Job 2:8 And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. (ESV)

Sitting in church this morning and listening to our pastor speak on this moment in Job’s life, painted an ugly and disturbing picture in my mind. It was one that was not part of the sermon today, but one that I could see, and it disturbed me.

Jeremiah 18:4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it.

Psalm 31:12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.

Imagine if you would a man that tries to take and remove the ugliness of his condition with the broken pieces of his life. This is the image I was left with this morning.

As pathetic as that image is of Job sitting in the ashes of his ruined life scrapping at those boils with a broken nasty filthy piece of pottery, isn’t that exactly what we do in this life without Jesus? Nothing we can do to make things better with the broken pieces of our lives.

We need to place ourselves back in the hands of the potter to be made into a new vessel.

Even more so should we accept the molding and not try and pick up the broken pieces of the old vessel and try and make them fit into the new one.

But we do just that don’t we?