Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Romans 9
21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? 22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— 24 even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

The connect I would like to show you in the above two verses is this… you know we who are his elect are nothing but vessels made from clay (mud) in whom Jesus has poured out His Living Spirit and in doing so has given life to us spiritually dead sons/daughters of Adam. There was a time we languished among the spiritual corpses of the world because of the disobedience of Adam in whose loins all of mankind sinned against God, yet, who can thwart the might right arm of God, that is Jesus who saves the elect from their sins and reconciles them back to God. Take a look at Psalm 44:1-3, you will see that in Christ we are the heirloom & heirs of Almighty God. The honourable use, He made the godly for (Rom 9:21), was speaking in terms of the elect serving His righteous purpose, which was made possible through the atoning sacrifice of Christ Jesus while the dishonourable use He made the reprobate for, was speaking in terms of the profligate serving their own wicked purpose, as fools handed over to their own adamic lusts.

Mat 13: 8, 23 (Jer 1:5 perspective)
Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
…
As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Take a look at the above scripture from the perspective of Jeremiah 1:5 mentioned in the beginning of this post. You will understand that the good soil doesn’t randomly happen here and there with the seed chancing itself on that good soil. That good soil, is a life prepared by the hand of God for honourable use i.e. to serve Jesus’s purpose (Rom 9:21). In all these things we must understand that God doesn’t make/cause people to sin. People who sin, sin of their own volition and enjoy it, it is the very nature they have received from the fall of Adam. The elect too once bore this nature but the redeeming power of Jesus overcame their sinful nature and turned them from serving their own wicked interest to serving God’s interests and enjoying because we are after all a new creation in Christ (2Cor 5:17). It’s like that brand “One Drop”, which can purify a whole glass of water with just one drop of that solution. So too we who were sinners were called and chosen by God, in doing so we’re given a little seed of Jesus’ Spirit, which grows and over comes our sinful adamic nature to bear the image/nature/character of God in the elect.

Isaiah 64:8
But now, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.

I was reading a little about how a pot is made and I have come to understand that a lump of clay is first put on a wheel, which is spun and given shape and left to dry, then while it is still a little moist, it is chipped and carved into with a pointer or a wire brush. The pot is then fired a little to prepare it for glazing, at this stage the pot is still porous enough to absorb the glaze, which not only makes it waterproof but also gives it texture and colour. After glazing, the pot it is fired in a kiln to convert the clay to ceramic, here the heat rises slowly to 1260⁰C and cools slowly, so that the vessels does not get destroyed. Now, when I ponder on Isaiah 29:16 & Romans 9:21, where the clay is not happy with the way the potter has fashioned it… it’s very much like today, where men feel they should have been women and women feel they should have been men and then undergo transgender surgeries because God supposedly made a mistake with them. What about people who are not happy with their skin colour, these are people who are not happy with the way God has made them either and because they are not happy with God, it follows that they are not happy with themselves. Then you have the Arminian, who believes that that his spiritualty is a result of his own volition… you can imagine how ludicrous it is for the clay to be saying that to itself. There is then the Pre-millennialist who expects to be raptured out of the kiln so as to escape the firing because the sovereignty of God, he believes in is only is theory & he fails to understand that even trials serve God’s purpose.

Genesis 2 (Read in context of Col 1:15-16)
7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

John 20 (Read in context of Col 1:19-20)
21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” 22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

Col 1
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by[f] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
…
19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

To conclude, I would like to say that every event in the lives of all of God’s elect though unpleasant in that moment, serves to make us the men and women of God we are, while all that glazing and firing sanctifies us and gives us a godly character that the lives we live may hold water in testifying of God’s salvation we have freely availed in His Son – Our Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ.