My previous post ended with the question, “How does soft clay become fragile?”.
The answer is simple,
When the water is baked out!
This can happen in at least two ways; naturally or manually.
Naturally.
Clay naturally becomes dry and friable as moisture evaporates under a hot sun during a drought; when there isn’t enough rain to replenish the water lost to evaporation.
In nature, clay remains dry and friable until the next, seasonal rains arrive. As the rain falls, the clay thirstily absorbs the water and becomes soft again.
It’s just clay, natural clay ‘in situ’; unformed.
Manually.
Clay becomes dry and fragile when a potter subjects the moulded vessel to the intense heat of the kiln; with the water baked out, the clay becomes hard enough to hold its shape; so hard that it will never absorb water again!
A clay vessel, having been baked in a kiln, become useful to its user; a water jar, a pot for cooking, a brick for building or an idol to be worshipped.
A potter has a purpose for every vessel they manufacture.
The Master Potter.
In the true Church of Jesus Christ, the potter is obviously, God, the Master Potter; working with his saints both individually and collectively.
Individually.
Individually, we are all, as Elihu said to Job, “pinched off from a piece of clay.” (Job 33.6); pinched off by God, for a specific purpose, His divine purpose.
When I lovingly submit myself to the rule of the Lord Jesus Christ, He breathes new life into me, filling me with His Holy Spirit; I become as soft clay in His hands. Soft clay that God moulds into a vessel suited to His purpose in the world, today; not a dry and brittle vessel, but a robust, Spirit-filled vessel; the sort of vessel only God can produce.
So too with every Spirit-filled disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Collectively
As God moulds His saints individually, He does so with His Master Plan in mind; a plan in which a great diversity of Spirit-filled disciples, “hold fast to the Head – that is the Lord Jesus Christ – from whom the whole body is supported and knit together through its ligaments and sinews, increasing with a growth that is from God.” (Colossians 2:19).
Collectively, we become the Body of Christ, a diverse collection of unique, living vessels.
In the true Church of Jesus Christ, we find a great diversity of people united within God’s divine order; unity in diversity.
The Usurper Potters.
Usurper potters are power-hungry people who seek to mould lesser people into vessels of their own design and for their own, selfish purposes.
This is true of every religious and political ideology the world has ever known; the powerful lording it over the weak. It is no less true of Christianity.
In Christianity, a power-hungry, professional class of popes, priests and pastors, ‘the clergy’, have usurped the right to mould ordinary Christians, ‘the laity’, into vessels suitable for the clergy’s own, selfish purposes, not God’s.
Their kilns are their peculiar, sectarian versions of orthodoxy!
Kilns so hot as to bake the Holy Spirit out of every follower’s life and practice.
The result is a brittle, uniform religion in which every follower of the sect walks and talks in exactly the same way as every other follower within their sectarian, Christian sub-culture.
'Unity through uniformity' is the only sort of pseudo-unity power-hungry humans can control.
Woe betide any follower who becomes animated by the Holy Spirit!
If these heretics are not ejected quickly enough, the sect could fracture and break.
The professional priesthood will do everything within their power to resist any move of the Holy Spirit that contradicts their sectarian orthodoxy.
So-called heretics are quickly ejected or crucified (or burned at the stake)!
Old and new wineskins.
The Lord Jesus Christ used the metaphor of old and new wineskins to emphasise the fragility of human organisation that become so rigid, that any move of the Holy Spirit threatens the very existence of the organisation.
No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the wine will burst the wineskins and the wine will spill out. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins.”
(Mark 2:22)
And spilling out it is!
Over 64% of young Americans between the ages of nineteen and thirty, who grew up in Christian homes, have abandoned Christianity; that is, they either no longer identify as Christian or no longer 'go to Church'.
For the past century, the United States has been the final bastion of Christianity in the world; the only world-power in which Christians have been able to exercise significant, albeit diminishing, control over the levers of state.
Such a massive exodus of young Americans, spells disaster for Christianity!
That's good news for the true Church of Jesus Christ!
There has never been a better time to be a disciple of Jesus Christ!
Next question, What is the iron in the clay?
