ready?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 1: So here's the context.
Speaker 1: By the way, the sermon is called Not Done Yet.
Speaker 1: If you hear nothing else this morning, I want you to hear that you are not done yet, probably.
Speaker 1: So that's okay, have some grace for yourself.
Speaker 1: So Jeremiah is this Israelite prophet who's mostly working and living and prophesying in the southern kingdom that is called Judah.
Speaker 1: My clicker is not working.
Speaker 1: Any idea why?
Speaker 1: There we go, okay.
Speaker 1: So if you remember Israel—oh, I went too far Israel was a kingdom that was divided in two.
Speaker 1: If you remember Israel's history, you don't have to go too far into the weeds here.
Speaker 1: But Israel was one nation and then, because of some rebellion and these two kings they actually split in half.
Speaker 1: There's the Northern kingdom, called the kingdom of Israel, and then the Southern kingdom was called the kingdom of Judah.
Speaker 1: Jerusalem, the temple and all of that was down in the South, in the kingdom of Judah.
Speaker 1: So the kingdom of Israel was already, at this time when Jeremiah is prophesying, the kingdom of Israel, the Northern kingdom was already ransacked by the Assyrians.
Speaker 1: They'd come in and they had taken over and taken those folks from the north into exile, and the southern kingdom, though, their day was sort of coming.
Speaker 1: Jeremiah was a prophet who lived and prophesied in the final decades of the kingdom of Judah and he lived in and around Jerusalem and he brought warning to the people saying, hey, you guys have broken the covenant with God by way of idolatry and injustices, and so be careful, because if you don't, god will allow judgment to come and God will let the Babylonians come in and sort of take over and drag you into exile too.
Speaker 1: So Jeremiah brings this warning, begging the people of Judah and Israel, jerusalem rather, to change their ways in order that God might relent and change his plans for this kingdom of Judah.
Speaker 1: Now here's the deal.
Speaker 1: This is an ancient prophecy and Hebrew prophecy was a bit different than Greek prophecy.
Speaker 1: The Greeks hadn't taken over this part of the world yet.
Speaker 1: Those would be a couple hundred years later.
Speaker 1: But most of us in this room are Greek thinkers.
Speaker 1: We're influenced by Greek thinking, greek philosophy, greek culture, and so we think of prophecy as a prediction of the future.
Speaker 1: The Greeks remember.
Speaker 1: They thought that the world was run by these three sisters in Greek mythology, called the Fates, that we were all victims of the Fates.
Speaker 1: So these are the three sisters called the Fates, that these women controlled the course of human history and you could do nothing to escape the Fates.
Speaker 1: Whatever happened to you was your density, I mean your destiny.
Speaker 1: Back to the future, okay, and so you really couldn't escape your fates.
Speaker 1: The Greeks loved divination.
Speaker 1: Divination was this act of seeking knowledge about the future or about unknown events through supernatural means.
Speaker 1: They would do all kinds of weird things, like crystal ball, kinds of things to understand or to divine the future or unknown events.
Speaker 1: So they would like they had one thing.
Speaker 1: They would like tear these animals apart and they would spill the entrails out like the guts, to sort of predict the future, which sounds a bit odd, but it's like an ancient world version of the magic eight ball.
Speaker 1: You know, like you'd shake up that sheep and pour out the entrails like, oh, outcome looks not good.
Speaker 1: You know, I've seen the future and it's medium rare.
Speaker 1: Oh, that thought that wouldn't be a little bit funnier than that.
Speaker 1: Uh, is it the will of the gods?
Speaker 1: It looks more like taco Tuesday to me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to cook that up and I'm going to see.
Speaker 1: But the Greeks love this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Those will work at the 10 o'clock.
Speaker 1: I think they'll work at the 10 o'clock.
Speaker 1: The Greeks would like, they loved crystal ball because they knew that the fates had designed the cosmos and how it would go and you couldn't do anything to escape your destiny because it was your destiny after all.
Speaker 1: Hebrew thinkers were not like that quite they didn't.
Speaker 1: They weren't fatalists.
Speaker 1: These, these, the Greeks, were fatalists.
Speaker 1: They believed in the faith.
Speaker 1: Greek Hebrews weren't like that they.
Speaker 1: So if you're a Greek thinker, prophecy is really just a prediction of the future.
Speaker 1: It's already set.
Speaker 1: You're going to kind of go on the road, but to the Hebrew mind, the prophets were not predictors of the future.
Speaker 1: They were people who were coming with warning Change your ways and things might change for you.
Speaker 1: Relent, repent, come back to the Lord that's what you hear all the time in the prophets and God will make your way straight again and bring you, welcome you, back home.
Speaker 1: That's the Hebrew mind.
Speaker 1: It raises the question, though, for all of us Are we victims of the fates?
Speaker 1: Do the fates control our destiny?
Speaker 1: Do we have any choice or say-so or agency in the matter?
Speaker 1: And then, how does God lead?
Speaker 1: Does God sort of micromanage us as human beings?
Speaker 1: Do we have any agency?
Speaker 1: And if we do, how much?
Speaker 1: And what happens if I make the wrong decision, or if I sin or make a mistake or marry the wrong person or choose the wrong career or have a failed business venture?
Speaker 1: How does God respond to these kinds of things?
Speaker 1: Am I just playing on a role that was set from the beginning and the fates are kind of pulling all the strings and I'm just an innocent bystander?
Speaker 1: And can I miss God's will?
Speaker 1: Is it possible to miss the will of God?
Speaker 1: And if I miss it, will God just like wash his hands of me, like I'm done?
Speaker 1: You missed it, ryan, sorry.
Speaker 1: Well, I hope this story might help.
Speaker 1: So here's the story.
Speaker 1: Jeremiah gets word from God and says hey, go down to the potter's house.
Speaker 1: All right, this is a picture of the potter's house, thanks to chat GPT.
Speaker 1: And so this is a potter in his house making pots with clay.
Speaker 1: This is what potters did.
Speaker 1: So God tells Jeremiah go down to the potter's house, I'm going to put on display for you like a theater, like a show, and you're going to watch it.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a word from me in this theater.
Speaker 1: It's a guerrilla theater, you know, like from back in the 70s.
Speaker 1: It's a subversive, provocative live drama that God's going to show to Jeremiah and make a point.
Speaker 1: And so he's watching this.
Speaker 1: It's like this live in this ordinary place called the potter's house, and God was going to speak to him about what was happening with Judah and this nation and their rebellious ways through this very much live action guerrilla theater at the potter's house.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: So far?
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1: So pottery was very common, by the way, in the ancient Near East and actually in the ancient world, because pottery, it was ubiquitous, it was everywhere, because pottery was what people used for nearly everything.
Speaker 1: I mean pots were used for storage, for cooking, they used it for oil lamps, they used it for even divine or like for idols, for other divine kinds of you know wear, and pottery was everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was used all the time for all these kinds of things.
Speaker 1: You would use pottery.
Speaker 1: You'd see it everywhere.
Speaker 1: In fact, archaeologists discover pottery in the ancient world, or what was the ancient world.
Speaker 1: In places like Israel it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: When I was there, you would find shards of pottery.
Speaker 1: They call them pot shards.
Speaker 1: You'd find them all over the place and you could just grab one and take it, because nobody cared, because there was pottery everywhere and it was actually.
Speaker 1: If you were a potter, you were in high demand because pottery was very much needed, because it was breakable, especially if you had teenage sons.
Speaker 1: It was always being broken, and so there was always more pottery needed, and so the potter had a very, very robust business and there was a potter almost in every single town or city and their job was really, you know, it was a very secure job, and even in the smallest, most rural towns there was always a potter who had a potter's wheel and was making pots, because people needed pots.
Speaker 1: They used pots again for everything.
Speaker 1: So they're in high demand.
Speaker 1: So people knew in the ancient world, they knew this image of a potter's house, but that the potter would live, where he worked, was like his house and his business, and so everybody knew this image of a potter's house.
Speaker 1: So this was not like a foreign idea for them.
Speaker 1: Like, oh yeah, we know that this metaphor, this live drama that Jeremiah is going to see and witness, everybody would have known this image.
Speaker 1: That's why it worked.
Speaker 1: The image worked so well because, like, oh yeah, we know a potter, so a potter used a wheel.
Speaker 1: This is what it looked like.
Speaker 1: By the way, in the text it says the potter was at the wheel, but it's literally, in the Hebrew, it's two stones.
