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This is Living Tape number 2038, side 2. Reverend Thielman, Sunday morning message of August 1st, 1971, entitled "Observations Concerning Cracked Pots." The scripture reading is from the prophecy of Jeremiah, the 18th chapter, beginning at

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the verse which is numbered 1. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, "Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel.

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And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me, "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done?" says the Lord.

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Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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Have you ever known what it is to be really frustrated? To be really up against it? To have tried to do the very best that you can, and to have discovered that that was not enough?

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To want to do something more, and yet not to know what that something more is? To want to win, perhaps not for yourself, but for another, or for God, but to want to win and to not know how to win? You know what it is to be really frustrated?

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Jeremiah did. Here was a young man who had been forsaken by his family. They had quite openly turned against him. He was repudiated and ridiculed by his church, though he sought to be a faithful servant

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of that church. No one ever loved his country more than Jeremiah loved his country, and yet his country would have nothing whatever to do with him. He was a man who tried in every way he knew how to be faithful to the word of God as he

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understood it, and he was defeated and beaten and whipped and discouraged on every hand. A frustrated person. If you ever visit the Sistine Chapel in Rome, be sure to go in the afternoon when it's not so crowded, and go over to the west wall in that room, which I consider to be the most

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beautifully adorned room in all the world, and you'll see on the wall Michelangelo's representation of Jeremiah. He sits broken, weeping, dejected, brooding over his frustrations. You might call that a fresco of frustration.

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Have you ever felt like that? Like you had a part in that fresco? Do you feel like that today? Well if you've never felt like it or if you don't feel like it today, then rest assured,

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sometime you will. For we all, soon or late, encounter frustration. The word of God came to Jeremiah in the midst of his frustration and said, "Go down to the potter's house."

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And always obedient, Jeremiah went. And he stood there, evidently for a whole day, and he watched the potter at work. He saw how the potter would place the clay upon the spinning wheel, and then by applying his hands to the clay, would mold it into something beautiful and useful.

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And he also saw, several times during the course of the day, how a particular lump of clay would refuse to yield to the potter's hand. Maybe it had some stones in it, or a pocket of moisture which made it too soft, perhaps there was sand mixed with the clay, but for one reason or another, the clay would not

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form itself as it ought to have formed itself, would not yield to the touch of the potter. And when that happened, the potter would stop, would remove from the clay the impurity, would knead the clay, making it plastic again, and then would begin to make something different out of it.

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And Jeremiah watched that again and again throughout the course of that day. And when the day was done, he went home. And he went home with a new hope in his heart. For he discovered some truths at the potter's that day, some observations relative to cracked

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and broken pots that led him out of frustration and into the future with encouragement. The first thing he learned was this, that God is always at work. Jeremiah equated God, you see, with the potter. Now the tools of a potter were very simple, just a stone on the bottom, a vertical axle,

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and a stone on the top. The potter would sit and spin the bottom stone with his feet and then work with the clay atop the topmost stone. But the clay, you see, never formed itself into anything until the potter put his hand

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to it. The clay was not capable of becoming something beautiful and useful by itself. The potter had to be at work at it. And just so, Jeremiah says, God is always at work fashioning things in this spinning

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world of ours. Now I think most people understand that to be true. The tragedy is that they understand it to be true in the general and not in the specific. I mean by that, they understand God to be at work in the world.

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They see Him moving in the progress or the regress of nations. They see His hand in the great events of time. But what they fail to understand is that the same God who is moving amongst nations and peoples is also moving in the nitty gritty of their own personal experience.

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The whole testimony of Scripture is that we are not to be principally concerned with how God moves in the world. Rather we are to seek always to be expanding our sensitivity so we can more and more experience the kingship, the movement of God in our own lives.

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The providence of God right where we live. This morning I could illustrate for you in a dozen different ways how God moves in our lives. But because we are concerned with frustration, I focus upon those experiences where God moves in the midst of our frustrations.

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All of us are sophisticated enough to understand that for a picture to be good, it must have in it both light and dark. It must have in it both brightness and shadow. The contrast contributes to the beauty.

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You don't have to be a Beethoven to know that a discord set into the midst of some melody can accentuate the beauty of that melody. Well just so you see, the shadowed times in our lives, the frustrating times in our lives, the discordant days in our experience contribute their own special beauty to our way of living.

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This is the reason James could write in his epistles, "Praise God for all of the tribulations that you know." This is the reason that Martin Luther could say, "My temptations were my teachers in divinity." This is the reason the scriptures will be bold enough to assert that even Jesus learned

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by what He suffered. Suppose an angel were to come to your home this afternoon and ask you to enumerate those experiences in your life which had taught you the most. Those experiences which had opened you up to dimensions of life which you had never

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known before. You might respond immediately by referring to happy reunions, wonderful Christmases, perhaps some minutes that you spent at the feet of this particular teacher or that particular preacher alluding of course to that time when you first became a disciple of Jesus Christ.

