God Turns Messes into Masterpieces

One day, God had a message for a prophet named Jeremiah. He told him to go to a potter’s house and watch the potter make clay pots.

As Jeremiah watched the potter molding and fixing the clay, he noticed something: “Whenever the pot the potter was working on turned out badly, as sometimes happens when you are working with clay, the potter would simply start over and use the same clay to make another pot” (Jeremiah 18:4 The Message).

After Jeremiah saw this object lesson, God gave him a message for Israel: “Watch this potter. In the same way that this potter works his clay, I work on you” (Jeremiah 18:6 The Message).

You may have really made a mess of your life. Your “pot” is scarred from poor decisions that you made and things that were done to you. As a result, your life has not turned out as you intended.

But you are the clay; you’re not the potter. God is the potter, and he doesn’t discard clay that’s been misshapen by circumstances. He doesn’t waste the pain that you’ve been through.

God doesn’t throw out the personality and the essence of who he created you to be. Instead, he takes every part of you—the good, the bad, and the ugly. He puts it all in his gentle but strong hands. And then he starts over with shaping your life, applying pressure at just the right places to mold you and remake you into a beautiful, priceless piece of art.

That’s what happens when you surrender yourself completely to God’s loving hands.

God specializes in fresh starts. You can have a new beginning today, simply by starting with King David’s prayer in Psalm 51:10: “God, make a fresh start in me, shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life” (The Message).

It’s never too late to start over. Bring whatever chaos is in your life to God, the Great Potter. Trust him to do a new work in your life.