The Ultimate Vessel.

Heb 12:4  Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. 

Heb 12:5  And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: 

Heb 12:6  For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. 

Heb 12:7  If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? 

Heb 12:8  But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. 

Heb 12:9  Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? 

Heb 12:10  For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. 

Heb 12:11  Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. 

We forget we are children… REALLY CHILDREN. We've labeled ourselves adults and called ourselves independent. We praise those who make it on their own, who makes something of themselves,  who have grown up nice and mature, polite, respectful, generous, kind, and prosperous. We love being able to say 'our children' have wonderful lives, they take care of themselves and are raising a wonderful family of their own. We would so love to be able to say that we are successful adults.

Yet, we are counting our success and our children's success on a level so far away from the spiritual we no longer care so much if we or our children have a true spiritual walk with Christ but rather if we appear to be a success to the world around us, to our families, to our friends, to our peers.

We in turn are very quick to label ourselves and our children failures when we've not met the proper criteria of those who are able to call themselves successes.

By WHOSE measuring stick have we measured our success or failure? Man's or God's.  If you say God's and go on to tell me how God has given you so much goodness, I may just have to ask you if you've been chastened by God, if you've suffered scourging by the Lord.

If you call yourself a spiritual failure, I may have to ask you if you are the Potter or the Clay in the Potter's hand. Only the Potter can determine if the clay is a failure or not.  We like to pretend we are the potter and the clay as well, but that's not true. We want to determine when we've had enough refining, enough chastisement but the truth is when a parent is striving to raise a child they determine when the child needs chastisement, they don't let the child decide because children will quickly decide that the very least chastisement is necessary so they don't have to suffer at all.

Most parents will never call their children (adult children as well) failures, because they hold out hope that an errant child will see their wrong ways and mend them. 

Why are we quick to label ourselves failures when we seem to suffer endless chastisement? Probably because if we are constantly chastising our own children we begin to believe they'll never learn. However, throughout a child's life there are different levels of chastisement each fit for the maturity level of the child. You generally won't have to chastise an older child in the way you do a younger one. Your teenager will still need to be chastised after fourteen years of constant off and on chastisement for various age appropriate infractions. You won't stop chastising your child at ten years old and never chastise them again. In fact I'm sure there are plenty of parents that have no problem continuing the chastising where needed of adult children well up there in years. As long as they're a parent and they note where a child may be erring, they'll want to correct the child.

So why can't we comprehend that as children of God we will never truly be in a position to no longer be chastised by our heavenly Father, at least not until our Savior returns and sin is eradicated?

We need to recognize that a lot of our inability to count our temptations, our trials, our tribulations, all joy is because we take on the stance that what we are coping with is unfair and awful, and a part of us wants to question God as to why we must suffer even when we already know the answer. We would rather cry, "Woe is me!" than count our suffering joy. Pain and suffering is AWFUL- so why can some endure it stoically and others crumble? Do we even pray to be able to count it joy, or rather that it simply stops and things go back to when they weren't so awful?  We are put through our tribulations and trials and through them all our steadfastness in the faith is what is being put on trial. The refining and scourging in the Potter's hand will mold the clay more perfectly- in faith.

What may appear for all intents and purposes to be unsuccessful lives in the worldly way could be lives filled with refining for the ultimate perfect vessel belonging to Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior!