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Hear podcast here: https://anchor.fm/eradio-valverde/episodes/Cracked-Pots-e1n6dm6
1 God told Jeremiah, 2 "Up on your feet! Go to the potter's house. When you get there, I'll tell you what I have to say." 3 So I went to the potter's house, and sure enough, the potter was there, working away at his wheel. 4 Whenever the pot the potter was working on turned out badly, as sometimes happens when you are working with clay, the potter would simply start over and use the same clay to make another pot. 5 Then God's Message came to me: 6 "Can't I do just as this potter does, people of Israel?" God's Decree! "Watch this potter. In the same way that this potter works his clay, I work on you, people of Israel. 7 At any moment I may decide to pull up a people or a country by the roots and get rid of them. 8 But if they repent of their wicked lives, I will think twice and start over with them. 9 At another time I might decide to plant a people or country, 10 but if they don't cooperate and won't listen to me, I will think again and give up on the plans I had for them. 11 "So, tell the people of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem my Message: 'Danger! I'm shaping doom against you, laying plans against you. Turn back from your doomed way of life. Straighten out your lives.' (Jeremiah 18:1-11 The Message Bible_
Here's another sermon prop. Yes, it could be messy, but boy does it drive home the point! A sermon prop is a way to better illustrate a point that a preacher wants to make. (It beats the three points and a poem! IMO). For grins, I asked pastors on Facebook to share sermon props go bad. Interesting reading to say the least! One pastor shared: "A bowl of compost served up to unsuspecting members of the congregation who were invited to sit at a formal dinner setting. The idea was to create a sense experience of the disgusting nature of sin from God’s perspective, but it worked too well because the people became nauseous when they saw the maggots crawling on their plates. I didn’t know there were maggots until I saw them at the same time as the 'guests'."
In this case, God invites the prophet Jeremiah to make a trip to the local potter's house. So, the prophet obeys and finds himself there and sees the potter working away at his wheel and sees he's trying to make a pot and saw that it was going very bad, and he could stop and remake it as a new pot. Then God spoke to the prophet, "Can't I do just as this potter does, people of Israel?" God continues, "Watch this potter. In the same way that this potter works his clay, I work on you, people of Israel. At any moment I may decide to pull up a people or a country by the roots and get rid of them. But if they repent of their wicked lives, I will think twice and start over with them. At another time I might decide to plant a people or country, but if they don't cooperate and won't listen to me, I will think again and give up on the plans I have for them." The warning is that God is working against them.
Imagine being at the table in the above sermon prop. You are seated awaiting a delicious meal and you are served with a "disgusting nature of sin from God's perspective," and you begin to understand why God, as Potter, would reshape and reform the pot. Israel was a cracked pot and had a history of repeating the same disgusting acts of straying from God and joyfully wallowing in their sin. Their idea is that they are doing what they want, and are pleasing themselves, but the reality is that your plate is not of food, but of compost complete with maggots! You begin to understand why God would want to re-do His people. Friends, sin is ugly, no matter how we try to paint it or portray it. Sin leads to death and from what we know about sin, it is still infested with maggots and waste, and it leads not to life. God's plan was to lead us to life, even from the first pages, and somehow we take ahold of the markers and start messing up the clean pages with our ideas and wishes and we find ourselves alienated from God and life itself. In re-watching Jurassic Park, there is a scene where the park's founder and owner, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is reflecting on his "creation," namely the dinosaur DNA mutated with frog's DNA dinosaurs of his theme park, and the flaws in it speaks of the next time he creates the species, he wants it to be flawless, because the entire park and the renegade reaction of these "new" dinosaurs went so wrong. And I thought about the mind of God as God reflects on His people, the people of Israel and their never-ending disobedience against God. What would it take to bring all creation back to faithfulness? What would it take to bring you and me back into faithful servants of God?
PRAYER: Loving God, we have strayed often and far from You, yet still you welcome back those of us who repent and seek to be back in Thy grace. Grant to us a new opportunity to serve and to love; for we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! YOUR CALL TO ACTION: Admit you're a cracked pot, if you are, and put yourself in the Potter's hands to remake you new.
Receive my blessings of love and peace,
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
