So far, God has taken us on a journey through which He has given us a beautiful glimpse of His heart toward us. We have seen His love through the Gospel story, the bestowing of His Holy Spirit upon us as His chosen people, the way He chooses to use us to accomplish things in His name, and the fantastic grace He shows us by being the one that empowers us to abide. Sometimes it can be easy to read these things and have the head knowledge of its truth, but the thought of truly letting go and allowing God to shape us in the way He sees fit can feel daunting. I’m sure the same angst was felt by the Israelites as God called them to trust Him with their refinement through Jeremiah. God did this through imagery of Him being the potter and they the clay.
Read Jeremiah 18:1-6.
Just as He called them to trust, we must do the same. Take a moment and examine your posture. Ask the Lord to help you shed your defenses and lay yourself in humility for Him to create what He pleases in you.
Now reflect over the process of crafting pottery. No step can be skipped. It must be created with patience as it is slowly formed moment by moment to the potter’s desire. The clay is under the authority of the potter as he skillfully creates it into a masterpiece. The potter, intimately aware of its needs in order that it can be formed in the way He wishes.
Read Matthew 6:25-34.
This trust we are called to is a step by step, moment by moment kind of trust: tomorrow can worry about itself. The Lord is calling you in this moment to be present and place your faith in Him now. Not looking behind and not looking ahead. Right now. That’s it. Yet in the same breath, just as we have found before, it is the Lord that will sustain us to do this.
Andrew Murray in Abiding in Christ says, “Abiding in Jesus is not a work that needs our minds to be engaged each moment, or our attention to be directly and actively occupied with it. It is an entrusting of ourselves to the keeping of Eternal Love, in the faith that it will abide near us and with its holy presence watch over us and ward off evil, even when we have to be intently occupied with other things. In this way the heart has rest, peace, and joy in the consciousness of being kept when it cannot keep itself.” (p.82)
Isaiah 27:3 (KNJV) paints the imagery of God’s protection beautifully as it says,
PRAYER
Finish your time by thanking God for His provision and ask Him to increase your faith to trust Him moment to moment.
