Marred Clay

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD : "Go down to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message." So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. 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.

Then the word of the LORD came to me: "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?" declares the LORD. "Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.
(Jeremiah 18:1-10 – NIV)

There is so much here that it's hard to know where to begin. I could talk about nations repenting like Ninevah did in the book of Jonah. I could talk about nations that are blessed by God turning away and abandoning God. I could speak of how God actually changes his actions based on the actions of nations.

But I'm going to talk about marred clay. Have you ever seen a potter working on a wheel? The clay starts out as just a lump, but soon, under the pressure of the potter's hands, it begins to rise and form into a cup, a pitcher, a jar, a bowl. Sometimes, though, there's a weak spot in the clay, or the potter presses a bit hard, and the clay collapses in upon itself. What was going to be a beautiful vessel is suddenly just a misshapen lump of clay again.

So, does the potter yell at the clay, pluck it off the wheel and throw it away? No. He changes his strategy. Sometimes he starts over, patting the clay back into its initial shape before trying again. Sometimes he takes what was going to be a tall vase, and makes it into a short, broad bowl. The point is, he makes something useful of the clay that was marred in his hands.

We are all marred clay. The potter picked us up out of the mud (what do you think clay is?) He took us and began to lovingly shape us into a beautiful vessel, fit for the home of a king. Instead, through our own failures, and through the action of God's enemy, we were marred in the potter's hands. We didn't fulfill the destiny that God originally had for us.

But God does not throw us away. He wastes nothing, not even the sins that marred our lives and turned us away from his original plan for us. He uses everything in our lives to build us up. He takes every sin, every virtue, every bad decision, and every good one and makes something to bring himself glory. It may not be the thing it could have been, but it will bring glory to God.

No matter what you have done in your life, God can use you. And he starts anew right where you are.

Joy and Sorrow

Yesterday I received some very bad news. My aunt Ginny, who has been very much a mother to me in the past 30 years, raised my sister, and has been a grandmother to my children, has terminal cancer. What she initially thought was a rotator cuff problem turned out to be a bone tumor, which was actually a secondary tumor, having spread from one in her lung. We got through the initial shock of that, and she was starting radiation for the shoulder, when more tests turned up tumors in her brain, liver, adrenal gland, and lymph system. The estimate is that she has between 3 and 12 months to live.

Needless to say, it has been a hard time for all of the family, none moreso than her husband Jim. I've been fighting a sense of deadness over this news. I haven't really been in denial, but I've had trouble grasping the reality of it. This is a vital, vibrant woman. She has had some tough times in her life, but has always fought back hard, bringing joy and blessing to all those around her. And she will continue to do that, I'm sure. It's not within her to be morose and self-pitying. Her biggest concern is for those she will be leaving.

It is hard for me to imagine a world without Ginny. She has been Nana to my kids since my oldest was born. After my parents died, she traveled down to Mexico to take care of my sister Alison, who was injured in the crash that killed our parents. She and Alison have shared a special bond since then. When my new wife and I moved to this area, we naturally leaned on Ginny, and really chose to go to Richland Hills Church of Christ because she was there. What a blessing that has been!

It was in this semi-dazed, somewhat mournful frame of mind that I went to our Wednesday worship service. I spoke to a couple of people coming in, answering their "How are you's?" truthfully with "I've been better." As the worship started, take a guess what the first song was.

The Joy of the Lord.

Here I am, grieving over the news I still have not completely taken in, and we sing The Joy of the Lord. If you're not familiar with the song, these are the beginning lyrics.

The joy of the Lord will be my strength

I will not falter, I will not faint.

He is my shepherd, I am not afraid

For the joy of the Lord is my strength.

It continues in that vein. As you might guess, it is a very joyful, exuberant song. Not exactly in line with my mood, right? And yet as we sang the spirit of the song overtook me, and I began to sing wholeheartedly and with conviction. Before long I lost myself in the joy of the Lord, in praise and worship of the one whose gift is joy.

