The tension is mounting here. Students all over the area are anticipating our return to this school, whether grudgingly or excitedly. What's even more urgent-- the days are falling off the countdown even quicker this month.
This will be a test. As with every major step forward in life, this school year will shake out what we've decided to keep in our souls. Sure, we can allow God to be the potter to our clay. We respond joyfully, like good disciples, to our shaping. However, a vessel in this state is absolutely worthless.
It is made whole in the fire.
How will we react to the heat? The intensity of the kiln of our lives, will it leave us cracked? Split, disfigured, useless? Will we discover that our preparation was flawed, leaving us to deal with such gross inequities and an inherent inability to cope? Will we be stricken by despair in regard to our new-found worthlessness?
No.
We will be solidified. We will be transfigured. Our souls, in their fragility, will contain the joy and love of the living God. We will see with our own eyes what God has decided we will become, and we will be overjoyed at the sight of the virtuosity of his intensional craftsmanship. But for this to occur, one thing is certain:
He must be the potter.
No one else can take our most troubling, depressing, recurring-nightmare-causing issues and form them into such, as beautiful as this. We must stare down our wills on the dust-swept roads of our hearts. We must order our sin to be put to death. We must be willing to be put in the fire.
The prayer of Hezekiah, a man in the fire:
"O Lord, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; listen to the words Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God.
It is true, O Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their lands. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by men's hands. Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God."
Hezekiah had no reservations in his trust in God, even with an incredibly mighty and insulting Assyrian army breathing down his neck-- threatening to destroy his nation, his wealth, and his power. He trustingly admits that he is not the potter. He puts the situation into the hands of a god that was not created, but creates. I don't want to ruin the ending for you. I will say that Isaiah got involved, and this king came out of the fire as a beaming, glowing hot, bright red vessel of God's glory.
2 Kings 18-20 tell the story, and I highly recommend it.
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