The
Evangelical Ministry Assembly met
in the Barbican during the last few days and it seems to have been Mike Cain who
offered this:
"We're not Louis Vitton handbags, we're plastic bags, so that the only explanation is that God is at work."
The jars of clay in which the
gospel treasure dwells are the ancient equivalent of plastic bags. Weak,
ordinary and torn. (My source are a few tweets from people attending the conference.)
This is a useful contemporanization which I why I
want to make a note of it here. But I’m glad the apostle Paul did not talk
about plastic bags. Plastic bags are weak and ordinary and easily
torn, but they are also an environmental hazard and the mass product of a consumerist
throw-away society.
Ancient jars of clay were for all their
ordinariness a product of the earth and hand-made for a purpose whether special
or ordinary (Rom. 9:21; 2 Tim 2:20).