Joy comes not from easy times, or from a life that lacks hardship. There is no such life. Joy is sometimes unexpected, but always welcome. It can come through new life, as when a child is born. It can come through beauty, as when the sun shines through clouds to highlight a flower. It can come through laughter, through meeting old friends, through victory, through learning. It can even come through sorrow.

I am reminded of the time the family had gathered for my Grandma Gill's funeral. It was a time of sorrow, to be sure. We were saying goodbye, and that always hurts. But a time of joy also came out of that sorrow. Several of us gathered at Grandma's house (a trailer, really), and went through her things. Understand that Grandma was not wealthy by any means. She had no great store of possessions, and what she did have was of no great quality. But there was meaning there. We all found little things that meant something to us, often gifts we had given to her and Grandpa over the years. I came away with a cheap weather set, barometer, thermometer, and hygrometer, which I had give to Grandpa for Christmas many years before. We found old snapshots, jars of Grandma's pear preserves, rusty knives, beat up fishing lures. All worthless, all precious. And we found joy in the midst of sorrow.

That's not quite what it was like for me as I sang last night. The joy I found came not from memories. It came entirely as a gift from God. I cannot truly explain it, but I did feel joy in the moment, joy in praising God, and strength that came from somewhere else. It certainly didn't come from me. It didn't eliminate my sorrow. But it made the sorrow seem more distant and infinitely more bearable. It's odd, but joy and sorrow can coexist. But joy so outshines sorrow. Sorrow becomes like the moon in daylight. You can see it, but it's not the light source.

There's more here, I know. There will be more sorrow coming. That is the condition in which we live. And there is more God wants to teach me about both joy and sorrow. Because sorrow, too, can be from God. I pray I am open to the teaching. And I pray peace for Ginny, Jim, and our whole family. I ask for your prayers as well.

One Day at a Time

Ask anyone in recovery, whether it’s a member of Alcoholic Anonymous, a person in drug rehab, or a man struggling with porn addiction, and they’ll say this: you have to do it one day at a time. It’s no good looking far into the future and imagining what it’s like to be free of whatever addiction or demon besets us. We can only live in the moment, and do our best to make good decisions today, this day. We’ve all heard this so often that it has become something of a cliché. One day at a time, we hear from counselors, from friends, from mentors, from out accountability partners. We hear it so much that we are a bit dead to it.

But it’s not mere cliché. For that matter, a saying only becomes a cliché because it contains truth. If there were no truth there, it wouldn’t be repeated enough to become cliché. A cliché is a proverb that has had a lot of success.

In the case of “One day at a time,” the cliché originates with . . . Jesus. He said it in Matthew 6:-34:

“Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us not to worry about tomorrow. It’s another way of saying one day at a time.

And it’s great wisdom. We cannot change tomorrow. Yet. We can only change tomorrow when it comes to us. We must receive the blessings and trials of each day as they come.

Easy said, right? Not so easy to do. But, really, what else can we do? We are all locked within time. Not a one of us can reach forward to tomorrow or backward to yesterday.

Also, look at the verses just before this in Matthew. Jesus is talking about worry and how it is contrary to dependence on God. The pagans worry, he says. But God knows what we need, and we should be about seeking the Kingdom.

So, we should deal with one day at a time when it comes to our food and our clothing. Makes sense that it should apply to the strength we need to resist temptation or do the right thing, too.

For that matter, even God deals with each day as it comes. I know, you’re going to say that God is outside of time, that he’s eternal. A day is as a thousand years to God.

And you’re right. God is outside of time. But we are not. So much of what God does uses, even depends on us. He used Noah, and Abraham, and Jacob, and Joseph, and Moses, and Joshua, and David, and Solomon . . . you get the point. God is outside of time, but we are locked in it. And God has always, since he created Adam and Eve, worked with the people he created. Sinful though we are, frail and foolish as we are, he works with us. He created us to be his allies. And since the day when we turned against him, he has worked to make us strong allies, soldiers in his war against Satan and the third of the angels who rebelled with him.

There can be only one reason for this. He loves us.

And because he loves us, he provides for us, works through us, and lives in us.

One day at a time.

