Blog # 346 The Potter and the Clay

Blog# 346  The Potter and the Clay

              May our faith in Jesus fill our hearts with joy, and may our knowledge and love of the Lord Jesus grow stronger and deeper as the years go on!

                The eighteenth Chapter of the book of Jeremiah contains that beautiful and well known passage in which the prophet describes God as a potter and His people as clay to be formed into a vessel of beauty and usefulness. We are given the image of God shaping His people according to a plan in His mind for them. Though the passage directly concerns nations and kingdoms before the Lord, it can also be applied to individuals.
                   Each of us has been created by God because He loves us. I remember hearing a preacher tell a group of people that none of them was wanted by his or her parents.  It sounds false and shocking at first, but he insisted upon the truth of his statement and explained it very well. He pointed out how our parents did not know us as such,  and therefore could not really have wanted us as their  child or their friend. They may have wanted a baby very much, and we happened to be that baby, and when we came they began to know us and to love us, now by the very name they would give us as their son or daughter and as their friend.
                   But with God it is different. From all eternity God knew us 'by name'.  God called us into
our mother's womb and from our mother's womb. Every moment of our lives each of us is known and loved by God. He is the potter of our lives, and we are His clay.
                     What a difference this insight would make if  we would make ourselves aware of it and be conscious of it in our daily experience of life.  Nothing or no person would enter or leave our life without God being present and even being in control.  God does guarantee our freedom and it is  a mystery we ourselves cannot understand fully, but even in our freedom God is the potter and we are the clay. 
               Each of us has been created by God because God loves us.  We are not alone.  God is with us, molding us, shaping  us, and forming us according to the pattern He has determined for us from all eternity. Among the seven billion people alive on earth today each of us is a unique one of them.  What a joy it is to know this, and to walk, hand in hand, as it were, up every mountain and down every valley along with God, each step of the way home!   Thank You, Jesus!