because God has engrafted new truth from it.  And I hope it reaches you today because I never have any desire ever to just preach a sermon.  The word ‘sermon,’ as you know, comes from sermo in the Latin and John’s Gospel opens: “In beginning was the sermo and the sermo was with God; and the sermo was God.”  There’s only one Sermon, and that’s when God’s life as revealed in Christ comes through and you hear that ‘other voice’ and you forget the preacher.  I want that to happen today.  Don’t want any distraction away from God’s Word and God, who can speak to each of us today. 

If you haven’t got it already written down, I want you to write four words in the margin of your Bible because those four words let me hang the truths of this illustration in a way that you can retain them.  There’s too much preaching that is like seed falling on the well-traveled path in the Parable of the Sower.  We just get dinted a little bit with one message and here comes the next message and it dints us a little and nothing really penetrates.  When the Word of God comes forth anointed by the Spirit it’s gonna penetrate.  When Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost, it says of that mocking mob, “They were pricked in their heart, and said what must we do to be saved?”

And now “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah,” and I want four words written alongside that 18th chapter: ‘Principle,’ ‘Purpose,’ ‘Process,’ ‘Person.’  The strongest men that God ever had to deal with, and that’s very significant to me, the strongest men that God ever had to deal with He forced them to learn the lessons of the potter’s house.  And He forced them to learn it in the context that once for all they would understand that this is the way that God deals with His people.  

and mire for doing nothing but preaching God’s Word, and with certain doom in the natural facing him, he declares his Faith in God

by sending out an offering and defying circumstances by having his relative invest in his inheritance under God in Anathoth as though God, and God alone, was in control of him whatever circumstance he was in.  He was tough. 

Zechariah, we know, was that flame of fire that got God’s people working again when they came back from bondage to build the Temple.  He was tough.  When everybody else was ready to lay down on the job, Haggai, an old man, and Zechariah, a young man, got them going again.  God took him to the potter’s house. 

In the New Testament, nobody’s tougher than Paul.  What he bore up under I couldn’t bear up, I really believe, for a day under it.  Yet it never slowed him down.  God made him go to the potter’s house.  Isaiah, when everybody else had forsaken God and given up when Josiah died, Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on a throne.

These are men who in the natural pointed in a direction—their tenacity, their determination, their courage, their willpower, their abilities, their ingenuity.  They would have made a mark wherever they went.  God picked them.  Before He could maximize their use, they had to learn this lesson of the potter’s house.  You take the message of the potter’s house and try to fit it over much of the preaching that attracts men and women to God today and it’s gonna jar with a dissonant note because God is boxed up, though He’s never called that, God is boxed up somewhere as needing a new sales pitch every day that can bring man to God to where man will accept—as though the Lord of Glory is tremblingly waiting for acceptance—where man will accept God.