Broken Jars or Works of Art?

In the book of Acts, Paul referring to King David, says that he served his generation, or as the Amplified version puts it ‘served the purpose of God in his own generation’. I have often thought that would be a wonderful epitaph to have. ‘Nathan served the purpose of God in his generation’!

However, that raises the obvious question – How can we know the purpose of God? Is such knowledge limited to a few – the spiritually elite, or is it accessible to us all? Was Maslow right? Is self-actualization the privilege of a few? Or as Del Taggart explains, ‘Is Maslow’s hierarchy a lie, because we do not exist for self-actualization at all but rather to fulfill God’s intentional purposes,’ which still leaves us with the question as to what those purposes might be.

Fortunately, to paraphrase Moses, the answer is not out of reach, not on a high mountain…not across the ocean but close at hand. Jeremiah would tell us it is just around the corner at the Potter’s House.

The people of Jeremiah’s time had little interest in identifying or serving God’s purposes, yet God wanted to help them join the dots of their lives with His eternal purposes. So He sends Jeremiah to the Potter’s House where the potter is at work. Eugene Peterson commenting on this passage says, ‘The great masters of the imagination do not make up things out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes… they connect the visible with the invisible’. Where is God at work in your life today? Or what is He doing that He is calling your attention to? Sometimes we confine God to the esoteric when He is at work daily in the common places of our lives – the supermarket, the office, the car-pool, and we miss discerning His presence.

The Lord directs Jeremiah to the potter and the pottery that he is creating. We tend to think of pottery today as a handicraft, an art form. But can you imagine life before the invention of pottery? Unless you stayed near to your food source, you were limited to storing what could be held in your hand. Pottery allowed the user to provide for the future, to store up for the next season, to carry resources from one place to another. The pots of Jeremiah are the bottles, jars, pots and pans of our lives today. Pots had a purpose.

But there is something else. Every pot is also an art form. Even the most mundane utensil has proportion, shape and form. There is evidence of design – functional and aesthetic. Yet clay itself has negligible value, the value arises from its use. When shaped it takes on a value far in excess of the raw material. You and I are eighty percent water and a few minerals, our value is not based on our chemical worth but the design and purpose that is built within us.

We live in an age where we separate utility from beauty. We have show-plates and every day plates, brown paper bags for groceries and paintings on the wall. Yet in Jeremiah’s time the distinction was not so stark. The necessary and beautiful were integrated. Unfortunately, this dichotomy has entered our spiritual and work lives too. Hence when we look at finding our purpose, we see some lives as having beauty and our own in comparison as perfunctory, at best. But as Jeremiah saw the potter at work, he saw that each life was designed and shaped by the Master Potter, unique, necessary; not only necessary but also beautiful.

As we look at our lives, do we see the functionality that God has built in as well as the beauty arising from being made in the Imago Dei? I am flat footed so it was apparent at a very early age that I would never be a runner. Yet like Eric Liddel I too feel God’s pleasure; but for me it is not when I run but in sharing His word, or structuring a business deal.

How has God formed you? So many of us feel like a square peg in a round hole, simply because we haven’t come to terms with who we are – using the pottery analogy, a teapot instead of a coffee pot. Paul would respond ‘But indeed O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “why have you made me like this?”

As we seek our purpose, we need to remember that the ‘dust out of which we are made and the image of God into which we are made are of the same creator’.

Maybe today there is some regret? Rather than embracing your design, you have been fighting it and the result is a misshapen or damaged vessel. The wonderful truth is that the potter doesn’t give up. He doesn’t take the misshapen clay and chuck it at the dog, but starts over. Even more wonderful, in the New Testament we find that thirty pieces of silver buys the potter’s field. The place where pottery shards were discarded, where the pieces that did not survive the baking process are thrown is purchased by the blood money of Jesus Christ!

Do we get that? The Potter doesn’t give up! He sent His Son to die so that the broken lives in the Potter’s Field can be restored. The Japanese have a beautiful artform called Kintsugi where broken pots are put together using gold and platinum resulting in the restored article having even greater value than the original. That is what the Lord does for each of us, not with silver or gold but with His precious blood.

As you and I seek to serve our generation, may we be those who, through His Grace, accept our design, and make ourselves available, and by doing so point others to the Potter who is still at work among them. Forming, reforming and even restructuring the broken pieces into something of beauty.

To quote Spurgeon “Would it so happen that when our life’s history is written, whoever reads it would not think of us as ‘self-made men’ but as the handiwork of God. Not in us may men see the clay but the Potter’s hand”. Os Guinness in The Call put it this way ‘Calling (finding our purpose) is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be’. May that be true for each one of us.