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You would list all these happy moments, but if you have any real sensitivity and any real understanding you'll go beyond those times to the place where you will assert that the moments in which your soul was most stretched, the moments in which your heart was most torn open so that it could be sensitive and tender to the needs of others, they were the moments

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in which you knew agony and hurt and loneliness and sorrow and frustration. The moments when the Spirit of God was carving onto your countenance the lines of beauty which belonged to those who have suffered, those moments were the moments of suffering. They were the moments of hurt.

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They were the hours of frustration. Books are my friends, and one book that is a special friend is titled Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush. It's a book all written in the broad Scots dialect, stories from little highland towns

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in Scotland, and one of the chapters is entitled How My Mither Got Her Soft Face. It's told by a young man whose mother's other son was dying. She tended to the boy and ministered to the boy in every way that she could. At last she went to her bed for a little rest, and it was while she was lying down that the

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lad died, and they brought her the word, and immediately she turned so that she faced the wall. They could not see her face. They could only hear her sob, and when she turned back to them again after a few moments,

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her face was strangely and forever softened. And from that day on, when anyone in the village would know bereavement or heartbreak, she would go to them and she would take them in her arms and she would say, "Dinna greet, dinna greet.

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Don't weep, don't mourn." And her neighbors would look at her and they would say, "Ah, Janet, but you're greeting yourself. Ah, Janet, you're weeping yourself."

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You see, the moment in which she got her soft face was a moment facing the frustration of the death of a loved one, but that softness gave her entrance into the hearts of those who desperately needed her. Never say, "Why has God made me so?"

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You are not made; you are being made. Every experience of your life is the hand of God moving in your days. The bright hours and the shadowed ones - all are those times when God is touching you. Learn to experience Him not only in your blessings, but in your bruising.

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Feel the wind of His Spirit. That's the way you should think of the Spirit of God - as the wind. You know how it is, even on the darkest night, you can go to the window and you can hear the wind and the trees and the bushes outside.

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Well just so, in the darkest night of your soul, listen and you'll feel the wind of God's Spirit. He never stops. He never desists.

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He never slumbers. He never sleeps. He never gives up. He never stands aside.

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So you make your bed in hell. Even there He is with you. Feel always, in every experience, the wind, the fingers of God. That's the first thing Jeremiah learned at the potters.

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He also learned there that day that the clay did not have to yield itself to the fingers of the potter. You see, as he stood there, he saw some of the clay fail to become what the potter wanted it to become.

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Three weeks ago I was visiting some members of our church who live in Newport, and they took me up to their new fashion center, and there was an art celebration on, and they took me to see a potter at work. And it was fascinating to watch him.

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And at one point, he began to work with a lump of clay, and suddenly he stopped and he said, "This is a bad lump." And then he took the lump and began to knead it and to remove from it certain impurities, and then he began to work with it again.

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Now, Jeremiah is saying, you see, that we are like clay. Not that we're dead and lifeless and incapable of independent action like clay is. Rather, he's saying, we have free will. We have the option, if we want to, of turning away from the moving fingers of God in our

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life, of rejecting, if we wish, what God would have us become. And how sad it is when someone does that. When they turn away from God's providence and become twisted and bent and cracked and broken.

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The first thing that cracks and breaks when you turn away from God is your relationship to other people. Have you noticed how that happens? I remember once, a good number of years ago, I was in an automobile accident, and of course

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it was the other fellow's fault, and he admitted that and said he would send over his insurance representative to take care of everything. And I said that would be fine, and I told some friends about it, and they said, "Oh, you better get a lawyer there with you.

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Those insurance men, they're pretty slick operators, and he'll come in there and he'll get you to sign something, and before it's all over, you won't get anything at all, even to cover the expenses, and you better be on your guard." And I began to get uptight about this, so that when the time came for me to meet this

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insurance representative, I didn't have an attorney, but when he came through the door, I was already convinced he was my enemy. And when he came through the door, he was already convinced that I was his enemy. The first thing he said to me was, "Don't think you're going to be able to retire on

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what you get out of this insurance settlement." You see, he'd been conditioned by so many, trying to rob his company, so that he just expected me to be exactly the same way. And he said things like that to me, and I said things like, "I just want enough to cover

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the expenses on the car, and nothing more than that." And we kept saying those things to each other, and never really hearing what we were saying. Now if I - I cannot speak for him - but if I had submitted myself in this circumstance to the moving hand of God, had tried to discover what God was bringing to pass in my life through

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this experience, if I had yielded myself to that, how differently I would have approached that man. Not uptight, not uptense, not out of relationship with him, but no. I held back.

