◄ The Potter in the Vessel ►

O Lord, You are our Father. We are the clay, and You are the potter. We all are formed by Your hand. (Isaiah 64:8 NLT)

We are in the Lord hands, and being in His hands we are in the hands of a Potter Who knows what He is after... first of all, the vessel is in the potter, and then eventually the potter is in the vessel. What we mean is this, that before ever the potter starts, the vessel is in his mind, in his heart very clearly. The pattern is not something objective, the vessel is already a complete thing in him; and then he gets to work upon it and when he is finished, he is in the vessel he has wrought. What was in Him has come out in it. We say of people work: can see who made that, it is just like them.hat is just like So-and-so to make a thing like that.Yes, He is in His work, He is in the vessel that He makes, and that is just what He is doing. Sometimes that clay has to be pressed down to a shapeless mass, broken. It is not showing all that He intended it to show, there are defects and flaws, and so He crushes it down to shapelessness. A mass without shape. But it is to start again to get something more perfect than has been before, in which He Himself is.

May He give us grace to endure whatever the trial may be, along whatever line of metaphor, the wind, the blaze, supreme heat, or pressure of His hand, all of which is to get us into a place where we cannot be moved, where hell cannot shake us, where His power is made manifest as triumphant over all the power of the enemy.