Brittle Clay in Tender Hands Part 2

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You can find out more about Robbie Zacharias and the team at www.rzim.org. He may call you to be a diligent government servant. He may call you to be an artist. He may call you to be a car mechanic.

He may call you to be an executive. Are you willing in that setting to be the life of Christ in the midst of a dark situation? Hello and welcome to Let My People Think. Are you willing to be molded by the master potter?

Many aren't, but those who do find a fulfilled and contented life. This week RZM's founder, the late Robbie Zacharias, concludes a message on the story of the prophet Jeremiah, the man who wept for his nation over the things he saw them doing. How does our world today compare to what Jeremiah witnessed? Last week, Robbie shared that both eras demonstrated inexplicable violence. What is the second similarity between Jeremiah's time and ours? Here is Robbie with the conclusion of his message titled, Brittle Clay in Tender Hands. And you look across the historic landscape, you will find that those who have left their mark have left their mark because something within them died that they laid at the feet of our Lord and sacrificed it to him.

This is how Amy Carmichael put it. Never I think, not even in heaven, shall I forget that parting. It was such a rending that I never wanted to repeat it. Even now my heart winces at the thought of it.

The night I sailed for China, March 3, 1893. My life on the human side was broken and it never mended again. But he has been enough. I bring a challenge to you tonight that I bring it to myself. Are you the kind of clay who's breaking down here when he's trying to mold you to understand your calling? He may call you to be a diligent government servant. He may call you to be an artist. He may call you to be a car mechanic.

He may call you to be an executive. Are you willing in that setting to be the life of Christ in the midst of a dark situation? In the call, the first thing he needed to do was see how God was molding him for that call itself. Secondly, the main reason that he continued was he was motivated with compassion. He saw the desperate need of the people. If you want to understand what it was like, read the book of Lamentations. It was how the nation had become like a widow and was lying there desolate.

That's what keeps us going as we see the needs and as we see the difference it can make in the lives of people. On that first night in Indiana University, in spite of all of the cameras and the bright lights, even though the place was absolutely packed to capacity, I told Margie on the phone that night the auditorium was like electricity. There was tremendous anticipation. People were expecting a real confrontation on these issues and every nook and cranny was filled. You couldn't find a seat.

It was an overflow crowd. I'll never forget one antagonist who had been very hostile the previous night when Professor Dallas Willard of the University of Southern California had delivered a brilliant defense and analysis of skepticism. Dallas Willard is a fine Christian man. This fellow stood up and as soon as he became the first questioner, I thought he was going to be fireworks all over again. He stood up and he says in a very gentle tone, he says, Mr. Zacharias, I am an atheist.

I'm a card carrying member of the American Humanist Association. Sir, I want to thank you for the graciousness with which you have dealt with a very difficult subject and I have a question for you. Next man stands up and says, Mr. Zacharias, I'm a deist and I have such and such a question. Do you know the next night this atheist, do you know what his question was on?

Why the cross was necessary. I put my arm around him and I said, the hound is on your trail. He says, maybe so, maybe so. The need.

I look at the university students sitting in front of us time and time again. Gavin will tell you ultimately he drags me away because the voice is getting out. They are just so earnestly pleading and asking. Peter was at Dartmouth doing an open forum.

My colleague, Peter Bocchino, he said he finally had to leave for the airport around 1030 to get to the airport and he said they continued talking and discussing even an hour, an hour and a half after he had gone. The cry, the motivation that takes us there. So first we positioned the vision even though the people are resistant as it seems apparently, but then you move in and you're driven with compassion.

But thirdly and quickly, there can come disillusionment in the mission. Have you ever felt betrayed by God? You turn to Jeremiah chapter 20.

I don't think you'll read more powerful words. He said, Lord, you've deceived me. This is not what I thought it was all about.

You've really deceived me. And then he goes on and says, our curse it is the day that I was born. I wish I had been aborted in my mother's womb. Do you know what he's really saying? I did not think this is the way it was going to be when I was going to serve you.

I thought it was going to be something else. Why didn't you tell me in the beginning? A very few that he told completely in the beginning. Even Moses said, how do I know you have called me? But God says, when you get onto Mount Sinai and you worship me there, then you'll know that that's where I called you.

He probably wants to wait a minute. I'm asking you for evidence before the fact you're telling me after I get there, I'll find out that you did. He says to Ananias, tell that man, Paul, that he must suffer much for my sake. That disillusionment and that aloneness. I've often said to my staff that one of the loneliest moments in ministry is after you have finished an open forum, delivered your soul, done everything you could do. And I come back with my colleague and we go back into our rooms.