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I would not let God's hands move in this, and as a result, my relationship with him was cracked. Of course, after your relationships with others crack, then your relationship with yourself breaks as well.

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You soon take a look at your life and discover that you're not at all what you wanted to be. You look at yourself and discover a kind of guilt, and an overwhelming remorse because you haven't been loyal to what's royal in you. And the result is remorse.

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Like John Randolph, who on his deathbed in Philadelphia kept crying out, "Remorse! Remorse! Remorse!" He asked for a dictionary to be brought to him with the definition of the word "remorse"

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in it, and there was no dictionary available. And so he had them write out a definition. "Remorse! Remorse!"

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That was his cry. There was a man who was looking into the very jaws of hell. Don't ever listen to those who tell you that hell is something that was thought up by theologians. If hell is something that was thought up by theologians, it would have been forgotten

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a long time ago. But any man who has come to that place in his life where he understands himself to have rejected the provident grace of God, who understands himself to be out of relationship with others and out of relationship with himself, that man is filled with remorse and he looks into

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himself and he sees hell. Remorse is like those moments after some great storm at sea and the storm has moved on and the winds have abated and the sky is blue and there are no white caps to be seen, but there is still that tremendous ground swell that lifts up that ship and pulls it down

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to the depths. That's what remorse does. Come up here to this pulpit. Come up here to this pulpit right now, those of you who have sat in my study and wet that

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carpet with your tears. Come up, those of you who have testified to me again and again how you're out of relationship with God and with others and with yourself. Come up here, those of you whom I've tried vainly to heal, and tell these people it's

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true. You say goodbye to God and you say goodbye to peace. When that happens, we suffer. We don't suffer because of anything which God does to us. We suffer because of what we do to ourselves.

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Have you ever watched a mother out with her little child and the mother warns the child not to run away and the child does run away and the child falls? And the mother goes over and picks the child up and paddles her. That's a very foolish thing to do.

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The child has already been hurt in the fall. No need to hurt her anymore. But the mother responds emotionally and illogically and imperfectly. God isn't like that.

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When he sees us run away from him, when he sees us reject the movement of his fingers in our lives and watches us fall, our God who is not emotional and who is not illogical and who is not imperfect, thinks not for one moment of punishing us. We're punished enough already.

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Instead he stands and grieves for us. We break his heart in moments like that. That's the second thing that Jeremiah learned at the potters. How can we reject God's will and then how we suffer for it?

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But he learned one last truth and this the grandest of all. He saw how when that clay which had not yielded itself was encountered by the potter, the potter didn't throw the clay away. But he would take it and he would lead it into some new existence.

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He would take out of it that which was impure and would make out of the clay something other than he had originally planned, but something still beautiful and still useful. Jeremiah discovered there, you see, the determination of God. Have you ever praised God for his determination?

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God is the most determined being in heaven or on earth. Ever since Eden he's been remaking things and people. Here's Jacob, sly and crafty and selfish. Well you'd think God would be ready to throw him on the junk heap of the human experience,

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but he didn't. He was determined to make something of Jacob. Here's David who murders in the dark on the basis of his lust. Now here's a man that God could have crossed off his list, but he didn't because he was

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determined to make something of him. Here's Peter who in sniveling cowardice stands in the courtyard of the high priest and says, "I never heard of this Jesus." Now surely such a one could be forgotten forever by the Father of that Jesus.

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But he doesn't. He's determined to make something of Peter. And just so, when we return to the hands of God, when we yield ourselves to Him, He is determined still to make something of beauty and of worth out of us.

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Would you ever stop to think that we'd all be goners if God wasn't so determined? We make these great promises to Him and then smash them to pieces. We parade around in the garments of godliness and all the time make secret and subtle agreements with evil and temptation in our lives.

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We fall flat on our faces before difficulties and vicissitudes we should have learned to conquer a long time ago. We're converted at every revival. We commit and recommit, commit and recommit and fall down again and again.

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And if it weren't for the determination of God, where would we be? Hubert von Herkomer is a great Bavarian sculptor. His father was a great sculptor before him, and in his father's declining years, he was well up in his 80s, he came and stayed with his younger son.

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And every night the old man liked to work with the clay. But his fingers were weak now and his eyes failed him. And so at the end of the evening he would look at what he did and terribly discouraged by it would go to bed in despair.

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And then after his dad had gone to bed, the son, the great sculptor Herkomer, would take the same clay and he would rework what his dad had done. And in the morning when his father would come downstairs and the light was better, the old man would look at the work and say, "It's not so bad after all."

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That's what God does in our lives. No matter how many times we've rejected his fingers, the movement of his spirit, when we go back and he starts to work, if we watch, we discover what he makes of us. And to our surprise, it's not so bad after all.

