JOY "Jeremiah and Lamentations / Jeremiah: The Weeping Prophet" March 11, 2015

March 11, 2015

Jeremiah and Lamentations

Jeremiah:The Weeping Prophet

Jeremiah 18:1-11

I    Who Was Jeremiah

II    We Are Spoiled Clay

III    Still In The Potter’s Hand

Jeremiah and Lamentations are fitting companions for each other…Jeremiah spent his life warning Israel of what was going to happen to them if they didn’t repent---and Lamentations is a collection of the heart-cry of a repentant Israel after they were taken into captivity. Lamentations is an honest and forthright depiction of both individual and community despair over the plight of Jerusalem and Judah…..from the bittersweet remembrance of the greatness of the nation, to vengeful words for the conquerors of those brought about their fall…this book laments what once was and is no more.  Lamentations reminds us of the appalling consequences of sin and that God doesn’t treat sin lightly----and that we are responsible for our own sins, just like we’re responsible for answering to the Lord for our own salvation. The good news is that none of us is beyond help----the Lord Jesus  is our hope, He is always our hope…..if we will repent and confess our sins, no matter what they are…then our good gracious God will come to us and forgive our sins and restore our right relationship with Him….

“Story of the Teacup
There was a couple who used to go to England to shop in the beautiful stores. They both liked antiques and pottery and especially teacups. This was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. One day in this darling little shop, they saw a beautiful teacup. They said, "May we see that? We’ve never seen one quite so beautiful." As the lady handed it to them, suddenly the teacup spoke. "You don’t understand," it said. "I haven’t always been a teacup. There was a time when I was red and I was clay. My master took me and rolled me and patted me over and over and I yelled out, ’Let me alone’, but he only smiled, ’Not yet.’ "Then I was placed on a spinning wheel," the teacup said, "and suddenly I was spun around and around and around. Stop it! I’m getting dizzy? I screamed. But the master only nodded and said, ’Not yet.’ Then he put me in the oven. I never felt such heat. I wondered why he wanted to burn me, and I yelled and knocked at the door. I could see him through the opening and I could read his lips and he shook his head, ’Not yet.’ Finally the door opened, he put me on the shelf, and I began to cool. ’There, that’s better’, I said. And he brushed and painted me all over. The fumes were horrible. I thought I would gag. ’Stop it, stop it!’ I cried. he only nodded, ’Not yet.’ Then suddenly he put me back into the oven, not like the first one. This was twice as hot and I knew I would suffocate. I begged. I pleaded. I screamed. I cried. All the time I could see him through the opening nodding his head saying, ’Not yet.’ Then I knew there wasn’t any hope. I would never make it. I was ready to give up. But the door opened and he took me out and placed me on the shelf. One hour later He handed me a mirror and I couldn’t believe it was me. ’It’s beautiful. I’m beautiful.’ ’I want you to remember, then,’ he said, ’I know it hurts to be rolled and patted, but if I had left you alone, you would have dried up. I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled. I knew it hurt and was hot and disagreeable in the oven but if I hadn’t put you there, you would have cracked. I know the fumes were bad and when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn’t done that, you never would have hardened; you would not have had any color in your life. And if I hadn’t put you back in that second oven, you wouldn’t survive for very long because the hardness would not have held. Now you are a finished product. You are what I had in mind when I first began with you.)
(David, a 2-year old with leukemia, was taken by him mother, Deborah, to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to see Dr. John Truman who specializes in treating children with cancer and various blood diseases. Dr. Truman's prognosis was devastating: "He has a 50-50 chance." The countless clinic visits, the blood tests, the intravenous drugs, the fear and pain--the mother's ordeal can be almost as bad as the child's because she must stand by, unable to bear the pain herself.  David never cried in the waiting room, and although his friends in the clinic had to hurt him and stick needles in him, he hustled in ahead of him mother with a smile, sure of the welcome he always got. 

When he was three, David had to have a spinal tap--a painful procedure at any age. It was explained to him that, because he was sick, Dr. Truman had to do something to make him better. "If it hurts, remember it's because he loves you," Deborah said. The procedure was horrendous. It took three nurses to hold David still, while he yelled and sobbed and struggled. When it was almost over, the tiny boy, soaked in sweat and tears, looked up at the doctor and gasped, "Thank you, Dr. Tooman, for my hurting." )

God knows what He’s doing for all of us. He is the potter and we are His clay. He will mold us and make us, so that we may be made into a flawless piece of work to fulfill His good, pleasing and perfect will.”