Speaker 1: And so here's what it looked like.
Speaker 1: You had these two stones, one on the top, one on the bottom.
Speaker 1: This is before, of course, the days of electricity.
Speaker 1: And so here's the wheel, what it looks like.
Speaker 1: So they would spin this bottom part, the stone, and it would spin to the top one spinning.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's supposed to do that down there.
Speaker 1: All right, I was told this is an antique, so be careful.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what this does, we're going to leave it there.
Speaker 1: And so you would spin it and it would get going, and then they would work the clay on top, and so it was really this two stones wheel.
Speaker 1: There's like a, like a rod that goes right in between there, and it was like this flywheel on the bottom that the potter would spin and begin to work and massage that clay.
Speaker 1: Now about this wheel, this one actually, this is sort of modern version of this one.
Speaker 1: This one began to sort of surface in history and archeology around the fourth millennium BC, so around 4,000 BC was when they started to discover these artifacts in this part of the world.
Speaker 1: This potter is just two wheel, so it's spinning.
Speaker 1: Now, on occasion, though, you heard the clay that the potter would get.
Speaker 1: It would get this clay out of the earth.
Speaker 1: The clay would become marred when he's making a pot, but he's making a pot in the.
Speaker 1: I've got my napkin here.
Speaker 1: The potter is making a pot and he would get the clay and the clay would, on occasion, be marred.
Speaker 1: So, at first glance, you would like see the clay, like, oh, this is gonna be good, but then, as he begins to work it, it's like not so good, sort of like online dating, you know.
Speaker 1: You get there like, oh, this is good, not so good for a while, and so it's marred or it's spoiled.
Speaker 1: He's making a pot and he realized oh, the pot's not turning out like I wanted to.
Speaker 1: So in the text it says the vessel he was making, the pot or whatever it was was spoiled in the potter's hands.
Speaker 1: Now, spoiled literally means like this it means to be destroyed or corrupt, or to go to ruin or to be decayed, to be spoiled or marred.
Speaker 1: You get the idea, but in case you don't, here's another way to put it To render less perfect this clay was To be less attractive or useful, or to be disfigured or defaced or even scarred.
Speaker 1: This clay was not turning out how it was supposed to go.
Speaker 1: So the question is what will the potter do with this clay, as he's working it and it's not doing what he wants it to do?
Speaker 1: Well, I might just throw it away because I'm not wasting my time.
Speaker 1: So I called my friend Chad.
Speaker 1: He's a potter, he does great work.
Speaker 1: Anybody know potter Chad?
Speaker 1: Okay, he makes pots and he's incredible at his pottery.
Speaker 1: I'm like hey, talk to me about pottery, pottery and pots.
Speaker 1: How does this work?
Speaker 1: Have you ever had clay that, while you're trying to work, it isn't doing what you want it to do?
Speaker 1: He's like oh yeah, all the time.
Speaker 1: He's like Ryan, this was very common to get clay that just won't do what you want it to do.
Speaker 1: I'm like well, tell me more about it.
Speaker 1: It's like sometimes you'll be making a bowl and you're spinning that wheel, making a bowl, you know, and the bowl will collapse and become a plate.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I did here, let's get out of hand, okay.
Speaker 1: So it happens all the time.
Speaker 1: And so now you have a plate on your hands and so you can do two things.
Speaker 1: You can either like, okay, I'm gonna make a plate out of this, or you can throw it away.
Speaker 1: I guess you have three options.
Speaker 1: You can like, okay, I'll make a plate, because it doesn't want to be a bowl, or I'll throw it away.
Speaker 1: Or I'll maybe start over, because clay is this formable, malleable thing.
Speaker 1: You can kind of squeeze it back together, make it into a ball and then start all the way over.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't ever throw it away.
Speaker 1: He says, hey, ryan, it's because pottery is not really a science, it's more like an art.
Speaker 1: So you have to kind of be flexible in this way with this clay, because you have to adjust on the fly.
Speaker 1: If you're making a bowl and it's just not working, you will.
Speaker 1: Okay, you got to adjust Like, what does it want to be?
Speaker 1: So he says I don't try to come with this idea in my mind of what I want to make, necessarily, but more like a general idea, and I want to see instead, what does the clay want to be itself?
Speaker 1: What's the clay doing?