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Of course, it's not as good as it would have been if we had never turned away. That's made very clear to Jeremiah here at the Potters. He spends three verses in this chapter making it clear. Every time the clay refuses to yield, you see, something has to be taken out of the

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clay before it can become productive. That means God can't make out of the clay what he originally intended to make out of it. He can still make something useful and beautiful, but not as useful and not as beautiful as

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his original plan. I think the most perfect illustration of this that I know is the statue of David that used to stand up here in Forest Lawn before the quake. Do you know that a hundred years before Michelangelo carved that statue, some unknown sculptor

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in Florence bought that block of marble and started to work on it, cut a great big hole in it, and then decided that the marble was useless and sent it back to the shop? For a century it stood there in the shop, marred, unusable. And then one day Michelangelo came to the shop, poor, unable to buy a perfect piece

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of stone. He brought this scarred one, and from it he carved the glory of Florence, the statue of David. But you know if you stand behind that statue and study the back of David, you discover

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very soon that that back is twisted in a rather unusual way. Michelangelo had to carve it twisted because you see, that's right where the hole was that that man a hundred years before had inflicted upon that stone. It's true, you see, Michelangelo could carve a masterpiece out of that scarred block of

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marble, but the masterpiece is not as perfect as he would have wanted it to be. Just so when God begins to move again in our lives after we have yielded ourselves anew to him, he will still make of us something splendid. But the time of our first glory is gone.

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This has been very much upon my thought recently because of an experience in my own life. I want to share this with you and then we are done. About sixteen years ago, I was the preacher at a youth conference in the beautiful green mountains of Pennsylvania.

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And on the last evening of the week's services, the Holy Spirit used the words that were uttered, and many young people committed themselves to Jesus Christ. When the service was over, I went apart and I stood in the shadows of some trees where I could not be seen, thanking God for what had happened.

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While I was standing there, I thought everyone had gone, but two young boys came down to put out the fire around which the service had been conducted. They did not know I was so near. And one of these boys turned to the other and said, "Tonight I gave my life to Jesus

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Christ." I did not interrupt the boy then to counsel him. Instead, I told one of the other counselors who spoke to the boy at length. But my heart was warmed that in the providence of God, he had chosen to work in that boy's

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life through me. The boy went on to high school and college and seminary. And in the providence of God, I again entered that boy's life, for I was on the committee of ministers that interviewed him and passed him when he was ordained to the gospel ministry.

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And I remember what a great joy that was. He never knew that I knew about that night years before when he had accepted Jesus. He never told me, and I never told him. I lost track of him until this last summer.

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I was the keynote preacher at the New Wilmington Missionary Conference, which is the largest conference which our denomination has. Thousands of people at every service. And at one of the services, I saw him.

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He was there with a group of young people from his church for the whole week. I saw him just a few minutes that one night in the press of all those folks. But he was there the whole week. And then I came home to Glendale, full of joy because it was a great conference.

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And a few weeks later, I received a letter from him. In that letter, he told me for the first time about that night so many years before when God had used my words to save his soul. He went also to tell me that in the years of his ministry, he had become bitter and

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broken and frustrated. Nothing had succeeded as he wanted it to succeed. He had gotten into repeated squabbles with the officers of his church. He was out of relationship with his people.

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His preaching had deteriorated. Even his home life was threatened. And he poured out to me on paper all of the bile of his frustration. And then he said, "I came to New Wilmington and I heard you preach again.

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And God spoke to my heart. And I went home and I confessed to my people. And they loved me. And our church and its preacher are on fire again to the glory of God."

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As I thought about that, I thought of what Jeremiah had written so long ago. You see, God is always at work. Three times he had woven the thread of my testimony into the fabric of that boy's life. At no time was I responsible for it.

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But I was used in his life by God as so many others had been used in my life by God. God is always at work. And then there came a time when he refused to yield to the working of God. And bitterness filled him.

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And then he yielded himself once more. And God proceeded to make out of him and his ministry not, alas, what he could have made at first, but still something very wonderful. It can be said of boys like Jack.

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It can be said of all those who have known this experience, that they have given themselves to the truth that is to Jesus. And they have become beautiful in seeking God's glory. I suppose we might even say that John Keats could write of these cracked and made-over

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again pots what he once wrote about a very beautiful Grecian urn. Do you remember his words? Beauty is truth. Truth, beauty.

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That is all you know on earth. And that is all you need to know. Let us pray. O God, let the beauty of thy truth shine in our lives.

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Let the truth of thy beauty be evident to others. Mold us, mend us, bend us, break us. Until we are wholly thine. And the Lord bless you and keep you.

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The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love his peace. Amen.

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