12-22-2014

Good Morning All,

          Genesis 2:7; “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

      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