Speaker 1: What might this clay want to become?
Speaker 1: So again, he comes with this general idea, not a specific idea per se.
Speaker 1: In other words, he's like Ryan, I don't try to force it, I work with it and I massage the clay and the clay massages back and I don't come like, hey, here's what I think it should be.
Speaker 1: Rather, what is this clay all about?
Speaker 1: It's like an active discovery.
Speaker 1: So the potter, he told me Ryan, the potter must always be flexible.
Speaker 1: Even his thinking has to be flexible.
Speaker 1: This potter to adjust and to adapt.
Speaker 1: He has a friend who's a mathematician, who's also a potter.
Speaker 1: He's like Ryan, he's not a very good potter.
Speaker 1: He says mathematicians don't make good potters, for all the obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: Okay, any mathematicians in the house, okay, I mean, try it anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, he's like, because he's so rigid about it.
Speaker 1: He's like and he'll make these pots and it'll not be what he wants it to be.
Speaker 1: He keeps forcing it anyway, and when there's a mistake in the clay He'll use it anyway.
Speaker 1: He calls them seconds or failures.
Speaker 1: At that point it becomes not really art as much as a commodity.
Speaker 1: He goes because, ryan, when I'm making art, there's some amount of humanness, of my humanness.
Speaker 1: It becomes a part of the clay.
Speaker 1: When I'm molding it, there's a part of me that goes into the clay, into the pot, into the bowl, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: This thing that I'm making is imbued with something more than just the components that are there, like.
Speaker 1: In other words, there's more to this thing than just clay.
Speaker 1: There's part of me in there, in this bowl.
Speaker 1: There's a part of the human, the artist, the potter that becomes a part of the clay.
Speaker 1: This is why he told me people will pay $40 for a handmade mug that they could have got at Target for $5.
Speaker 1: It's the same kind of mug, they serve the same purpose, but one is imbued with the blood and sweat and tears of the artist.
Speaker 1: If you look at the bottom of those cups at Target, it says made in China.
Speaker 1: If you look at the bottom of an artist's mug, it says made in my garage while listening to sad indie music.
Speaker 1: The Target mug, though it won't judge you, this one might judge you when you're drinking out of it.
Speaker 1: So there it is.
Speaker 1: There's a part of the human, the potter, the person who's making it, imbued into the clay, and that way then it becomes this collaborative effort between the clay and the potter.
Speaker 1: There's a give and take.
Speaker 1: The clay has to give, but not so much that it breaks.
Speaker 1: The potter has to give.
Speaker 1: He can't like force it to be what it won't be.
Speaker 1: I mean he could, but it's not a good potter.
Speaker 1: A good potter is there's a flexibility to the potter, some pliability, some give and take to this relationship.
Speaker 1: It's a collaborative effort.
Speaker 1: And then Chad said this is, ryan, is how clay that's brought out of the ground can then become useful in the hands of this potter.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm not trying to make more out of this image than there is to make, but let this be my own kind of commentary, my own midrash.
Speaker 1: This is what's happening in this story.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly beautiful.
Speaker 1: Jeremiah goes down, he sees the potter making this clay and it's not doing what the potter wants it to do.
Speaker 1: So the text tells you the potter then changes his mind, his plans for the pot, for the clay, and make something else.
Speaker 1: And then he says God tells Jeremiah this.
Speaker 1: Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah and said can I not do this with you, judah and Israel, on this, as this potter does?
Speaker 1: Can I not take you and make you into something that you didn't?
Speaker 1: Maybe it wasn't working so well and maybe you were marred and spoiled.
Speaker 1: Can I not do this with you, like clay in the hands of the potter?
Speaker 1: God tells Jeremiah to tell Israel.
Speaker 1: So you are in my hand, israel, you're the clay, I'm the potter.
Speaker 1: By the way, in the ancient Near East, people believed that humans were made out of clay.
Speaker 1: They thought they were made out of clay, and you know this.
Speaker 1: I mean clay comes from the ground.
Speaker 1: So it's no wonder in our story then, in Genesis 1 and 2, god takes some clay, some dirt from the ground and he begins to shape it and form it and he makes human beings out of it.
Speaker 1: He does this a lot with the entire cosmos.
Speaker 1: He builds and shapes and forms.
Speaker 1: God's always taking these raw materials and then he breathes.
Speaker 1: Of course, he breathes life into this thing.
Speaker 1: So this is what God has always been doing.
Speaker 1: So it's no wonder that in the ancient world they had this idea that people thought that humans were made out of clay.
Speaker 1: Clay is formable.
Speaker 1: It's, again, malleable.
Speaker 1: Also, ancient Jewish commentators.
Speaker 1: They didn't really all agree or believe that God created out of nothing.
Speaker 1: There was nothing and then God just creates.
Speaker 1: They call this ex nihilo.
Speaker 1: A lot of the ancient Hebrew scholars didn't think that was true, because in Genesis, when you have what they call the tohu vavohu or the world was formless and void there was a chaos and wildness there.
Speaker 1: Something was there.
Speaker 1: According to some Jewish commentators, rather, god doesn't create out of nothing.
Speaker 1: He begins to shape and mold and form what's already there.
Speaker 1: Of course he would.
Speaker 1: This is what God always does.
Speaker 1: God shapes and molds and brings life.
Speaker 1: He brings life, identity and purpose into this clay, this raw material that's already existing.
Speaker 1: It's already there.
Speaker 1: Notice too that God doesn't unilaterally sort of just make something happen.
Speaker 1: He's molding, he's shaping, he's forming, giving it life.
Speaker 1: And where the clay is marred or spoiled or defaced or it's not turning out, well, it seems like God's like that's okay, I'm still going to make something out of it.
Speaker 1: I'll reshape it, I'll reform it.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to throw it in the garbage.
Speaker 1: I'll make it, I'll mold it back into a ball or, if it's going to a plate, I'll make it into a plate.
Speaker 1: I'm still going to work with it.
Speaker 1: In other words, the clay's not done until I say it's done, which is good news for Israel, because God tells me hey look, if you repent and return to me from your wicked ways, I'll relent and you can have a pathway forward, which is good news for us.
Speaker 1: It means that you and I, we are not done yet.
Speaker 1: This is the good news this morning.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for good news, this is the good news.
Speaker 1: You and I aren't done yet.
Speaker 1: We are merely clay in the hands of the potter.
Speaker 1: And if you're marred or you're spoiled or you've gone off the path or you've made wrong decisions, it's okay.
Speaker 1: If God was making you into a bowl, you're like I don't want to be a bowl, I want to be a pot.
Speaker 1: Even unknowingly, god's like fine, fine, fine, let me just adjust.
Speaker 1: There's some give and take, there's collaboration.
Speaker 1: If it started to break, okay, hang on.
Speaker 1: By the way, I was told by Chad too.
Speaker 1: He goes.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the clay gets so thin.
Speaker 1: They will take pieces of other clay and they call these grog.
Speaker 1: That's what he told me.
Speaker 1: They take grog, they ground up pieces of other clay, they mix it into this clay and it becomes stronger Again.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to read too much into this, but they'll take other clay pots, other people perhaps, and they will put them together and when they're together they're stronger.
Speaker 1: And he says and I don't know if Chad's a church goer he's like, yeah, yeah, kind of like maybe, what God would do with people If you're kind of on your own, you're weak, he'll put people with you to make you stronger.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, that's good, I'm writing that down, chad.
Speaker 1: So that was Chad's, not mine, that was his idea.
Speaker 1: So you're in the hands of the potter and he's making you worked for Israel.
Speaker 1: They understood it right away.
Speaker 1: The great Hebrew scholar, abraham Joshua Heschel, says it this way.
Speaker 1: He says life is not as fate designs.
Speaker 1: Are we merely victims of the fates that are just sort of just playing out?
Speaker 1: This role of the fates had designed for us?
Speaker 1: Nor is history a realm to be tyrannized by man, by humans.
Speaker 1: Events are not like rocks on the shore shaped by the wind and the water.
Speaker 1: Choice and design is what determines the shape of events.
Speaker 1: God is at work on humans, intent to fashion history in accord with himself.
Speaker 1: So I thought this might be a little bit poetic for many of us.
Speaker 1: Let me throw this in the chat GPT and have it reworded.
Speaker 1: So here's what rewording came up with.
Speaker 1: So this is re-quoting Abraham Heschel Life isn't ruled by blind fate and history isn't something that humans can completely control.