I always get on my knees first and the next thing I do is call my wife and talk to her. It's a terribly lonely moment. Suddenly you've moved from the din of antagonism and activity to all of a sudden being alone in yourself. The devil would love to get you disillusioned and get you to begin to wonder whether you really belong in this kind of calling.

But that's not true in the ministry alone, is it? It can happen in your life as a person. You may think God has let you down and God has betrayed you.

Follow along to find out what happened. He senses the calling, moves with compassion, gets disillusioned halfway but suddenly decides that he is going to persevere because he knows the character of God and he's going to trust him even though all that is apparent seems so much to be failing him. He was able to persevere through the opposition.

He was able to persevere through the opposition. Malcolm Muggeridge may have been a forerunner in many, many ways and you know I love this man. If you've never read him, I hope you will. One of the things I think heaven will be greatly blessed by is some discussions with these fellows. When I was at G.K. Chesterton's museum in Bedford, England a few weeks ago and entered heaven halfway through by sitting on Chesterton's chair and just wonderfully reclining on it except his mantle didn't dawn on me and they asked my wife to sit on the sofa there because there there was a handcrafted blanket which was woven by Joy Davidman, C.S.

Lewis' wife, so she got her thrill by sitting on that blanket. I got mine by sitting on Chesterton's chair and looking at his books. What a grand expression. You should see the language he was writing at age 10 or 11.

You and I would have needed a dictionary to understand some of those words. But you know what Chesterton used to do almost every day with about eight to ten of them, sometimes three or four of them, would sit around a table with a cup of tea and penetrate through some of the deepest thinking of that was going on in that time. We don't do that anymore. We don't like to wrestle with ideas and pry into them.

Why should we when we can be idiotized in front of a box? How important it is to work this mind away and probe into ideas so we can unwrap them when it finally comes together. It dawns so beautifully. Listen to the sensitivity and the brilliance with which Muggeridge says this, and this must come from that kind of interaction and thinking. He was chaplain at the University of Edinburgh years ago when the University of Edinburgh decided to distribute condoms to its student body so that they could have the freedom for their indulgences.

Listen to how he gives his farewell speech and this one paragraph that is so outstanding, that sensitivity and yet the power. So, my dear Edinburgh students, this may well be the last time I address you and this is what I want to say, and I don't really care whether it means anything to you or not. Whether you think there is anything in it or not, I want you to believe that this row that I have had with your elected officers had nothing to do with any puritanical attitudes on my part.

I have no belief in abstinence for abstinence's own sake, no wish under any circumstances to check any fulfilment of your life and being, but I have to say to you this, but I have to say to you this, that whatever life is or is not about, it is not to be expressed in terms of drug stupefaction and casual sexual relations. However else we may venture into the unknown, it is not, I assure you, on the plastic wings of Playboy magazine or psychedelic fancies. And he warned them, ploughed through some very, very difficult terrain and told them the truth. Years after that, Vice President Dan Quayle tells the Hollywood elites that they are destroying young lives, and they make a fool out of him, make him look like an absolute idiot, someone who doesn't belong in this modern times. One thousand studies over thirty years, says Harvard magazine. One thousand studies over thirty years, Harvard magazine says, have all come to the same conclusion.

Television violence has resulted in violent children, but Hollywood does not want to have anything to do with it. Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, but that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch, keeping watch above his own. The truth may be on the scaffold today, mocked by the elite of our times, but you persevere in its proclamation and ultimately it will triumph and show itself to be true. Jeremiah encourages me, even though he was disillusioned, he decided to cling on by a slender thread to his skull. Many, many times that thread is very slender and you want to walk away from it and you say God I understand why you've called me, I understand the vision, I sense the compassion, but I see the opposition, God would you find somebody else to do this now, I think I have paid my dues, and God just drops that slender thread down in my own mind, in my own voice, and in the word of God says to me, hang in there Ravi, hang in there because truth may be put on the scaffold, but behind the dim unknown I am standing, keeping watch, keeping watch above my own. Jeremiah triumphed because he told the people not only of the destruction, not only of the darkness, but he told them of a brand new day that would dawn when a new covenant would be put into the hearts of the people. Please hear me, all the laws of the land couldn't change them, all the social theories couldn't change them, God said I will put a new covenant, I will write a new covenant within the hearts of the people and they will rise up and call me and bless my name.

