Hidden Treasure in Jars of Clay.

Words for a song I wrote, that choir is learning for Pentecost. (It's in my book.)
I am rather fond of these words. This song is one of my best efforts at summarising the gospel message, I think, and I don't think highly of myself for it - the song was a gift, really. The treasure, of course, is Jesus, Jesus' love, and we are the jars of clay.

Hidden Treasure in Jars of Clay

Gracious Father shows his favour

In the free gift of His Son

Jesus Who shrank not from dying; 

Gave His life for everyone. 

Costly pearl, yet given freely, 

No sinful man can pay enough 

to earn this treasure, worth more than diamonds, 

Freely given from above.

Heaven's gates are now thrown open

Come to Him all you who thirst;

He'll never cast out a sinner,

not even the very worst.

Those who strive and strain to please God 

never can be good enough.

But those who trust and follow Jesus

Do his deeds with hearts of love.

In the gloom of this dark valley

How we’ve wept, the tears we’ve shed! 

Yet we do not fall, despairing,

Jesus comforts us instead.

With the dark clouds the thunder beckons 

Elijah’s heart might quail with fear,

But the One who made the thunder

Is the still quiet voice we hear.

Sins forgiven

God’s redemption

Fullness of God, Jesus' love,

Poured into these cracked containers, 

Treasure inside jars of clay.

When the groaning, stretched creation 

Wakes rejoicing at the day,

All will sing to see the glory

That was hid in jars of clay.

He came to bear our shame.

I saw a speaker a few weeks ago, a lovely man called Paul who radiated a sense of peace and God's presence. He was telling us about his life.

Paul talked about how he was mocked as a child by the principal at the school he attended, who told him he was 'the king of the duffers.' In the British dialect of the area he came from, a duffer was a stupid person, a dunce, a complete fool. Paul felt intensely ashamed about this public ridicule from a figure who ought to have been encouraging him, and this sense of shame, and the shame of other events that had happened to him in his life, drove Paul to alcoholism eventually.

Paul ended up working on the mines in Australia many years later. During a break, one of the other miners, pointing to one of the truck drivers, told Paul, "Stay away from that fellow, he's a religious nut, crazy about Jesus." Anyhow, Paul ended up talking to that truck driver, and came to faith in Jesus.

One of the things Paul discovered about Christ is that, on the cross, Jesus took our sin and shame. Realising that Jesus had carried all of his shames, Paul gave his sense of shame to Jesus, about his childhood humiliation by the principal at the school, and the shame of the other things that had happened to humiliate him over the years, and all his sins. This was his journey to inner freedom in Christ, and I believe is why Paul gives such a sense of peace when he is talking about Jesus, as though Christ's grace is free to flow through him.

One day, Paul was struggling with going to have another drink. He cried out to God, saying "I can't do it! The desire is too strong!" and in that moment he says God cut his dependance on alcohol completely, and since then he has never had another drop to drink.

Anyway, in Paul's talk one point that really stayed with me was this - that Jesus has taken our shame as well as our sin. It's not something I've often thought about before. For me, anyway, it wasn't hard to think of times when I've felt very ashamed and completely humiliated - these events tend to stick in your mind, like hard, pointed sticks, giving you pain, and causing whole areas of our emotional life to be something to be avoided because of the past, like an injury that causes you to wince whenever you use that part of your body.

I realised that in my own life a lot of actions and reactions can be explained by shame that I've experienced as the victim of other people's sins and thoughtlessness and nastiness, as well as the shame of my own sins, my own actions and reactions to others at times.

And this is what Paul was saying, that Jesus came to take all our shame - the shame of both the victim and the perpetrator - the shame of sins done to us as well as the shame of the sins we have done. That really is the great compassion of God.

Paul said you could go through your life - think of every shame, and every sin, and cast it onto Jesus, realising he has already carried it for you on the cross. Jesus is the true and only cure for sin and shame - He has done for us what dulling the pain and running away can never do, and as someone who has given to Jesus myself all of my shame and sins, I have found this to be true as well for me. If you haven't tried giving Jesus all your sin and shame already, then you should, because he really is the only one who can save us from these things.