Text: Revelation 18:1-12
Date: September 6, 2026

Introduction

Opening Illustration – Afghani: I read a story years ago of a young man who had been radicalized by Muslim extremists. He idealized giving his life in Jihad, and killing Christians. When he finally got the chance to come to America, he found himself one afternoon in the house of a stranger who invited him over for a meal. The man had a Bible open on his coffee table to John chapter 1. And this young Muslim radical simply picked up the book and began to read that wonderful chapter, and before he knew it he was overcome with a powerful work of the Holy Spirit. He fell on his knees in trembling and spiritual agony and reached out to the man pleading to know what he must do to be saved. That man placed his faith in Christ and had his entire life transformed, in a moment, because he read the Word of God.

Personal: How did God get a hold of you, Christian? Was it through faithful parents who trained you at a young age how to know and love God? Was your story a bit more radical, and God used some extraordinary measure, or some major life circumstance to reshape you into someone who knows and loves Christ? Or perhaps you are in here today, and you don’t know and love Christ, but you do sense that something is off in your life, something critical is missing, and you wonder if God could ever reform you.

Context: Today, we complete our short series titled ‘Dear Chicago.’ The heart behind this series is to ask ourselves the simple question “How can we put ourselves in a situation, in this Church, to be most used by God to reach this city for Christ.” We believe that God changes people. God changes cities. And God changes nations. And so how we can be salt and light in this city, and see God transform Chicago to know and love him. Two weeks ago, we saw from Jeremiah 7, that reformation always begins in the house of the Lord, we must get our house in order, before seeking to change Chicago. Last week, Thomas preached from Jeremiah 29 about God’s heart for the city. Today, we look to Jeremiah 18.

Main Idea: Nations are like wet clay in the Potter’s hands. He can and will do with it as he pleases.

Jeremiah 18:1–12 “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the Lord, Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.’ “But they say, ‘That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’”

Before we try to apply this text into our own context, let’s get a sense for what we just read.

Exposition

The Lesson of Potters House: Verses 1-4 are sort of experiential parable. God commands Jeremiah to go down to the Potter’s House. What Jeremiah sees in the Potters house serves him as a parable explaining how God Works. What does he see? Jeremiah sees the potter at work, sitting on his stool. Perhaps you have seen how old terra cotta pots are made. A lump of wet clay is placed on a flat stone. And as the potter pushes the lever with his foot, the stone spins quickly and the clay spins with it. And the potter is able to mold the clay with his hand and form it into the shape of a pot. As Jeremiah watches the potter at work, he sees the clay pot that was being spun had become spoiled. This is common when working with clay. Sometimes the clay is not wet enough, or sometimes debris got into the mix, or sometimes the shape just didn’t take the right form as it spun. And so, the potter collapsed his pot down into a single lump once again, and started again to remake it “as seemed good to the potter.”

Explanation: Well the imagery is not hard to understand. And the Lord clarifies for Jeremiah what it means.

Jeremiah 18:6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”

God says that Israel is like wet clay in his hands that he can form and reform however he pleases. If the clay that he is molding is not developing in the way he so chooses, then he has the power and authority, to condense that wet clay back down to a simple lump, and begin to form a new pot from the ground up.

Looking Back: This is of course a warning message for Israel. Israel is the wet clay in God’s hands, and Jeremiah is warning them that there is some kind of imperfection that has been revealed in the clay as its been spinning. What were the imperfections?

They have forsaken me (2:13)

They have a stubborn and rebellious heart (5:23)

They know no bounds in deeds of evil (5:28)

They were guilty of theft, murder, and adultery (7:9-10)

They have made their faces harder than rock (5:3)

Their sin was written with a pen of iron (17:1)

Two Paths for Every Nation: Then, in verses 7-10 something very important. This imagery of Israel as wet clay in the Potter’s hand is applied to every nation on the earth.

Jeremiah 18:7 “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it…”

Christians tend to forget this. We tend to think of Israel in the Old Testament as unique, and they were. They were the covenant people of God, entrusted with the prophets and the temple. And yet this passage teaches us that every nation, stands before a Holy God as wet clay in his hands. And he causes them to rise up and end at his command.

