Earthen vessel I was made

Our growing is for the unique purpose of God, that is, the building up of the Body of Christ through transformation (Eph. 4:12b; 1 Pet. 2:2, 5; 1 Cor. 3:12). The first stanza of hymn #395 (Hymns) begins, "O Jesus Christ, grow Thou in me." We all need to pray, "Lord, grow in me." Two additional hymns, #548 and #750, concern the matter of transformation. The young people need to spend their time on their education, and the working ones need to have a job in order to make a living, but the goal is not merely for us to have a proper daily living. The goal of our living is the building up of the Body of Christ. We need to be built up.

If we read the four Gospels and Peter's Epistles, we may find it difficult to believe that Simon, a Galilean fisherman, could be such a writer. By the time he wrote his Epistles, Peter had been changed, transformed. One of the hymns in our hymnal begins with the words, "Earthen vessel I was made, / Christ in me the treasure laid" (Hymns, #548). The last stanza of this hymn says, "Transformation is my need." Simon was an earthen vessel; Peter, however, was a transformed person. He had been regenerated and had become altogether new. Therefore, in his two Epistles we cannot see his flesh, the self, or his natural life. Instead, what we see is the new man expressed in his writing. Christ is expressed in Peter's writing.

I spoke on the all-inclusive Christ during the last seven days of 1962. The next day, January 1 of 1963, I was brought by a brother to Whittier to share with a group of seeking ones there. My burden was to share the truth and experience of transformation. Today I am still speaking on transformation. Stanza 6 of Hymns, #548 says: 'Transformation is my need, / To be broken more indeed, / That the clay may change in form, / To the treasure to conform.' We were made as an earthen vessel, but this vessel should be transformed in its appearance. Transformation is not a kind of outward reformation or correction. Transformation is a metabolic change in the substantial form.