Speaker 1: So there's this collaboration.
Speaker 1: It seems like Events don't just happen automatically, like waves shaping rocks.
Speaker 1: Instead, our choices give events their shape and God works through people, guiding history to reflect his purposes.
Speaker 1: And so God's like okay, I'm going to make something.
Speaker 1: My purpose, I'm going to make something beautiful out of this clay, this lump of clay that I pull out of the ground.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it will be yet, I don't really care, but I'll make something beautiful out of it.
Speaker 1: And I can say that because I'm God and I'll make sure my will is done.
Speaker 1: So at the end of this thing, I'm going to have you be some beautiful something.
Speaker 1: Now, your part is okay.
Speaker 1: What do you bring to the table?
Speaker 1: And how might you respond?
Speaker 1: There's this give and take, and God's not shocked or surprised, like I don't know what to do with this clay.
Speaker 1: No, I got you.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're marred, I'll keep massaging it.
Speaker 1: Abraham Heschel goes on to say this then, is not a cul-de-sac, nor is guilt a final trap.
Speaker 1: Sin will be washed away by repentance and return and beyond guilt is the dawn of forgiveness.
Speaker 1: We're going to gather in a minute around the table and you're going to come forward and receive the grace and mercy and forgiveness of God in the wafer and in the wine.
Speaker 1: I love it because you don't have to be stuck in this cul-de-sac of sin or brokenness.
Speaker 1: You can find a new way forward because you're like clay in the potter's hands.
Speaker 1: The door is never locked.
Speaker 1: The threat of doom is not the last word, heschel says.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 1: By the way, philippians writes it this way Paul writes to the Philippians, being confident of this that who began a great work in you, who started making you into something nice, he's going to carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Speaker 1: You are not done yet.
Speaker 1: Do you hear me?
Speaker 1: You're not done yet.
Speaker 1: And God is wise, the smartest, wisest, best potter I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 1: He knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: He will take care of you and keep massaging you and working with you, which means that your past does not have to dictate your future.
Speaker 1: Your past wounds your past mistakes your past, or even current sins, the wrong turns, your parents who were not very good, the job you lost, the failed business decision that you made, your failed marriage.
Speaker 1: These things don't have to be the end.
Speaker 1: They don't have to dictate your future, because it's marred, it's spoiled, but we'll make something else out of this.
Speaker 1: This is the redemptive work of God.
Speaker 1: This is resurrection.
Speaker 1: See, clay is being formed.
Speaker 1: That's what you're doing.
Speaker 1: You're being formed in the hand of the potter.
Speaker 1: Remember, it's not a science, it's an art.
Speaker 1: So here's your job, then.
Speaker 1: Okay, now that was the good news.
Speaker 1: Here's some good advice.
Speaker 1: So take this or leave it.
Speaker 1: I'll help you.
Speaker 1: Take it.
Speaker 1: Your job is to remain moldable in the potter's hands.
Speaker 1: It's your job.
Speaker 1: Or, as John writes it just remain in me and I'll remain in you.
Speaker 1: But be pliable, be flexible.
Speaker 1: Here's how you do that.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you three ways.
Speaker 1: One let go of control.
Speaker 1: Stop telling God, god, I don't want to be a bull, I want to be a plate.
Speaker 1: Okay, fine, but just relax and let God shape you how god might see best.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe god knows better than you do and you can look back like, yeah, I know the 10 ways I screwed that up, like.
Speaker 1: We all know that we look back.
Speaker 1: I was so.
Speaker 1: I was being so obstinate there.
Speaker 1: I just what if you let go of control and just even just today, like, okay, god, god, I'm just trusting in you that you're not gonna screw me up.
Speaker 1: Maybe you start there.
Speaker 1: You know, okay, god, and you hold it.
Speaker 1: By the way, the reason we raise our hands in worship, some ways like it's just a sign of surrender.
Speaker 1: It's a physical action when you get, when, if someone were to hold a gun up to you, you would surrender by doing this, it's all worship.
Speaker 1: When you're in worship, you just okay, let go of control.
Speaker 1: By the way, I love this.
Speaker 1: Tim Keller says this most of us think we know better than God about how our lives ought to go.
Speaker 1: Raise your hand.
Speaker 1: If you think I'm just kidding, I'm not going to have you do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know better God.
