Pastor’s Message “Shaped and Known By God”
God knows you. How does it make you feel to know that God knows your every thought, your every mistake and your every talent (even those talents you may not have discovered yet)? Does it make you feel at peace or blessed? Does it make you feel exposed or vulnerable? All of those feelings are perfectly natural and we can even have all of those feelings all at once, which is enough to make your head spin!
But don’t worry. This is nothing new. (Unless this is the first you’re hearing about God being all-knowing, in which case… surprise! You have no secrets from God! …and He still loves you no matter what.)
Isn’t that a beautiful thing about God? No matter what we’ve done, God loves us and will never stop loving us because we are made by God in His own image.
Does it break God’s heart when we sin? I believe it does, because sin separates us from God. As a parent of a child who lives across the country, I know that separation is painful.
Because God loves us so much, He wants nothing to separate us from Him. That’s why Jesus came to earth. So that we may claim Him as our Savior and be cleansed from our sins.
In our reading from the prophet Jeremiah, we hear that God will destroy a nation that sins against Him and reshape it to make it into a new, more pleasing vessel just as a potter does with clay that didn’t work well into the shape the potter had first intended.
I think I may have heard of some nations like that… but I’m not here to make any political statements. Instead, let’s look at ourselves as that “house of Israel” that the Lord spoke of, because we are told way back in the book of Genesis 2:7 that, “...the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. “
Because man has used clay to make pottery for many centuries, it has always been presumed that this is the medium God used to create humankind from the dust of the ground. Clay can be difficult to work with. If you dig your own, it most likely has impurities in it like dirt, stones, roots or other organic or manmade matter and they need to be removed in order for the clay to maintain its integrity.
The same is true for us. We can be difficult to work with. We have impurities we’ve gathered throughout our lives that need to be removed in order to maintain our integrity. The dirt of sin, the stones of addictions, the roots of generations of struggle and the physical ailments or hurdles from natural or manmade situations.
The more we live our lives, the more it tends to stick to us. But by the Grace of God, we can rid ourselves of those worldly impurities by turning away from sin and back to God, so that we may know Him from the inside out.
Just as God told Jeremiah in our reading today, “if that nation turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it.” God is waiting for us to simply turn away from the ways of this world and focus on His ways.
I think we’re on the right path. We are a part of a community of faith that loves and supports not only one another, but also our neighbors both near and far.
Please join me in reading the Mission Statement of the Waupun UMC…
We welcome you to
- GATHER with us in fellowship
- GROW in faith
- GO into the world to share God’s love
Our mission statement to GATHER, GROW and GO keeps our focus on how it’s through our faith that we are equipped to share God’s love with the world. (Hopefully peeling our own sins off of ourselves as we help others to do the same.)
As we enter into our service of Holy Communion, we celebrate the grace freely given by Christ. Knowing what cruelty awaited him, Jesus generously paid the ultimate price for our sins…
