JUST THINKING: God's Workmanship
BT Staff
I was just thinking about a question I have asked congregations for the past six decades: “What is the best thing that could happen to you one second after you receive salvation?” The answer: “To die and be with the Lord for eternity.” However, the Lord does nothing by accident. He always knows what He has planned for each person He has saved — and “called.” He fulfills that purpose. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28 NIV).
Like Clay in the Potter’s Hands
One of my favorite passages to teach is Jer. 18:1-5. God told Jeremiah some things that are pertinent to us today. He told the prophet to go to the potter’s house and receive God’s message. Jeremiah responded, “So I went down to the potter’s house and saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him” (Jer. 18:3-4). Here is the message and its lesson: “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?... Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel” (Jer. 18:6).
Believers are God’s Workmanship
Let’s return to the question I posed earlier — “Why does God not take us to Heaven one second after salvation?” It’s because He saves for a purpose — to glorify Him as we follow Christ and give testimony to others of the wonderful grace of Jesus who can save others, just like He saved us.
The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay (our human bodies) to show this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (II Cor. 4:7). We are God’s workmanship — not our workmanship. Isaiah posed this question: “…Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘You did not make me, Can the pot say to the potter. ‘You know nothing’” (Isa. 29:16).
Indeed, friends, you are God’s workmanship. You can readily say, as Isaiah did, “…You, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Isa. 64:8). May we never forget that sin marred us like the potter’s pot before Jeremiah. And just like the potter, God took us, as marred as we were, and made us into something new. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (II Cor. 5:17).
God formed us into new creations because that was His purpose in sending His only Son to die for us on that wooden cross atop the hill called Calvary. By His grace, He saved us because we could not save ourselves. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:8-10).
May we have the boldness to go where He wants us to go and do what He wants us to do so we might be exactly what He designed us to be.