Repeatedly, throughout scripture, we are referred to as clay in the hands of a Potter or a vessel for the Lord to use. When the Lord instructs Jeremiah to go to the potter’s house, he shows him the potter sitting at the wheel. When the vessel that he was making becomes ‘marred in his hand’, he makes it again into another vessel (Jeremiah 18:1-4). If you have ever sat with clay on a pottery wheel, when it doesn’t turn out how you like, you smush down the clay and begin to mold it again. That smushing and molding is not a particularly comfortable process, if you are the clay, but it is shaping the clay into what the Potter desires.
Everyone knows and understands that life will have seasons or periods of brokenness. When we come on the World Race, we are told that we are clay in the Potter’s hand and to expect brokenness to be a part of our journey. It is impossible to see the things that we see, hear the stories we hear, meet the people we meet, and live the places we live without being broken out of our comfortable lives and our apathetic or disconnected hearts broken before the Lord. It is impossible not to be shaped into something new.
Many times, we embrace the process of brokenness because we know that we will be built back up on the other side. We endure the painful and heartbreaking places because we hope to come out stronger and better in the end. But what if brokenness is the goal? If we are really striving for Him to be seen and not ourselves, brokenness allows Him to increase and us to decrease (John 3:30).
When I live in such a way as to remain broken before the Lord, what is in me can come out of me. The Spirit of the Living God is free to flow through me and touch others when I am not concerned about ‘having it all together’. The reason that Jesus desires a broken and contrite heart is because it is though broken things that He is unhindered and can flow freely. The more I resist the process of brokenness, the less people that Jesus can tough through me because I have created blockages and hindrances to His ability to flow through me. My brokenness is the platform through which others can experience a touch from God.
Many times, the fear associated with yielding to the process of brokenness is that there will be nothing left of us. But, the reality of the kingdom is that when I am in the hands of my Lord, no matter how many times He breaks me, there will always be an ‘abundance of fragments’ (Matthew 14:20). When Jesus fed the 5000, he started with 5 loaves and 2 fish. When He broke the bread and fish, 12 baskets full of fragments remained. What is left of us after we entrust ourselves into the hands of Jesus to break and pass out as He wills is more than when we remained ‘whole’. More people’s needs are met and He is seen.
So, don’t resist the process of brokenness. Inside of us, as Christians, is the kingdom of God, life, healing, wholeness, restoration, the very Spirit that raised Christ from the dead. It is only when we allow Him to break us open that what is inside of use can infuse a lost and dying world. Gideon’s army carried empty pitchers with torches inside (Judges 7:16). It wasn’t until the pitcher was broken that the light and fire was seen in the darkness.
Even a very small jar of perfume, if broken open, can infuse an entire room.
Life is a grain of wheat, but there is a shell, a very hard shell on the outside. As long as that shell is not split open, the wheat cannot grow. The question is not whether there is life within, but whether the outside shell is cracked open. – Watchman Nee –
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not us (2 Corinthians 4:7)
