A New Day

By: Pastor Johnie Akers     

Jeremiah 18:4, “. . . so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it.”  My wife loves candles.  The house is filled with a variety of shapes and scents.  Some she has purchased and some she has made.  Recently I noticed one older candle sitting on a corner shelf in its jar.  The wick was burned several inches down into the wax.  Dust had collected in the jar that was scorched around the edges.  It was fragmented with pieces of match stems and wick fragments imbedded in the wax.  Years ago, when she purchased it, the candle was fresh, clean, and burned with an aroma of spice.  But years of use had taken its toll on the old candle and the jar.  It would have been so easy to simply discard it in the trash and buy a new one in its place.  But on a whim, I took the jar and placed it in a double boiler on the stove.  Gradually the fragmented wax melted.  I poured the liquefied wax into another container, straining out the debris that had become embedded over the years.  I scrubbed the jar, making it like new.  Then I created a new wick from a piece of twine andcoated it with the melted wax.  Pam had some wax fragments left over from a craft project she had completed, so I added those to the melted wax.  With the wick in place, I poured the melted wax back into the jar.  After the wax had solidified, the candle appeared as if it was just purchased from the store shelf.  It was the same wax, in the same jar, but it had been created anew.  When she saw the finished product she said, “Now John, there’s a sermon in that!”  Indeed, there is.  This is the essence of God’s work of grace in each of us.  He takes the burned, used, fragmented pieces of our lives, melts us and gently strains out the impurities, and makes us as if we had never been used before.  Thank God, He never throws us away.  But He takes us in our broken state and remakes us into a vessel of honor that can once again reflect His glory and praise, for a witness to all, for each new day.