I   Who Was Jeremiah

What if some present-day preacher stood in his pulpit and persistently declared that God was on the side of the Taliban? That God was against America and that he was raising up the Taliban, to be his people and his servants? That God cared nothing for the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution or the long heritage of religious worship that our nation has had? In fact, that the things we emphasize were an offense to God?

And what if this preacher even advocated that Christians renounce their loyalty to their country and join the Taliban? And what if the preacher -- subjected to house arrest, or flung into prison, or slapped in the face in public and his writings burned, or half-drowned in a pit of slime -- would not only stubbornly refuse to take back one word of what he had said but would only repeat it again? Well, this is something like the situation that is recorded in the book of Jeremiah. This is exactly what Jeremiah was called to do. Except he was called to preach God to a nation who had turned its back on Him…

Imagine yourself as that preacher. Imagine how you would feel when no one listens to you and persecution hounds you every step of the way. You are unable to seek comfort in marriage because the days are too difficult and God has said to remain unmarried. You feel abandoned, and alone; all your friends turn from you.

And if you try to quit, and refuse to be this kind of a preacher, you find that you cannot quit -- that the word of God burns in your bones and you have to say it whether or not you want to. And despite the message that you are called upon to deliver, your love for your country is genuine and deep -- as you see it surrounded by its enemies and ravished and conquered and despoiled, you are overcome by a deep sorrow that breaks out in grief's lamentations.

Now, perhaps, you can understand why Jeremiah, of all the prophets, was unquestionably the most heroic. Isaiah wrote more exalted passages and perhaps saw more precisely the coming of the Messiah and the fullness of his work. Other prophets speak more precisely concerning some of the future events that were to be fulfilled, but Jeremiah is outstanding among the prophets as a man of heroic, dauntless courage. For many years he endured this kind of persecution in his life without quitting. That is an amazing record, isn't it? As you read through this book you can see that here indeed is an amazing man, and you can understand why he was called the weeping prophet…..

Jeremiah lived in the last days of a decaying nation. He was the last prophet to Judah, the southern kingdom. Judah continued on after the ten tribes of the north had been carried into captivity under Assyria. (Isaiah prophesied about sixty years before Jeremiah.) Jeremiah comes in at the close of the reign of the last good king of Judah, the boy king Josiah, who led the last revival the nation experienced before it went into captivity. (This revival under King Josiah was a more of a superficial matter; in fact, the prophet Hilkiah had told him that though the people would follow him in his attempt to reform the nation and return to God, they would only do so because they loved him and not because they loved God.)

Jeremiah, then, comes in, right in the middle of the reign of King Josiah and his ministry carries us on through the reign of King Jehoahaz, who was on the throne only about three months. And then came King Jehoiakim, one of the most evil kings of Judah, and then the three months' reign of Jehoiachin who was captured by Nebuchadnezzar and taken into captivity in Babylon. And Jeremiah was still around at the time of Judah's last king Zedekiah, at the end of whose reign Nebuchadnezzar returned, utterly destroying the city of Jerusalem and taking the whole nation into Babylonian captivity.

Jeremiah's ministry covered about forty years, and during all this time the prophet never once saw any signs of success in his ministry. His message was one of denunciation and reform, and the people never obeyed him. The other prophets saw in some measure the impact of their message upon the nation -- but not Jeremiah. He was called to a ministry of failure, and yet he was enabled to keep going for forty long years and to be faithful to God and to accomplish God's purpose: to witness to a decayed nation.

Two important things are woven into the fabric of this entire book of prophecy. One concerns the fate of the nation, and the other concerns the feelings of the prophet. And both of them are instructive.

First of all, the prophecies of Jeremiah that have to do with the fate of the nation, reflect the familiar theme of all the prophets. Jeremiah reminds this people that the beginning of error in their lives was their failure to take God seriously. They looked lightly upon what he said. They did not pay much attention to what he had told them, and they did what was right in their own eyes rather than carefully examining their behavior in the light of God's revelation and word.

