O Lord, You are our Father. We are the clay, and You are the potter. We all are formed by Your hand. (Isaiah 64:8 NLT)
We are in the Lord’s hands, and being in His
hands we are in the hands of a Potter Who knows what He is after... first of all, the vessel is in the potter, and then
eventually the potter is in the vessel. What we mean is this. That before ever
the potter starts, the vessel is in his mind, in his heart very clearly. The
pattern is not something objective, the vessel is already a complete thing in
him; and then he gets to work upon it and when he is finished, he is in the
vessel he has wrought. What was in Him has come out in it. We say of
people’s work: “I can see who made that, it is just like them.” “That is just
like So-and-so to make a thing like that.” Yes, He is in His work, He is in the
vessel that He makes, and that is just what He is doing. Sometimes that clay has
to be pressed down to a shapeless mass, broken. It is not showing all that He
intended it to show, there are defects and flaws, and so He crushes it down to
shapelessness. A mass without shape. But it is to start again to get something
more perfect than has been before, in which He Himself is.
May He give us grace to endure whatever the
trial may be, along whatever line of metaphor, the wind, the blaze, supreme
heat, or pressure of His hand, all of which is to get us into a place where we
cannot be moved, where hell cannot shake us, where His power is made manifest as
triumphant over all the power of the enemy.