Scripture: Jeremiah 18:1-6
Journal: How do you sense God most wants to mold and shape you in the year
ahead? What do you sense he is trying to
make you into? How will you yield
yourself, your plans, and your will to his shaping hand in the days to come?
Reflection:
So often in this life we hear that “we are the
artists of our lives” and thus we should “make of them whatever we will.” But here in Jeremiah we see another paradigm
altogether. It is not we who are the
artists, but God. He is the Master
Artist. He is the one who is constantly
molding and forming and shaping us into the beautiful creation that he dreamt
into being before the foundations of the world.
Ours, therefore, is not to take our lives into our own hands and make
something beautiful of them. Ours,
instead, is to yield to the work of the Master Potter, and to be completely
open to his wild and wonderful creativity.
Ours is to make time and space for him to get his strong and tender
hands on us, and to become that beautiful work of art that he imagined us to be
long, long ago.
That is the invitation of
this New Year. For our lives are his and
not our own. This New Year is not about
making a lot of resolutions and plans and decisions, but about doing whatever
he would have us to do, and about being whoever he would have us to be, and
becoming whatever he would have us to become.
For he is the Potter and we are the clay.
Prayer
Closing
Prayer: Creator God and artist of my life, I thank you
for not giving up on me, tossing me out with the trash. Instead, you take my broken and spoiled
life—the misshapen acts, cracked motives, and lumpy spirit—and rework it
all! Press me into your purposes,
created and re-formed for your glory.
Amen. (Seeking God’s Face by Philip Reinders)
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