Good Morning!
When I was a kid, I got a box of clay one time. It had four different colors blocks of
clay. It kind of looked like sticks of
butter. You could take it and then you
had to “warm it up” that was to roll it in your hands until it became
pliable. Once it was pliable, then you
could form it into different shapes. It
was fun to work with but my actual shapes were not quite as good as my
imagination. I had visions of being a
Michelangelo but I ended up more like the turtle than the artist.
It takes
talent, patience, an artistic flair, and a passion to be a good sculptor. It takes an eye that sees what this blob of
clay can be. Michelangelo once said that
“he saw an angel in the block of stone and chiseled til I set him free” That is
quite the skill and it displays a little of what God does for us through his
creative process.
In this
process we see two things about God. First,
we see him as the God who is willing to get his hands dirty in our life and
secondly, we can see this creative process as an ongoing event.
In the
creation of the rest of God’s works; he spoke and it was. Yet here we see God taking his time to mold
and shape you to be the creature that he wants us to be. With the creation of Adam, he had the perfect
creature. It was shaped right and it
filled its role in creation perfectly.
Then Adam sinned and he began to add extra clay to his existence. He padded this perfect creation with excess
selfishness, excess jealousy, excess greed, with excess hatred. All of this excess went to block his vision
of God and Adam lost sight of all that God had done for him.
So, God sent
Jesus to return us to the creative process.
We see when Jesus told his disciples that he would “make them fishers of
men.” Here, “make” can be thought of as
molding or shaping or fabricating. It is
taking a lump of clay and shaping it into a piece of art. We can see God doing this when we think of
times when the excesses of our lives are stripped away until we see that our
only source of hope and security is God.
All of that padded on excess sin needs to be shed. We need to stop clinging to our old sins, our
old sinful desires and to our old sinful hurts to be the creation that God
desires us to be.
Yet we sin
and we sin daily so God must continue to shape us and mold us daily. He does this through the forgiveness of sins
which he tells us to remember. We call
this the confession and absolution cycle.
Through this process God continually molds and shapes us. He gets his hands dirty because he loves us.
Gracious
Father, you have wondrously made me and you continue to mold me into the
disciple that you want me to be. Lead me
to trust in your loving arm. Lead me to
be your holy child. Lead me to be the
light in this dark ad lonely world. In
the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret