God, as our heavenly Father, so closely identifies with His children that our tears are His. This precious revelation of God’s relationship to us is first glimpsed plainly when we read how God called Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldeans and follow Him in a life of faith, encouraging him by promising, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse” (Gen. 12:3, NIV). In other words, God would be so closely identified with Abraham that He would consider Abraham’s friends and enemies His own. God not only loves His children, He identifies with them.
And in response to such loyalty and love, I, in turn, desire to so closely identify with Him – with His grief, His joy, His love, His pain, His blessings, His honor – that His tears are on my face.
My tears – and yours – are precious to Him! How He loves those who love Him enough to shed His tears as they share His cross!
Is the Potter molding — or remolding — you, using . . . pressure or problems? stress or suffering? hurt or heartache? illness or injustice? Has He now placed you in the fire so that circumstances are heating up with intensity in your life? Then would you just trust the Potter to know exactly what He is doing?
For the child of God, suffering is not wasted. It’s not an end in itself. Scripture reminds us, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”
The spiritual principle is that in some way God uses suffering to transform ordinary, dust-clay people into . . .
vessels that are strong in faith . . .
vessels that are fit for His use . . .
vessels that display His glory to the watching world.
So don’t waste your sorrow. Trust God!
Jesus makes suffering understandable; as the Potter, He uses suffering as the pressure on the wet “clay” of our lives. Under His gentle, loving touch, our lives are molded into a “shape” that pleases Him. But the shape that is so skillfully wrought is not enough. He not only desires our lives to be useful, but He also wants our character to be radiant. And so He places us in the furnace of affliction until our “colors” are revealed – colors that reflect the beauty of His own character.
Without the preparation of the loving, skillful touch of the Potter’s hand, any usefulness or beauty the clay might have would be destroyed by the pressure and the heat. But Jesus makes suffering understandable to this blob of clay. In the midst of the pressure and the heat, I am confident His hand is on my life, developing my faith until I display His glory, transforming me into a vessel of honor that pleases Him! I don’t trust any other potter with my life.
Would you submit to the touch of the Potter’s hand?
Within a period of eighteen months, I went through a cluster of storms that left me emotionally gasping for breath. From Hurricane Fran, which downed 102 trees in our yard, to the fire that consumed my husband’s dental office, to my son, Jonathan’s, cancer and surgery, to my parents’ increasingly fragile health that included multiple hospitalizations, to a home remodeling project that involved a contractor who took our money but refused to do the work, I reeled from one emergency or crisis to another.
Looking back over that eighteen-month period, my thoughtful, confident conclusion is that God allowed the storms of suffering to increase and intensify in my life because He wanted me to soar higher in my relationship with Him-to fall deeper in love with Him.
Faith that triumphantly soars is possible only when the winds of life are contrary to personal comfort. That kind of faith is God’s ultimate purpose in allowing us to encounter storms of suffering. Trust Him!