Speaker 1: You don't know as good as I do.
Speaker 1: If it's not going right, we get anxious, filled with self-pity, scorn, we get skeptical, hard and cynical, but patience and the ability to not worry when things go wrong is a kind of humility.
Speaker 1: Oh man, we don't like being humble, I don't, because it takes humility to say, well, I thought this is how my life ought to go.
Speaker 1: I thought I should be a bull.
Speaker 1: Maybe I shouldn't, though, but what do I know?
Speaker 1: How would I know?
Speaker 1: I can't see what God can see.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's best for me.
Speaker 1: Then Tim Keller says I love this.
Speaker 1: He says it takes pride to be worried.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying To tell God I know how my life ought to go, and I'm afraid that God won't get it right.
Speaker 1: Humility says I don't know.
Speaker 1: You have enough joyful hope, enough belief in the fact that, though weeping tear for the night, joy comes in the morning.
Speaker 1: I know it's not going so well.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know what God's up to, and I know that in the end God will make me into something beautiful, but in the meantime, this is painful, but all right, let's just see what happens.
Speaker 1: So, number one let go of control.
Speaker 1: Number two repent.
Speaker 1: Are there any ways that you're actively walking the wrong direction or rebelling against God, doing things you know you shouldn't be doing?
Speaker 1: Things like that are undermining God's love and plan in your life.
Speaker 1: We do this, we.
Speaker 1: We actively rebel against God and we do things we know we shouldn't do.
Speaker 1: That's called rebellion and sin Like okay, don't do that, because sin destroys.
Speaker 1: So repent, turn around, stop doing those things.
Speaker 1: We'll help you.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're actively undermining God's plans for your own life and doing things you shouldn't be doing, stop doing them and we can help you.
Speaker 1: We're the church, we're helping you.
Speaker 1: So confess your sins.
Speaker 1: Bring, by the way, the only thing you need to bring for communion when you come forward for the meal.
Speaker 1: The only thing you need to bring, not your good works, not your good looks, not your money, not your accomplishments.
Speaker 1: Bring your sins.
Speaker 1: That's all you need to bring.
Speaker 1: Bring them, just dump them up here and leave them and repent.
Speaker 1: Number three, then, lastly, is trust the potter.
Speaker 1: He knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: He's good at this.
Speaker 1: He's a good potter.
Speaker 1: Trust him.
Speaker 1: Trust him, because you can then start over again.
Speaker 1: You can, and again, and again, if you need to.
Speaker 1: And if you need to, you can start over again and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
Speaker 1: Is he going to keep going?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Is he going to keep Central Lutheran Church?
Speaker 1: May you be moldable in the hands of the potter, the great and wise potter.
Speaker 1: May you trust him and his plans for your life.
Speaker 1: May you know that god is calling you home.
Speaker 1: I mean you turn from all the ways in which you're not going that way and just go home.
Speaker 1: It it's safer there, it's better there.
Speaker 1: May you remain moldable in the hands of God.
Speaker 1: Here's what we're going to do.
Speaker 1: We're going to respond in three ways.
Speaker 1: We're going to sing a song, we're going to take communion and also we've got the ushers going to give out some clay.
Speaker 1: Right, ushers, are my ushers with me?
Speaker 1: So everyone's going to get something out of this clay.
Speaker 1: Okay, is that right?
Speaker 1: Are the ushers going to do it?
Speaker 1: They've got, oh God, great.
Speaker 1: So, oh, you've already got it.
Speaker 1: Oh, good grief, thank you, you already got it, thank you.
Speaker 1: So you're going to open it and just add, as the song is going, before or after communion, just make kind of I don't know, just have fun and make something and notice how malleable the clay is.
Speaker 1: And if it's not becoming what you want, okay, well then maybe change it to something different and notice the collaboration between you and the clay.
Speaker 1: Now, this is air dry clay, so it might dry.
Speaker 1: I don't know how fast it will dry, but you've got, you know, you've got probably a good hour or so.
Speaker 1: But then take it home and, like, set it on a windowsill, but maybe a reminder for you of the story that God can take our clay and make us into something beautiful.
Speaker 1: And if you get a picture of it, send it to me.
Speaker 1: I'd love to see what you make and what you think of it and how it speaks to you.
Speaker 1: Okay, amen.