Illustration – Amorites: This is the witness of all of scripture. Remember back in Genesis 15 when God first called Abraham to be a new nation. In that passage God foretold what would happen to Abraham’s descendants. He foretold that they would be slaves in a foreign land for many years. And then he says…

Genesis 15:16 “And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.””

Understand this principle… The Amorites were the people living in the land that would one day become Israel. God says that Israel cannot come and take that land until, the people who were living there before them were ready for destruction. That would take a few more centuries. But then, the Amorites would have accumulated so much sin before a holy God, that God would destroy them, and he would use the Israelites to do it.

Illustration: Roman Empire: God decides the day and the moment when and the way in which nations come to end. We like to debate what the cause of the fall of Rome was. Was it barbarians attacking from the East. Was it poor leadership? Was it internal political strife? Did they expand too far and lose control? Those were only secondary causes. Primarily, the potter determined to pluck up and break down and destroy. What a holy and awesome God we serve! You may recognize indeed that the Apostle Paul borrows this passage to speak about God’s sovereignty in Romans 9.

God brings blessing on nations that honor him (8): God also sees the heartbeat of the nation. And if that nation turns from its evil, and turns towards God, he as the good potter will relent of disaster, and he will bestow blessing.

God brings disaster on nations that dishonor him (9-10): But if after warning, any nation, continues to do evil, to foster godlessness, to celebration abomination, to refuse to listen to him, then he will bring that wet clay down to a single lump once again, and begin to form something new.

Still Time (11): And so Jeremiah stands before Israel and pleads with them. “There is still time. God delights in blessing. Repent of national sin. Seek God.” Return to the potter himself, and let him craft something wonderful out of you.

Israel’s Choice of Destruction (12): Then of course we read the horrifying reality of verse 12. The people of Israel scoff at Jeremiah. They accuse him of vain and empty words. They cry out together, “We’ll go our own way.” In chapter 19, Jeremiah completes the potter imagery, by taking the elders of Isreal out to a vally, and holding a larger terra cotta pot above his head, smashing it against the rocks, as he declared what would soon happen to their nation. Indeed, their own way eventually led to the end of Israel in 586BC, when the Babylonian empire horrifyingly overcame Jerusalem and took the vast majority of Israel’s residents as exiles back with them back to Babylon.

Application

That is the text, plain and simple. And I believe that Jeremiah’s words are no less prophetic for us as they were for Israel in the sixth century BC. God is still the potter today. Every city and every nation is wet clay in his hands. Jeremiah pleads with us, as he pleaded with Israel, to turn to Him, and to discover his blessing!

Not a Prophet: There are no living prophets today, and so we have no way of knowing at what point a city or a nation has become so sin filled that the great potter determines to break the pot and build back up. But we do have the word of God. We are able to evaluate our current circumstance, and read the times with the eyes of wisdom. In fact throughout the ages, faithful Christians have always had a mind to do just that considering whatever nation they have lived in. Certainly, the early founders of our own nation were deeply concerned with the hand of God over the nation.

Cultural Analysis: et’s apply some prophetic anaylsis to our own city and our own nation. By God’s grace, there is much to celebrate. Indeed, there is a Church in the city of Chicago, and God by his grace has not permitted that Church’s light to extinguish. While we are rapidly moving towards a ‘post-Christian’ era, we still (especially in the midwest) have deep seeded roots in a Christian ethos. Yet, I think we all know that things are not looking great on this front. As was true, in the days of Jeremiah, we have heaped our sins as high as the heavens. I am not a prophet, but I am reading the words of the prophet.

Institutions: We have rejected God, and pulled him out from underneath the foundation of all our institutions. There was once upon a time in this nation when the great universities were established in the name of Jesus Christ. The original mission statement included this language.

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only gives wisdom, let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of him (Prov. 2:3).

Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day, that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein, both in theoretical observations of language and logic, and in practical and spiritual truths, as his Tutor shall require, according to his ability; seeing the entrance of the word gives light, it gives understanding to the simple (Psalm 119:130).

We have pulled God out of our institutions. Or as Jeremiah said, “They have forsaken me.”

Abominations: We have normalized and legalized horrifying sins. From abortion to homosexuality. From divorce to forsaking the Sabbath. From radical feminism to transgenderism. We have sentimentalized Christianity, and changed it from a faith that shapes cities and nations to a private faith only good for the safety and confines of the private life. These are not things that God simply does not observe. He sees all. As Jeremiah said, “They know no bounds in deeds of evil.”

Redefined Justice: We have redefined justice so that the guilty go free and the innocent are accused of creating the environment that caused the guilty to be guilty. Even Karl Marx himself would have thought was a stretch. Yet, here we are. As Jeremiah said “Their have a stubborn and rebellious heart.”

I dont’ just want to be that preacher who points to the sins out in society. I am stating these things in order that we might read Jeremiah’s words properly. They are to us, as much as they are to any other nation.

Two Paths: There are two paths before us. If this nation does not repent of its sin before a holy God, of its foolishness, God will in time remove his hand of blessing, bring the clay down to a wet lump again and rebuild in his own way. He is the potter. I believe that we are witnessing that happen to a number of nations around the world that once were Christian and prosperous and now are in turmoil seeing the consequences of their decisions. One need only look to my beloved England for the example.

But Jeremiah tells us that there is another path.

Jeremiah 18:7–8 “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.”

Is it Possible: What our city, and what our nation needs is a movement of repentance and turning towards God. The hope of Chicago is not that sinners simply stop sinning and choose to live better kinder lives. The hope of Chicago is that Jesus Christ is proclaimed as king by its citizens. Our city doesn’t just need better morals, it needs Christ.

Billy Graham: I saw recently Tim Keller retell a story from the life of Billy Graham, the great evangelist, who was asked one day to go across the Atlantic Ocean and preach at Cambridge. Before he arrived, there was all kinds of criticism in the press. They were calling an uneducated American country boy. And this made him a little nervous. He was going to one of the most elite universities in the world. And so before he arrived he brushed up on philosophy and got his quotes from Sartre and Rousseau and DesCartes in order, in order that might sound more impressive.

Well, the first four nights of his preaching had very little success. Nothing like what he experienced in America when he preached. And the last night he was there, he made a decision. He said, “I’m just going to preach about the blood of Jesus.” And so he got up there, and he preached about the blood. And all these Cambridge Professors were disgusted at such a sermon that lacked so much polish, that elevated such an old message. But at the end of sermon, about 400 young people came forward to receive Christ. It reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s words.

1 Corinthians 1:23–24 “but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” `

Preach the Blood: The central belief of the Church is Christ crucified for our sin. At the cross, Jesus Christ shed his blood in order that we, who are separated from God due to our sin, could be forgiven and enter into a covenant relationship with God. Outside of the blood of Christ, we are all lost. Outside of the blood of Christ, Chicago is lost. We can get new laws passed, but if we don’t get people to Jesus, then they’ll just find new ways of sinning. Christ forgives and transforms. The same potter that holds nations in his hands as wet clay, holds our lives in his hands as wet clay. Those who are outside of Christ must be brought down to a wet lump again, in order that they might be built from the ground up, as a new vessel to honor God. This is called being born again.

You say, Chicago’s too big. That could never happen here. Then you have read all the wrong histories. Do you know the history of revival in this world.

Welsh Revival of 1904-1905: Leading up to the revival that took place in Wales in 1904, was a national spiritual hunger, and tensions in society. Wales was the world’s first industrialized nation, and they were experiencing an identity transition. The years leading up to 1904 were marked by a sense of spiritual decline, particularly among the younger generation who were being drawn into socialism. This in turn made the devout Christians push harder into their faith.

The revival ultimately broke in Cardiganshire under the preaching of a young pastor named Joseph Jenkins who began holding post-service gatherings for folks in his church who wanted to get very serious about their faith and go deeper. Then, one day… the spirit struck. On Sunday, February 14, 1904 Jenkins asked one of his young people what Christ meant to them personally. Up stood Florrie Evans, with a tremble in her voice said, “I love the Lord Jesus with all my heart.” According to eye-witnesses, that young woman’s voice sent an electric shock through the entire congregation, and everyone began to weep openly and profess their love of Christ.