As we read ,in the historical books, the Israelite people, had sunk so low in the early days of Josiah's reign that they had actually lost the copy of the law. As far as we can tell, no one in the land of Judah any longer had access to the word of God, and the copy which was in the temple -- and which ought to have been in the central place of worship -- was lost somewhere in the back room. Only by accident was it finally found, and its discovery stimulated the revival led by Josiah.

But that is how far off base the nation had gone. They had actually lost contact with the word of God. They had adopted the dangerous principle of doing what was right in their own eyes. What they thought was right. Many people do what they know is wrong in the sight of God. That is bad enough. But it is equally dangerous to judge for ourselves what is right for we have no ability to judge properly -- and this is what was happening in Israel.

As a result, they adopted the values of the world around them and ended up worshipping the gods of the other nations. This brought on, as it always does, a torrent of bickering and strife and lowered morals and perverted justice. They made military alliances with godless nations around them, and the country gradually sank deeper and deeper and lower and lower on the moral scale.

It was to this people that Jeremiah came. And the message that he was told to proclaim was judgment: that the national rebellion would lead to national ruin. Throughout this whole book you find these prophecies building up to become reality, as Jeremiah told exactly how God was raising up a terrible and godless people, a fierce and cruel people, who would sweep across the land and destroy everything in their path. They would be utterly ruthless; they would break down the walls and destroy the temple and take all the things that the nation valued and Israel would be carried away into captivity. And that that would be how God  God would judge Israel.

But Jeremiah also makes very clear throughout these passages of judgment that God judges with a sorrowing heart, a weeping heart, and then the prophet looks beyond the 70 years of captivity he predicts. (Later on, while reading this very book of Jeremiah, the prophet Daniel realized that God had predicted that the captivity would last exactly 70 years. That is how Daniel knew that the end of the time was coming and he could look forward to seeing the nation restored again to the land.) Jeremiah looks beyond the captivity to the restoration of the people and then, in that peculiar way that prophets suddenly extend their view from immediate to far-distant events, he looks even further beyond -- to the ultimate dispersion of the peoples of Israel, and then to the final regathering of the nation into the land. He looks to the days that will usher in the millennial reign when Israel -- restored and blessed and called by God -- shall be the world's center.

In the middle of this book, in chapters 30 through 33, is an amazing and beautiful prediction written when Jeremiah was in a dungeon. He was in a deep slime pit, the mud two or three feet thick on the bottom and only a little bit of daylight trickling through from above. In the midst of those depressing and deplorable circumstances, the prophet was led of the Spirit of God to write the flaming vision of the days when Israel will be called back again, and God promises to be their God and to walk among them and put away their sins. There in the middle of chapter 31 is the great promise of the new covenant, which will be made with Israel.

These words are picked up by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 8:8-12) Also, our Jesus himself referred to this same prophecy when he gathered with his disciples on the night before the cross and instituted the Lord's Supper. As he took the cup after the bread and held it up to them, he said, "For this is my blood of the [new] covenant." (Matthew 26:28) He was referring back to the days of Jeremiah's prophecy of the covenant that God would make with his people in that far-off day yet to come.

And even Now, in the ultimate sense, the fulfillment of that covenant is still in the distant future. God is fulfilling it today among the Gentiles in the church (which is made up of both Jew and Gentile) but the ultimate fulfillment of it for the nation Israel remains in the future, as Jeremiah predicted:

What a wonderful picture that is. This is the fulfilling of the vision that was given to Jeremiah, in chapter 18, when God told him to go down to the potter's house. That is a strange place for a prophet to go but that is where God sent him.

As Jeremiah watched the potter at work, he saw him making a vessel on his wheel, and as the wheel turned the potter shaped the vessel. And as Jeremiah watched, the vessel in the potter's hand was marred and broken. Then the potter took the vessel and once more pushed it all down into a lump of clay, and shaping it the second time, made it into a vessel after the potter's heart.

All through this book you will find visual aids, or object lessons. The prophets are good at giving such lessons, and Jeremiah does that here. This is God's great object lesson of what he does with a broken life. He takes it and makes it over again -- not according to the failures and foolish dreams of an individual, but after the potter's heart, for the potter has power over the clay to shape it as he wishes. Jeremiah speaks a prophecy of ruin -- of desolation and destruction and judgment -- but beyond that is the hope and glory of the days when God will reshape the vessel. And this applies not only to the nation but to the individual as well.