It's the only hope for our society and that's why we go and honor the call knowing when God writes his word on the hearts of people a national revival can break out. I'll just tell you two simple things and then I'm through. Thirty-eight men on a conference telephone call. Some of the finest men in this country who are carrying the gospel in very difficult situations, people like Chuck Swindoll and Evie Hill, Joe Stoll, and many, many others.

If I named them, you'd recognize all of them. Who were they? We were all part of a group that's going to be speaking at Promise Keepers this year where there are hundreds of thousands of men going to gather one of the brightest lights in our nation at this point in our history. I just see it as a glowing bright light where tens of thousands of men all over this land will be gathering for some days to listen to the word of God being preached. And I was with all of those speakers on the phone when the organizer and one of them said this, can we men bow and pray because none of us is worthy of this task? And then one of them said, brethren, I feel so unworthy.

I don't even feel I'm doing right by standing up. Can we get down on our knees and fall on our faces before God? And across this country, 38 men were on the telephone lines, on our faces before God, on our knees before God, asking for a move amongst the men of this country, a move that will change their hearts, a move that will freshly put his law upon the hearts of these men so that there will be fathers in the home and peace in the hearts of our children, so that there will be peace in the household and peace in the nation, so that the answers won't be with people sprawling on the floor trying out why or 17 year old murderers writing letters to their teachers saying, I do not know why I did this. We were on our face before God, pleading that God would pour out a national sense of revival. The calling is intimidating. The need is very demonstrable as we move towards it. The disillusion men can stalk you with an awesome, daunting power, but you persevere even as he lends that slender thread, knowing that even when truth is forever on the scaffold, God is in the shadows keeping watch above his own.

And when that new work is done and the new promises given, the law is written on the hearts and the nation is changed and the wise are not asked as much as how Lord can we serve you as a people, how can I serve you as an individual? I had the great privilege I mentioned to you of being in San Juan and watching Dr. Graham and deliver that message to the world as we had a small part in sharing in it. One morning after we finished talking to our interpreters, Luis Palau and I were sitting around the table. I loved that brother.

He's always an encouragement to me. I love South Americans because of the way they hug you. They really hug you. It's not one of those whether you were hugged or imagined you were hugged. You don't know.

This is real. In fact, you generally have to unknot your type in from him when you're finished with Luis, you know, and just talk to you in Spanish for a little while and hope he's saying the right thing. He said this to me. He said, I've just come back from Miami and I'm going to Miami to do a crusade.

He said, Ravi, I spent a long time with General Manuel Noriega. He said, he's all alone in a solitary cell, all alone. He said, I walked a long hall, heard my footsteps, not a soul in sight. And then the guard leaves me with Noriega and walks away and there he sits all alone, his bed, a table and an exercise bike that they had given to him some months ago so that his body could somehow get some exercise to keep him from languishing away. He said, I looked on his table and there was his Bible worn cover to cover, cover to cover.

I didn't say anything. I said, General, you must be a very lonely man. He said, Mr. Palau, everybody says that to me and I used to be very lonely and in many ways I still am. But you know, I have found Christ. Once a week my chaplain comes and I forget how often his wife is allowed once a week or once a month. And he says, Mr. Palau, I'm a very contented man in this prison because I have my Bible here with me and I'm a changed man in my heart.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I've never been at greater peace. I study the Bible. Mr. Palau, one of the reasons I keep that Bible marked is because I don't understand a lot of it.

Will you answer some questions for me? Page after page of pen and paper questions, Luis answered his questions. Shortly before he left, Luis said to him, do you want us to help your family in any way? He said, no, they're fine.

My wife is being taken care of by the Baptist Church here in Miami. He says, I'm a little concerned about my daughter in Argentina, but I think she'll be all right, but don't worry. And as Luis was saying this, the man who'd led Noriega to the Lord was sitting next to Luis's eyes filled with tears. His name was Rudy. He was one of the interpreters. He says, Brother Ravi, a few days ago I was in the courtroom in Miami to try and interpret for another person from Spanish.

And as I was walking away, a sheriff was sitting there and beckoned me towards him and said, come here, sir. How is Mr. Noriega doing in prison? He said, I straightened up my shoulders and I said, how do you know that I know Noriega? He says, I used to be a guard out there and I watched you coming.

He said, can you tell me something? Rudy says, what did you really think of Noriega about his conversion? And the man says, well, I think you may be asking the wrong person, but I'm a Christian myself.

