“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”                        2 Corinthians 4:7

A Vessel

A Bible Study question I had this summer was, “What do you say about who you are?” I answered, “I am a daughter of the Most High God… I am fearfully and wonderfully made… God doesn’t make junk.” Then came the question, “Are you satisfied with your answer?” No, I wasn’t.

Previous to this we studied about John the Baptist and what he chose to say about himself:   “… I am ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the LORD,’…” (John 1:22-23)

Out of all the things John could’ve called himself, he chose the nondescript, the unassuming—just a voice. Jennifer Rothschild, the author, went on to say, “It’s like saying an instrument, a guy, a tool, a woman, a mom, a wife, a daughter, a vessel. His response shows he was not the center of his thought closet—Christ was.”

As I reread that, vessel stood out to me and I wrote, “I am a vessel; God please use me as You see fit.” This answer both satisfied and terrified me.

I’m a broken vessel, but God in His infinite wisdom, and with boundless grace and mercy, has glued me back together multiple times, in multiple ways. As an earthen vessel, I can grow brittle and easily crack, but when I am filled with God’s Holy Spirit, when He is working in me, when I allow His Living Water (John 7:38) to overflow and leak out of those broken areas, it’s beautiful.

2 Corinthians 4:7 (NLT) reads: “We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.”

I’m a fragile clay jar, pieced back together, yet I carry the Light of the World (John 8:12) within me, and He shines brightly, in even the darkest places.

We’re in a continual process of shaping and molding. Jeremiah 18:4 tells us: “And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.” The Lord will have to reshape me, perhaps even break me, to bring about a vessel pliable enough to really mean: God please use me as You see fit—not as I would like, hope, or think You should.

In a commentary on Jeremiah 18, I read, “Power was manifested in his manipulation of the clay, and pity in his remaking of the marred vessel… The clay was suddenly marred, twisted; it failed to express the potter’s thought… He saw that the potter did not abandon it.” (Morgan)

“Lord, thank You for never abandoning us. May it be our heart’s desire for You to shape and mold us into vessels to be used as You see fit. Amen.”