Now, the second theme in Jeremiah relates to the feelings of the prophet. There is a great lesson for us in Jeremiah's honest reactions to the situations he faces. We find that he constantly fights a battle with discouragement. Who wouldn't with a ministry like his? He sees absolutely no signs of his ministry's success and the grim specter of discouragement and depression dogs his footsteps through all those forty years.

One of the amazing things about this prophet is that when he is in the public eye, he is as fearless as a lion. He speaks to kings and murderers and captains who hurl enraged threats against him, and he is utterly fearless. He looks them right in the eye and delivers the message of God that speaks of their own destruction. But when he is by himself, all alone with God, he is filled with discouragement and depression and resentment and bitterness, and it all comes flooding out. The prophet turns to God and cries out…..

He accuses God of being a liar and undependable. Strong words? Undoubtedly. Honest words? Absolutely. He is pouring out exactly how he feels. He has begun to wonder if the trouble might after all be with God that he cannot be depended upon. As we look through this brief account, we can see that what is bothering the prophet , personally is persecution….and lonliness

And Aren't these usually the ingredients of discouragement for us? We feel put upon. We feel persecuted. We feel that we have tried to do the right thing but everybody either just disregards it or comes back to make trouble for us. Or they mock and ridicule us and we are weighed down by loneliness and depression of spirit. We feel forsaken. (tell the story of my isolation last night)

Reading about Jeremiah’s reaction, our first thought is "I know the trouble with this man. He's obviously permitted himself to backslide." Disobedience -- that is the quick and easy answer that we glibly assume about somebody who is suffering like this. But that isn't the case with Jeremiah. We can see that he was a man who was praying: And was feeding on the word: And was witnessing. 

This was not a backsliding man, is it? These are the very things we need to do if we get discouraged and depressed. We need to pray and read our Bible and witness to others and keep away from evil. Isn't that the answer? Isn't that the formula? But here was a man who was doing all these things and he was still defeated, still discouraged. Well, what was the problem?

The problem was that he had forgotten his calling. He had forgotten what God had promised to be to him. So God called him back to it:

That is what God said to him at the beginning. Notice this man's call back in chapter 1, “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you:
I appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:4 RSV)

And Jeremiah said:

"Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth."[He was probably about seventeen years of age when this call came to him.]

But God called him back from a mire of depression and discouragement, He  called him back to the promise of God; where He was reminded that God is greater than circumstances and that no matter how depressing they may be, or how negative they are, the God woo calls him ,is the God who is able to sustain him, in the midst of it; when he get his eyes off of himself and back on to God (like Peter walking on the water), he began to walk again.

And in the strength he received through this lesson he continued with his ministry, through all the discouraging circumstances, to at last, be taken as a prisoner to Egypt, where he died. We have no record of his death, but Jeremiah was faithful to the end as he learned to walk in the strength of the Lord, his God. And he gives us this wonderful prophecy of the grace of God in restoring lives and taking broken, battered, wounded, defeated spirits and making them over again, into vessels pleasing to him….

II      We Are Spoiled Clay
 There are sermons in front of us every day, if we will just open our eyes and pay attention. If we walk through this life attuned to the spirit, listening for God’s voice we will be able to hear those sermons preached. 

That was how it was with Jeremiah.  In chapter 18, v. 1, “The word of the Lord came to him, and said, ‘Come, go down to the potter’s house and there I will let you hear my words.” So, Guided by the Spirit of God, Jeremiah obeyed and when he got to the potter’s house, he saw a very common sight – an artisan working at his wheel. Potters were as common in the time of Jeremiah as landscape workers are in our time. In a time before Tupperware, these craftsmen provided the people with the essential containers they used to carry, to store, to serve and to cook. The potter was as much a fixture in the communities of ancient Israel as bankers, grocery clerks and auto mechanics are in our day. 

The potter also happens to be a common biblical image used for God in the Old Testament. From God kneeling on the earth to form and fashion humankind from the dust and mud in the book of Genesis, to the creation theology of David in the Psalms and prophets like Isaiah and Amos, who proclaimed God to be a potter. The word potter actually means, “One who shapes and forms.” There’s no better metaphor, for what God does in relation to His creation, than this. He is a master artisan. God takes the raw materials of life and humanity and molds them - shapes them- into something beautiful and useful. God is the master potter in whose hands Israel and its people were fashioned to be a blessing to the whole of creation. And it’s still the image that we can hold in our hearts and minds… in the times that we live in….  – of God as a potter. 

