My 14 year old son and his mother arrived home after his basketball game. It was close to bedtime, but his mother wanted him to cook up and eat some carrots with his dinner that he had previously agreed to eat that night. My son put some carrots in a pot of water on the range to boil… and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

Some time later, my son woke up to the smell of something burning in the house. The water had boiled away. The carrots had burned. The pot was scorched black. He put the pot in the sink to soak and went up to bed.

During the night his mother woke up to the smell of smoke in the house. She came out to investigate the smell and found the pot soaking in the sink. Holy Spirit prompted her to take a particular action that exposed an area of sin in my son’s life that had been hidden (details withheld to protect my son’s privacy).

The next day after school I came over to my son’s mother’s house for a family discussion. I brought with me a heavy-duty cleaning agent called “The Pink Stuff” as well as a steel scrubber pad to get the pot clean. As we were talking, I went to work scrubbing the pot clean. His mother had some “Pink Stuff” of her own and had been trying to scrub the pot with a sponge, but the black scorch marks were not coming up. As I used the combination of the “Pink Stuff” and the steel scrubber, the black marks came off without much trouble.

I was going to have my son scrub the pot clean, but Holy Spirit prompted me to do all the scrubbing myself. As I was scrubbing, I thought about how weird it was that the pan got scorched at the same time that this sin area was exposed. I realized that the timing of the two events wasn’t a coincidence and that Father God had given my son a PROPHETIC POT.

After scrubbing the pot clean and getting it cleaner than it had been previously, I showed my son his prophetic pot. I told him how his father was equipped with the tools necessary to make all things new. How he was forgiven because nothing was lost or needed to be replaced. How his father could scrub something that looked ruined and restore it better than it was before. How that effort was accomplished without any work on his part. How Father God works in the same way with us to scrub us clean and make us new through zero effort on our part. How the only expectation for us is to receive that grace with gratitude.

I told his mom that the prophetic pot was also for her. How we both carried the same “Pink Stuff”–the Holy Spirit–but that I was equipped with additional tools and anointing from the Father to deal with my son more thoroughly than she can deal with him.

 I’m sure that within about 48 hours my son forgot every single word that I spoke to him that night. But I’m also sure that he will never forget that visual image of a scorched pot made new through the efforts of his father.

 May this prophetic pot be a lesson for us all.