Jeremiah 18:1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD saying, 2 “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” 3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. 4 But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make. 5 Then the word of the LORD came to me saying, 6 “Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.”
The clay is always in the hand of the Potter to do with as He pleases. This is a fundamental truth that each heart must bow in submission to. Israel should have bowed to the Lord and sought Him for strength to stand firm and seek His face in prayer and holiness in accordance with His revealed will, but Israel sought self and the things of self. Israel began to think that the Lord could be manipulated as the heathens manipulated their gods through sacrifices and external actions. This statement is full of the glory of God and Israel should have bowed in great haste in confession and repentance.
One of the things that should strike each heart in any time period and perhaps each day is that each person and all groups are in the hand of God to do with as He pleases. God is sovereign and He can do with me as He pleases each moment of each day. There is no one and the whole universe together can resist the living God in carrying out His eternal plan and the plan He has for each person. But even then that can be nothing more than an intellectual fact which we carry around in our heads, but the reality of this must sink deeply into our hearts. Each person must begin to see that God can harden him or her if He so pleases. Each time a person sins that sin can be what God uses to harden that person and never soften them. Each one and all alike are as clay in the hands of the Potter to do with as He pleases.
The great truth of who God (Divine Potter) and who man is (clay) would change how people “do church” and how people live. It would change how people worship and it would change how people read the Bible and pray. It would change how people respond to trials and it would change how people approach life. But the difference between a person that seems himself as the potter of his own life and the one that sees himself as clay in the hands of a Divine potter to be formed and shaped according to His plan, is infinite.
What we see in our day is vast numbers of people who think of themselves as the potter of their own lives and living in that way. We also see religious people living as if they are the potter and God is the clay that they can manipulate according to their pleasure as long as they are nice and good and pray while saying the name of Jesus. That is simply idolatry, not to mention utterly blasphemous. Human beings were not made for themselves which includes not living for themselves and shaping themselves as they please, but instead they were made in the image of God and for the glory of God. Men and women are active in seeking to shape themselves and make themselves into something that they want and desire and rarely do they take the will of God into consideration. Religion is used to make us better people, though the idea of better is usually based on humanistic concepts. Christianity itself has been perverted to be little more in the eyes and efforts of many to be nothing more than a self-help philosophy or perhaps how to overcome the things against you philosophy.
But God is sovereign and on the throne of the universe and nothing happens apart from His eternal plan. Those who seek the Lord out of love to be shaped by His Divine hand are being drawn to Him and the Potter is shaping them into a vessel of glory. Those who are giving their every effort at making themselves as they please or as they desire are also being conformed by the Divine Potter as He hardens their hearts and turns them over to their desires which lead to misery and destruction. “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you” (fill in your own name) “in My hand, O” (fill in your own name). Perhaps the most real thing about us that we ignore the most is that we are all clay in the hands of a Divine Potter to be shaped in accordance with His pleasure. Being shaped in holiness by His hand is to know God and love Him, but to be shaped by His hand of wrath in being turned over to sin is to know true misery now and then for eternity. Oh how men should seek the Lord!
God Loves... Himself 
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