Jeremiah 18:3-4 – Watching and Waiting in Faith
3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. 4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.
“What children we are," admits Lew Wallace in Ben-Hur, "even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”
Jeremiah could have displayed the peevishness of a child in the interim that comes down to us as Jeremiah 18:3-4. He was called from Jerusalem's gate, from a dressing down of the prominent of the culture at the end of Jeremiah 17.
He takes with grace, or at least with silence what men might view as a demotion to a smaller, more mundane venue of the potter's house, and indeed makes allowances for the Almighty with his mature willingness to listen rather than proclaim from there.
The childishness still at times extant in me would expect immediate gratification for such indulgent obedience. I've done my part, I've claimed, somewhere between checking off mental boxes with clinical precision and coloring with melodrama the supposed hardships of my obedience.
MY state of the heart in Jeremiah 18:3-4 interims, gaps between the unmistakably obvious footsteps of the Lord would have been so full of my fulminations that I would have been too preoccupied to write down what the Lord DID show me in more subtle forms.
Making allowances for my storm of indignation of indeterminate duration, making, in the diagnosis of Romans 13:14 as it warns us against the search for artificial stimulation, provision for the flesh, I would have assured God and anyone else who would listen that I had seen this play before. I've seen a potter. There's nothing else to be learned here. NEXT!
Exactly on cue from Greg Carlson's Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You, "As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck." I practice that hasty filing system with the daily doings of those I say I care about. I certainly would with the manufacturing process of some tradesman.
Blessedly, Jeremiah, whose emotions including impatience demonstrated in Jeremiah 17 are at least as strong as mine, channels them through his journalist's pen rather than his personal pique. Absent the auditory revelation that has been promised, he writes what he does perceive. Amid the seemingly ordinary, he obediently, even reverently, sets the stage for what he believes the Lord will show him next.
Let's consider also what this isn't. Faith-filled obedience in the waiting doesn't turn Jeremiah into a sappy celebrant of everything to the point of hyper-optimistic meaninglessness, to the point of compromising his credibility. When the potter finds a flaw and has to start over, Jeremiah says so. This, perhaps, is an aspect of his previous seasoning in the Lord's service from which we could benefit. Jeremiah has seen flaws before, has said so, has grieved over them.
He already knows before he gets to the potter's house that God's glory will come without Jeremiah's turning from faithful, evenhanded prophet to PR shill, either for his country, for Jeremiah Consulting, Inc., or for God. There is a place to call life as we see it, but then to keep these things in a format where we can allow God to shape the narrative from the raw material we accumulate.
Luke says twice that faithful Mary it's hidden unfolding aspects of God's glory in Christ's in her heart. Perhaps we, more distractible, more emotional, need to write them down as we wait for God to help us understand hereafter with more explanation and revelation. By such disciplined expectation, we channel our acquisitiveness.
We show up hungry, expecting to be filled, whether by the hearty but plain fare of everyday routines or by some particularly memorable epiphany. Henry Adams, son and grandson of presidents, was both smarter and more jaded than we are, brothers and sisters in Christ, and as far as I can tell did not see through the eyes of faith which Christ grants. Yet he insisted in The Education of Henry Adams, "The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express.”
Do we, then, soak our hearts in the glory of the Lord as we insist on perceiving it in a sunrise, a phone call, or a frown? Or, do we insist on our self-generated and perpetuated rights to a bigger, better show before we are responsive? The wheels of God's sovereign glory are moving as surely as was the equipment of this ordinary potter. Are our hearts, our pens, and our mouths moving in response?
“What children we are," admits Lew Wallace in Ben-Hur, "even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”
Jeremiah could have displayed the peevishness of a child in the interim that comes down to us as Jeremiah 18:3-4. He was called from Jerusalem's gate, from a dressing down of the prominent of the culture at the end of Jeremiah 17.
He takes with grace, or at least with silence what men might view as a demotion to a smaller, more mundane venue of the potter's house, and indeed makes allowances for the Almighty with his mature willingness to listen rather than proclaim from there.
The childishness still at times extant in me would expect immediate gratification for such indulgent obedience. I've done my part, I've claimed, somewhere between checking off mental boxes with clinical precision and coloring with melodrama the supposed hardships of my obedience.
MY state of the heart in Jeremiah 18:3-4 interims, gaps between the unmistakably obvious footsteps of the Lord would have been so full of my fulminations that I would have been too preoccupied to write down what the Lord DID show me in more subtle forms.
Making allowances for my storm of indignation of indeterminate duration, making, in the diagnosis of Romans 13:14 as it warns us against the search for artificial stimulation, provision for the flesh, I would have assured God and anyone else who would listen that I had seen this play before. I've seen a potter. There's nothing else to be learned here. NEXT!
Exactly on cue from Greg Carlson's Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You, "As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck." I practice that hasty filing system with the daily doings of those I say I care about. I certainly would with the manufacturing process of some tradesman.
Blessedly, Jeremiah, whose emotions including impatience demonstrated in Jeremiah 17 are at least as strong as mine, channels them through his journalist's pen rather than his personal pique. Absent the auditory revelation that has been promised, he writes what he does perceive. Amid the seemingly ordinary, he obediently, even reverently, sets the stage for what he believes the Lord will show him next.
Let's consider also what this isn't. Faith-filled obedience in the waiting doesn't turn Jeremiah into a sappy celebrant of everything to the point of hyper-optimistic meaninglessness, to the point of compromising his credibility. When the potter finds a flaw and has to start over, Jeremiah says so. This, perhaps, is an aspect of his previous seasoning in the Lord's service from which we could benefit. Jeremiah has seen flaws before, has said so, has grieved over them.
He already knows before he gets to the potter's house that God's glory will come without Jeremiah's turning from faithful, evenhanded prophet to PR shill, either for his country, for Jeremiah Consulting, Inc., or for God. There is a place to call life as we see it, but then to keep these things in a format where we can allow God to shape the narrative from the raw material we accumulate.
Luke says twice that faithful Mary it's hidden unfolding aspects of God's glory in Christ's in her heart. Perhaps we, more distractible, more emotional, need to write them down as we wait for God to help us understand hereafter with more explanation and revelation. By such disciplined expectation, we channel our acquisitiveness.
We show up hungry, expecting to be filled, whether by the hearty but plain fare of everyday routines or by some particularly memorable epiphany. Henry Adams, son and grandson of presidents, was both smarter and more jaded than we are, brothers and sisters in Christ, and as far as I can tell did not see through the eyes of faith which Christ grants. Yet he insisted in The Education of Henry Adams, "The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express.”
Do we, then, soak our hearts in the glory of the Lord as we insist on perceiving it in a sunrise, a phone call, or a frown? Or, do we insist on our self-generated and perpetuated rights to a bigger, better show before we are responsive? The wheels of God's sovereign glory are moving as surely as was the equipment of this ordinary potter. Are our hearts, our pens, and our mouths moving in response?
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