So it makes sense that this this was the image that Jeremiah used to try and get God’s message across to the people of Israel, and to us too…. The first part of the message is simply this: We Are Spoiled Clay. …..Jeremiah obeys the Lord and goes to the house of the potter and begins to watch him, working at his wheel. He notices how the craftsman takes his lump of raw clay and throws it up on the wheel. And then Jeremiah watches as the potter begins to knead it, and throw it down again and again on the wheel. He watches the potter mold it to a desired shape. But then, Jeremiah notices something that becomes a visual sermon for him. In the words of verse 2: “The vessel he (the potter) was making of clay was spoiled…and he reworked it…” One of the first messages we might hear from this ancient allegory today is that we are clay– we are lumps of dust and mud that the potter is fashioning. But sometimes we do not turn out as the potter intends. The Hebrew word in verse 4, that is translated “spoiled” also means, “marred or ruined; corrupted or perverted.

 Both Jeremiah and we understand this sermon. We are that spoiled clay. Sometimes, the potter has some pretty raw material to work with, in people, and sometimes the master potter just has to begin again and reshape and remold us for His use. We, all of us, are in one way or another marred clay. Another way that the Bible says it, is that we are “sinners.” We fall short of what God’s intentions are for us, most often, by our own choices. 

We are, incomplete works of the Master Potter. We’ve all heard the phrase, “God is not finished with us yet.” While it may sound cliché, it is profoundly true. God is NOT finished with me yet. nor is God is finished with you yet. And it only takes a daily self-examination to know, that that is the truth. We are good creations of God – clay that has tremendous potential – but the Potter is not finished with us yet.  

(The story is told about Ruth Bell Graham, that once she was in an antiques store… and she rummaged around for an hour----when she finally went up to the counter to pay for her purchase of a delicate little tea cup---the proprieteor said,”Mrs. Graham, I’m sorry but there’s a chip in this cup” and her reply was, “I know it but I still want it so that  can remind myself, that God’s not through with me yet…” )

The same could be said of everything in God’s creation. Genesis 1 says that when God looked at all that He had made in the 6 days of his labor of love, called creation, God said, “It is very good!” But then we look around us and we see all manner of ills that exist in creation, because of sin –---like poverty, terrorism, drugs, war, disease and greed. And when we see those things, we know not only, that God is not finished with US yet, but God is not finished with his world yet either. Now, we have two choices in response to the “unfinished-ness” of our lives and the world . We can face the reality of being spoiled clay in a corrupted creation and just become hopeless. Or we can face the reality of being spoiled clay in a corrupted creation and become hopeful. I believe God, in Jesus Christ, has called us to the latter choice. Look at all the ways, that despite our corrupted creation, God has chosen to use us people – ordinary messed up people – “spoiled clay” - to do his will in this world.   

(Another of Ruth Graham’s simple, but honest, faith understanding and wisdom, is that )No matter how messed up, you think you might be, God can use you Mrs’ Graham said to and will use you, to do good for Him…  and for his creation, that He so longs to redeem. Mrs. Graham said that “whenever we feel bad or useless, dwelling on the fact that we are spoiled clay, and of no use to God or anyone else. We need to remember that… …

Noah was a drunk, Abraham was old, Isaac was a daydreamer, Jacob was a liar, Leah was ugly and Joseph was abused, Moses has a stuttering problem, Gideon was afraid, Sampson was a womanizer, Rehab was a prostitute, Jeremiah and Timothy were too young, David had an affair and was a murderer, Elijah was suicidal and Isaiah preached naked, .Jonah ran from God, Naomi was a widow who was bitter, Job went bankrupt,

John the Baptist ate bugs, Peter denied Christ, the disciples fell asleep while Jesus was praying. Martha worried about everything, Mary worried about nothing, the Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once, ,Zaccheus was a very short man, Paul was a religious fanatic, Timothy had an ulcer…AND Lazarus? That poor guy, was dead!)

II    Still in the Potter’s Hands

No matter who we are, or what we’ve done, the Lord can use us. Why? Because, just like in Jeremiah's visual sermon, we may be spoiled clay, but we are……Still in the Potter’s hands!

That is the second part of the message Jeremiah saw in his visual sermon that day. We

may be spoiled clay, but we are still in the potter’s hands. Never forget… He is not finished with us yet, and can still make something beautiful of our lives. That wonderful hymn by Bill Gaither is true: “Something beautiful, something good. All my confusion, He understood. All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife. But He made something beautiful of my life”  The truth of the matter is that God the Master Potter, is always looking to remake us, reform us, reshape us more and more in the image of his Son Jesus Christ. He loves us – spoiled clay that we are. 

In fact, He loves us so much, that in the person of Jesus, he actually humbled Himself to become a part of His created  humanity. And He entered into our marred ness – and our corruption and He understood our fragile incompleteness. So, that gives Him the right,   with tender and loving care, to fashion us into something beautiful and new. One writer says it like this: “God is not the Lord of the landfill, anxious to get rid of anything that is ruined, spoiled, damaged goods. Instead, God wants to rework us, recycle us, and turn us into something that is pleasing and useful and good.”  As long as we are in the Potter’s hand, there is hope for this clay. However, one question does arise. 

How can we make sure that we stay in the hands of the master potter? And it seems that the answer in Jeremiah 18 is that we will remain in the master’s hands… …Through repentance and willingness to change. In the middle verses of this passage, the Lord uses covenant language to talk to Israel. He uses a lot of “if this…then that” language and in the process essentially tells the people of Israel that they have a role to play in becoming good vessels. They have the free will to choose to submit to the will of the potter. And if they do, then the Master artisan can make something beautiful of their lives. But if not, then He cannot. I like the way one commentator on this wonderful passages puts this thought: “It is not just the skill and determination (of the potter) that makes these pieces of art; the consistency of the clay makes a big difference. If the clay starter was mixed with too much water, it will slide around on the wheel; if there wasn’t enough moisture in the mixing process, the clay will crack. 

The clay has to be malleable and flexible enough to work with – in a sense, it has to ‘cooperate’ with the potter.”  And how do we cooperate with our Master Potter? Through repentance and willingness to change. Where are we, as we hear this story today? Are we recognizing what spoiled clay we are? Are we keenly aware of our shortcomings and what a shoddy looking vessel we are for the one who fashioned us? We don’t need to despair. It’s the guilty and the imperfect that God has used more times than not in this world, to fashion something precious and useful in his sight. Are we uncooperative clay today? Do we find ourselves, working at odds with the Master Potter, resisting His reshaping and remolding work in our lives? The answer is a simple but difficult one…. we need to submit our hearts and our attitudes and our abilities, and our disappointments, and our joys, and our hands and our feet and our mouths and our ears and our intellect-----the whole of what we are, to the Lord today. 

(I was watching little Leona yesterday sleeping first in her mama’s arms and then in her daddys’s, totally relaxed, totally submissive---her face turned up, and her arms flung over her head-----the picture of total trust ,in the ones, in whose hands she was resting…)

.We need to let go and let God work on us! We need to trust Him totally…We need to be malleable in the Master’s hands. If we learn to surrender ourselves to Him, there is no telling what priceless treasure the potter will craft from the raw material of our lives. (Way back in the 2nd century, one of the early church father’s Irenaeus, gave us the words we should live by….he said, “If then thou art the work of God, await the hand of thy maker, who fashions everything in due course…Keep thy heart soft and pliable for Him; retain the form in which the artist fashioned thee, have moisture in thyself, lest becoming hard, thou

shouldst lose the mark of his fingers”

May the divine fingers that fashioned all of us from the dust of the ground, continue to

remake us more and more into the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and King Amen and amen……

                                                Have Thine Own Way Lord

Have thy own way,,,

Thou art the potter, I am the clay

Mold me and make me after thy will 

While I am waiting

Yielded and still

prayer….

Our Father, thank you for the encouragement of this great prophet as we see the decay in our own nation, and the defeat of so many endeavors undertaken for your name's sake. We see the scorn and contempt for your word and for the things concerning you. We pray that you will help us to realize and remember that you are the God who opens and no man shuts and who shuts and no man opens, who does your will in the nations, who sets up and overthrows, who builds and plants, and who accomplishes all your purposes. May we get our eyes off ourselves and our circumstances and on to you and to your great purposes and be strong in you and in your power. We ask it in your name. Amen.