So, the next time someone tells you to live one day at a time, take heart. Know that God is living this day with you. Look beyond the cliché, and see the one who made this day. He’ll make another one tomorrow, and give you everything you need to get through it.

Resisting the Devil

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7

Something I heard recently has bearing on my last post, Pray Hard. I am very familiar with this verse, and I've quoted it to a lot of people. Unfortunately, my understanding of this verse (and I'm not alone) has been somewhat inadequate. It all stems from translation and not knowing the culture in which this was originally written. Thanks to Patrick Mead for pointing this out to me in one of his recent lessons.

There are a lot of sporting terms in the New Testament. That's hardly surprising. The Greeks, if you remember, started the Olympics, and they had conquered everything from the Adriatic to India. Greek was the language of trade and literature, and Greek social customs and terms had filtered out into all the cultures they touched.

When James speaks of resisting the devil, he is using a sporting term. It is from a type of wrestling where the participants wrestle to the death. It had a specific meaning to James' readers, but over the intervening years and through translation we have lost that meaning.

That kind of puts a different slant on "Resist the devil," doesn't it. We have had this idea of just saying, "get away, Satan", and he heads for the hills, screaming like a little girl. That couldn't be further from the truth. What James is saying is that we have to fight hard against Satan, resisting him even to the death, and he will flee. We have to be willing to give everything, even our lives, in the battle against him.

Really, this should not be shocking to us. Look at 1 Peter 5:8-9:

Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

I don't know about you, but I've never lived in a place where lions roam. We think of lions as those big, placid cats at the zoo. Those who live with lions know to fear them. An adult lion can be over 450 pounds, and can kill and carry off a grown man with as little trouble as a cat playing with a mouse. Does it make any sense that you can just resist a lion with a glance or a word and it will leave you alone? In addition, look at the last part of those verses. Do you think those folks being persecuted could just say, "leave me alone, Devil," and their persecution stopped?

Look also at Hebrews 12:4:

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

Umm . . . didn't that say something about shedding blood?

This is not a picnic day in the park we have signed up for. It's a battle. God is at war, and we are soldiers in the line. Nobody said it would be easy. There will be casualties. Our leader and savior was crucified. He told us that we needed to pick up a cross to follow him. I think that might be a hint.

Pray Hard

When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. "Why are you sleeping?" he asked them. "Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation."
Luke 22: 45-46

It's funny how you can read a passage of scripture repeatedly throughout your life, and then one day it will just jump out at you. That happened with this passage. And I wasn't even reading the passage. I was actually listening to Luke on my iPod.

The first thing that hit me was that the disciples were exhausted from sorrow. They were grieving because Jesus was grieving, and that wore them out. If you remember, this was in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed so intensely that his "sweat fell like drops of blood." Apparently, the disciples weren't up to this. They fell asleep.

But Jesus was up to it. That tells me what a mighty man Jesus was. The disciples were a rough lot. Most of them were zealots, most of them men who made their living with their hands and their strength. But Jesus prayed intensely while they fell asleep.

But the thing that hit me hardest was what Jesus said to them. "Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation." How many times have I read that and missed it? None of us wants to fall into temptation. We all want to have the strength to resist. So, what's the secret?

Pray.

That's it. Just pray. I'm assuming that Jesus wouldn't have told the disciples to do it unless it was effective against temptation. Pretty safe assumption, wouldn't you agree? There we have it in Jesus' own words. Pray so you will not fall into temptation. Considering what Jesus is going through here, I suspect he's not talking about a quick "Help me, God. Amen." He's talking about struggling in prayer, wrestling in prayer. Praying against resistance.

Praying hard.

Generally, we fall into sin because we are weak, or because we are willful. We've all seen both sides of that coin.

But maybe, just maybe we didn't pray enough, or hard enough.

Bring Your Hoe

Notice there's an "e" on the end of that word. I'm talking about the garden implement, not . . . never mind.

I was talking with a friend today, a man who has been at Wild at Heart Boot Camp a couple of times. We were talking about how Satan deceives us, and how we miss the glory that God sees in us.

At the Boot Camp, they show that scene from Braveheart where William Wallace is riding back and forth in front of the assembled Scotsmen, inspiring them to stand and do battle with Edward the Longshanks' soldiers. It is an amazing, stirring scene, one that makes us want to stand up and shout, "Freeeeedom!"

The Boot Camp instructor for that session, a man who has been involved in Wild at Heart for years, confessed something to them that day. He said that when he sees that scene, it's hard for him to put himself in the picture as one of the brave warriors at the front of the line. He sees himself not as a William Wallace with his greatsword, or as one of his companions with a battle axe or a mace. Instead, he sees himself as "that little scrawny guy in the third row carrying a hoe."

That was evidence to him that we really don't see the glory God has in mind for us. We don't see how we reflect God's glory, how we are allies with God, warriors in the battle against Satan. We're not the big, brawny soldiers, but the little shrimpy guys, poorly armed, untrained, inadequate.

I'm going to have to take exception with that. Not with the fact that we don't see God's glory in ourselves clearly. That's pretty evident for most of us. We need others to show us how that glory is reflected in us. It's one of the reason we need true friends, brothers and sisters who can come alongside us and show us what we really are.

No, what I take exception with is that the little guy with the hoe was somehow less glorious than Wallace and his companions. Far from it. That little, scrawny guy was there.

He willingly chose to come to the battle. He willingly chose to stay and fight. He didn't have armor, or a shield, or even a real weapon. He wasn't big and strong. He wasn't well-trained. Yet he chose to expose himself to the deadly shower of arrows the English launched toward him. He stood his ground when the heavy cavalry charged, shaking the very ground. He even chose to taunt the overwhelmingly superior English by mooning them.

Talk about glory! That guy waded into a maelstrom of battle, swinging his hoe. He was a man's man, full to the brim with bravery and boldness.

We are in a battle. Not all of us can be Braveheart. In fact, few of us can be. Not all of us even have a proper weapon. But we can all bring our hoes, rakes, and pitchforks to the battle. We can all stand between the enemy and our families. We can all fight alongside the greatest hero the world will ever know. We are allies with Jesus in the battle against Satan.

Bring your hoe, brothers.

A Man After God's Own Heart?

In 2 Samuel 11 and 12 is one of the most amazing stories of the Bible. David, the king of Israel, a man after God’s own heart, the little boy who had enough faith to take on Goliath, commits adultery and murder. He takes Bathsheba, probably against her will (who can resist the king?), and after finding out she’s pregnant, tries to get her husband Uriah to sleep with her so the baby can be passed off as his. When that doesn’t work, he orders Joab to set Uriah up so he’ll be killed in the battle.

Now, what is amazing is not that David committed these terrible sins. What is amazing is that God forgave him. Not only did God forgive him, but David is held up in scripture as one of the heroes of the faith. And to add to the strangeness, God continued David’s line on the throne by making Solomon, the son of Bathsheba, king after David.

Now, that is scandalous to the nth degree. Look at what he did! He committed adultery (maybe rape), and murder! He tried to sweep it all under the rug. Does God not care about sin?

Hardly. There were terrible consequences for David and for those around him because of his sin. The son of his union with Bathsheba died. David’s concubines were taken by Absalom, who had sex with them in a tent on the palace roof so everyone would know what was going on. Absalom took the entire kingdom during his rebellion, and many, many people died.

Oh, God cares about sin. He hates our sin. It’s something he cannot help. Sin is simply the opposite of God’s nature.

But he loves us more than he hates our sin. Because he loves us, he does not keep us from sinning, like robots. He permits us to either choose him, or to choose sin. At this point in his life, David chose sin. But look at what he wrote after that:

Psalm 51
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.

Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.

There’s a lot more, and it would be a good passage for all of us to memorize. But I really want you to consider the note at the top, where it begins "For the director of music." David published and distributed this Psalm. He went public with his sin. He confessed it freely, and then he wrote a Psalm about his sin and sent it to the director of music to be performed.

Don’t hold back. Don’t let shame keep you from proclaiming the grace and freedom you have received. We, too, can be men and women after God’s own heart. In spite of our sin.