Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Dial Daily Bread

Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread":

It’s a never failing encouragement to “arise and go down to the potter’s house ... to hear [the Lord’s] words” (Jer. 18:2).

 

(a) You are a “vessel” He has been forming on the potter’s wheel. He has a happy purpose for you to be useful in His great work of lighting the earth with the glory of His “everlasting gospel” message.

(b) No matter who you are, as a vessel you have in some way been “marred,” because “all” of us “have sinned, and [do] come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). The only “vessel” the Potter has succeeded in turning on His wheel that has turned out perfect is Jesus Christ Himself. His experience on the “wheel” is illustrated in Isaiah 50:4, 5, where the Father awakened Jesus “morning by morning ... to hear as the learned.” The Father taught Him during those early hours. He constantly resisted our temptation to be “rebellious” and “turn away back.”

(c) The divine Savior-Potter never throws any marred vessel (us) in the trash, no matter how lowly it may have become in its being “marred.” There’s always a useful purpose left that you and I can serve. There is the “good news” encouragement.

(d) Always the {Potter “[makes] it again into another vessel, as it seem[s] good to the Potter to make” (v. 4). This is redemption in action.

(e) Every “vessel” is made to receive something, from which it can be poured out in some act of service to others. It’s a container to be filled and emptied continuously.

(f) But the “vessels” are living beings who have been given freedom of choice who can “resist God’s will.” “But who are you, my friend” asks Paul, “to talk back to God? A clay pot does not ask the man who made it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” (Rom. 9:19, 20, GNB).

(g) Obviously, the “clay pot” needs to be reconciled in heart to the Potter! This is accomplished in an amazing way.

(h) The Potter Himself has become clay; the Son of God Himself has emptied Himself in those seven steps of condescension in Philippians 2:5-8, “even [to] the death of the cross” which involved enduring being “made” the “curse of God” (cf. Gal. 3:13). Tried and tempted, feeling “forsaken” by God, He has known to the full what no other human being in history has known to the full—what it feels like for the Potter to throw someone into the trash. He “took” upon His sinless nature our “sinful flesh” that He might “in every way be tempted that we are, but did not sin” (Heb 4:15). Then He died the world’s “second death” for every man (2:9), so that no one of us might have to feel what it’s like to be thrown in the eternal trash heap (cf. Rev. 20:15).

(i) Each of us is an empty vessel each new morning of life. But “God has poured out His love [agape] into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God’s gift to us” (Rom. 5:5, GNB). He fills each empty, willing vessel.

Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.

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