The passage

1This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2“Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” 3So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel.

Also referenced today

The shape of the message

1. A week of tragedy, and confidence that God works for good and awakens spiritual urgency
2. Jeremiah’s context: mercy, warning, and the potter’s house as God’s object lesson
3. Potter, wheel, and clay: God’s skill, life’s circumstances, and human frailty
4. Sovereign purpose and the fear of outcomes: the Potter’s right to shape and remake
5. Defects, resistance, and criticism: yielding to God and responding to opposition
6. Trusting the pierced Potter: Christ’s love, the potter’s field, and remaking the broken

Questions to hold while you listen

• Where do you feel the “wheel” of daily circumstances turning right now, and what would it look like to be willing and receptive rather than resistant?
• What fears come up when you hear that the Potter makes the vessel according to his plan and not the clay’s demand (Romans 9:20–21)?
• How do you typically respond to criticism, and how might God be trying to tell you something through it?
• What loss or suffering have you been tempted to interpret as cruelty, and what would it mean to believe God was shaping you with purpose?
• How does the picture of the Potter’s pierced hands and feet change what it means to trust God with pressure and heat?

Notes

This week

Watch for the ways God uses different hands to shape your life—parents, siblings, teachers, ministers, authors—and choose to receive rather than fight. When criticism or persecution comes, pour your heart out to the Lord and choose to bless rather than curse (Matthew 5:44; Romans 12:14).