And I've watched a dramatic change in that man. He genuinely, genuinely loves the Lord. Although he's going to spend all these years in prison, he genuinely loves the Lord. In fact, he said, Rudy, some time ago when we had the hurricane and we had to move them from one prison to another, all of a sudden we realized some of the prisoners had been planning an uprising and one of them started to agitate and try to gain control. And Noriega took charge of that bus, commanded him to be quiet in the name of Jesus and like a real general controlled all of them in the bus till they got to the next prison. He said, we took them to that prison and suddenly I heard loud thumping and loud sounds.

I got myself ready wondering if something was still going on. I ran towards Mr. Noriega's room and what I could see between a thick wall that separated him from the man standing next to on the other side was Noriega with his Bible open, reading the scriptures to the man on the other side of the wall, getting him to become right with Christ first. Rudy said with tears in his eyes, he said, I remembered the conversation I had with him after I sat down with him and said, General, what will you do if the day ever comes that they will release you from this prison? And Noriega smiled and said, you know, when I was president and general, I had a tribunal of friends as we carried on with so many things we ought not to have done. And I would look to these three men and say to them, what advice do you have for me on these matters you have brought to me?

And one of them would throw his hands up and say, General, you're the commander in chief. You're the general. We are not here to tell you what you must do. You're here to tell us what we must do. He said, Rudy, I have found a new commander in chief. I have found a new general.

I don't tell him what to do. If the day comes around released, he will tell me what to do. The law was now written on his heart. There was a triumph in a soul, a commission, the intimidation, the compassion, the disillusionment, but you persevere and God brings a change. Maybe that change can begin in your heart and mine tonight if these struggles are indeed ours. May God bless you. Thank you so much for giving me your gracious attention.

Change isn't easy, but when God himself is orchestrating the transformation, we know we are in good hands. While Ravi is no longer with us here on earth, we hope you'll check out all of his content on our website, including books, articles, and messages. If you'd like to watch the memorial service for Ravi Zacharias held in May of this year, then be sure to visit our YouTube channel, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. And we hope you'll consider donating to our ministry as our team of speakers continues the work Ravi started for this ministry nearly 40 years ago. You can see a list of all of our speakers and upcoming events on our website, where you can also look at current initiatives and how you can partner with us. To order a copy of today's message titled Brittle Clay in Tender Hands, you can order by calling us at 1-800-448-6766 or on our website at rzim.org.

That's rzim.org and rzim.ca for those in Canada. Hello friends, this is Ravi Zacharias speaking to you about a book called The Logic of God. There are 52 essays. We wrestle with many pertinent ideas in that book. We pull together some of my writings from years gone by, brought them together into this one book called The Logic of God. The reasoning of God is very different to the way you and I reason. And the goal is that we will learn to think his thoughts after him. What happens in the brain with even a single thought? Well, how much more intricate is the soul? And so we must have ideas that deeply touch the soul. This book, The Logic of God, is intended to bridge the head to the heart, ultimately moving to the hands and the feet. Get a hold of it, The Logic of God.

You can get The Logic of God by Ravi Zacharias at rzim.org. Hello, my name is Michael Ramsden and I've been working with RZIM now for well over 20 years. It's been an incredible privilege to be part of a ministry, having a presence right across the globe and reaching into so many places that even just a few years ago we couldn't even have dreamt of. My current role is as the international director where my primary responsibility apart from being an evangelist apologist is to help lead and develop our speaking teams around the world. And that has been absolutely thrilling. The young people who have come, who've been trained by this ministry, who've joined the team, who've been added in as speakers and then gone on to do some really remarkable things in the way they're reaching their peers, reaching their country, even the way they've been called to other communities to go and speak is utterly remarkable. And it's a huge thrill and joy, not simply to be part of a ministry which is seeing long-term fruit and people coming up five years, 10 years, 20 years later saying, thank you for the difference this ministry has made in my life, but also to see how people have grown into the ministry themselves. And starting off at a young age, whether it's a Vince Vitale or a Joe Vitale or a Tom Price or any of the countless other young people who've joined, and then to see them grow in their ministry and them to go on and do and say and write what they have done, said and written is thrilling and something which fills us all with great hope for the future, realizing that God is raising up a new generation of people passionate about him, passionate about the gospel and passionate and willing to take it anywhere in the world, regardless of the cost and to do it with faithfulness and humility. And I just love that. It's something that really thrills my heart. Let My People Think is a listener supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.