Are you a cracked pot?

Are you a cracked pot?

We have this expectation that the call of God will somehow turn us into a perfect person.  Consciously we know that is not true, but still it persists in our unconscious mind.  When that Christian artist who writes songs that move us so deeply leaves her husband and gets involved with another man,
we are beyond disappointed.  “How could she do that?” 
we wonder, often angrily!  When our favorite minister reveals a side of his personality that is deeply flawed, we tend to toss every lesson we ever learned from him, as if the truth he taught is invalidated by his human nature.  The fact is that the call of God does not perfect the person.  The Bible tells us, repeatedly, about God using some very broken, sinful people to accomplish His purposes.

Jonah is one. They don’t come much more flawed than this man. His story opens with rebellion. The Lord said, “Go.”  He said, “No!”  This prophet was acquainted with God and His Presence, enough that he knew the call clearly. In spite of his familiarity with the things of God, he chose to run in the other direction when sent to Nineveh.  He was not just a rebel, he was a coward.  His actions endangered the ship on which he was traveling, while he hid out below deck. When he got to Nineveh after his famed weekend in a fish’s belly, he whined and complained when the Lord spared the city from destruction. There just isn’t much to admire in Jonah. Never the less, he was a man God used, and quite effectively!

Does that mean we can live in willful disobedience and expect to continue under God’s blessing? Not at all.  The point is that the Lord is faithful to His Promise and that He is able to use ordinary sinners, like me, to do amazing things for His glory.  We must not put doing His will on hold until we think we are ‘good enough’ to be used.  We also need to think twice about insisting that someone else should be perfect before we allow God to use them to minister to us. 

Paul, the great apostle, referred to himself as the ‘chief of sinners.’  (1 Timothy 1:15) This was not just rhetoric! He understood that God found him in sin and used him despite his sinful nature. He reminds the Corinthians that the treasure of the Gospel and the Spirit  were carried on earth "in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us." (2 Corinthians 4:7, NIV)  The gloriously perfect message comes our way through quite ordinary, unimpressive people. We need to rid ourselves of the need to pretend that we are better than we are even our desire is to ‘help out’ the Gospel message. Prophets who pretend to have it all together in their lives do worse in their hypocrisy than those who admit to being a cracked pot!

I am not making an excuse for any Christian to live in open rebellion against God or His Word!  When we receive the call of Christ, “Follow Me,” that’s what we should do. And, as we walk with Him, we are ‘becomers,’ increasing like Him, by the work of His Spirit.  The Bible says that "when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him." (2 Corinthians 3:17-18, The Message)

Are you looking for perfect people to lead you? 

Are you holding back on doing what God would have you do because you think you’re too sinful to be useful?

Remember, the Lord uses cracked pots to do amazing things and as He restores those broken lives, His Gospel shines ever more brightly.