In the following weeks, Pastor Jenkins and young Florrie Evans, caught up in a sudden movement the Holy Spirit traveled to nearby churches, and wherever they went weeping, open profession of faith, spiritual fervor. Eventually God raised up Evan Roberts who went preaching throughout Wales, and 100,000 thousand souls were saved that year.

Result: As a result, crime rates plummeted, public houses were emptied, and a wave of piety swept across the entire nation. I wonder… is Chicago’s Florrie Evans sitting in this room?

HebridEEs ( Revival in Scotland): How about the Hebrides Revival of Scotland in 1949. Spiritual life was at a low across Scottland, when two little old ladies, Peggy and Christine Smith (aged 84 and 82) began praying fervently and daily for God to bring revival. They felt that God had given them an unshakable conviction that revival was near.

Peggy famously asked her minister, James Murray Mackay to begin leading prayer meetings, and together they sensed that God was doing something. Pastor Mackay invited a man named Duncan Campbell to come and lead the prayer meetings. The first all night prayer meeting he led had about a dozen people. At three in the morning, they were all laying prostrate on the ground overcome by the presence of God. As Mackay walked home from that prayer meeting he found strangers along the sides of the road laying on their faces calling out to God for mercy. Every house he walked by in the early morning hours had lights on the windows and he could see the people praying fervently.

The next morning Duncan Campbell arrived at Church, and the church was crowded and overflowing. People had come from all over the island to the little church. Nobody had told them to come. But God led them. Large numbers of people were saved. Duncan went to give the benediction at the end of the service, but no one left. They stayed until 4:00am the next morning weeping and praying and receiving Christ.

Even then, Duncan Campbell tried to go home, but the local police got a hold of him, and said there were many people gathered at the police station in great spiritual distress. And the police pleaded with Mr. Duncan, “Is there somebody who can come and help them..

For five straight weeks, revival spread through the Hebridese. Thousands were saved. And the whole culture changed. Drunkards became abstainers, former blasphemers begin to invoke the name of God with respect and holy fear, alcholo shops and gambling houses get closed. Prodigals come home.

I wonder… is Chicago’s Peggie and Christine Smith sitting in this room?

Others: Space forbids me from telling of the great history of Revival, and how God blesses cities and nations with the outpouring of his spirit. We could speak of the First and Second Great Awakening under Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in early Colonial America. We could speak of Revivals throughout England, in Canada, in South Africa. Throughout Europe. Revivals have broken out in Pakistan, and China, Korea, and Japan. In 1860 Jamaica had a wonderful revival, so much so they were saying that every church in the country was overflowing with attendees hungry for God. You couldn’t get into a Church, but that didn’t matter because those who were gathered outside were on their faces before a holy God for their families and their nation.

The Effects: Why do I share this with you? It is because I want you to know truth. This is what does God. Now, we cannot coerce God to do something like this. There is no set formula where we follow a specific set of instructions and make God move like this. He is God, and He will move on his time and in his way. But we can do everything we can as a church to be in a position to be used mightily of God should he so choose to do so.

Conclusion

Can God cause a spirit of repentance and belief in Christ to well up in this city and in this country once again? Yes! Yes he can! And if he does, I want us to be in a position to receive it. I want us to be in a position to be a part of it, and not a sideline player. Nations are like wet clay in the Potter’s hands. He can and will do with it as he pleases.

How do we do this? How do we prepare ourselves?

It means we have to commit as a Church to prayer. All these revivals always began with a small group of folks pleading for revival to come. Please, come be a part of our weekly prayer meeting. It’s not fancy. But its prayer every week, we call out to God for our church and for our city. Do not grow weary of simple unexciting prayer meetings. That is the simple work.

It means we walk deeply with Christ in our homes. You want to change a nation, it starts in the home. We need homes organized to the glory of God, with faithful men serving as the head of their house. And faithful wives joyfully serving and nurturing their families. Watch what happens to a group of neighbors when a Christian family walks in the joy of the Lord.

Personal: As we close this short series, I want to ask you personally to examine yourselves. What if God, chose to do a great work today? Would you be ready? Is there anything holding you back