Psalm 139:11-17 • Wondrous Works of God
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Well, you all look in your Bibles at Psalm 139, Psalm 139 in the first half of the Psalm. The psalmist is saying that he believes God's hand is on him even in dark times.
And the reason for that is in verses 11 through 17. Let me ask that you would stand as we honor God's Word reading Psalm 139 verses 11 to 17. The psalmist writes, "If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them." Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, for revealing your thoughts to us, we praise you.
And for revealing that we are precious to you. From earliest life to last breath and beyond, we celebrate you.
Thank you for the lives that you give and the gospel that tells us how you have given yourself for us, that we might count precious all that you place in our care for Christ's sake.
So we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Please be seated.
Thursday of this week, World Magazine Editor Mindy Bells speaking to church leaders in Washington, D.C., said this directly, "In China, we have witnessed in the past month the near complete shutdown of perhaps the most influential church of the house church movement in China, the early reign covenant church, along with its school and its seminary.
As a church," a lot of you will remember just before Christmas, "we prayed for the early reign covenant church. We gathered together as a church and prayed for Christian brothers and sisters in China because this particular church, though its leaders now are facing incarceration and some even have faced torture, are our brothers and sisters in Christ, church established by missionaries with which this church is affiliated, people who believe and worship as we do." These are our brothers and sisters in Christ.
And as we recognize that, we recognize not only their genuine Christians being ministered to in times of great darkness, we recognize it must be hard for them to believe in God's care in that darkness.
Underscoring the real people and the real darkness are secreted blurbs from church news sites, January 4, from that particular church under current pressures, 90-year-old scholar and brother Zhang Xinxi was rushed to the hospital.
Brothers and sisters dropped what they were doing and went to the hospital. One of the brothers being strictly monitored by the police broke through and went and traveled
to be with the aging scholar and brother. With other brothers and sisters, he prayed, sang worship songs, and stayed with him in the hospital. Why?
He's old.
Not many people know about him. Does his life matter?
From the same church sources, January 5, the wife of one brother in criminal detention who had been pregnant, hemorrhaged badly.
Brothers and sisters rushed to help her get to the hospital.
Our father in heaven took the child in her womb back to himself.
And the mother wrote a poem saying, "He is already at home.
We are still on our road to being home."
Should we grieve? Such a small thing.
So insignificant, especially in a culture where abortion is common even among Christians, particularly if you are a girl.
Does that young life, not even breathing air yet, does it matter?
The reason that such lives matter according to the Scripture, whether young or old, is because they are demonstrations of the intricate care of God for every life that He has made.
God's care for life from womb to tomb and beyond in all of its detail is ultimately the assurance for the believer that when I face darkness, that I cannot see through, that I don't know what God is doing, where the complexities do not make sense to me. If God has such care for life from earliest moments to eternity, then I can trust Him in my darkness too, even now.
For believers in China and for believers here, these words mean something.
"Surely the darkness shall cover me. If that's what I say, the light about me be night.
Lord, even the darkness is not dark to You.
The night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light to You."
What does the psalmist point to, to say that God can see in the dark and work in the dark and work beyond what we can see?
He simply calls us to remember God's hand in the darkest places of this world. Verse 8, "If I ascend to heaven, You are there, but if I make my bed in Shao," that is the place of the dead, "Lord, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Your hand lead me and Your right hand shall hold me."
When our children were little, we took them on cave tours with guides in the Ozark Mountain caves, on Nandaga, Marimac Caverns. And when you're going through those caves, the tours get to be rather predictable. You know what's going to happen. I mean, even as the guide tells you that a stalag tight is one that holds tight to the ceiling and a stalag might, might trip you, at some point on the tour, the guide wants you to know absolute darkness.
And so every light is extinguished, every flashlight turned off, every cell phone hidden,
and you are suddenly in absolute darkness.
And at that point, every parent feels a little hand reaching for him or her.
I need your hand in the darkness. If you're a child, that is your heart's cry. What's different is for us as parents, we can't see through the darkness.
What's different for children of God is knowing God can see through the darkness. And that's why holding His hand through the darkness becomes so important. How do we know God sees through the darkness? The psalmist goes to the darkest places he can think of, telling us that God is inside us seeing.
Verse 13, "For you formed my inward parts," as though God is saying, "I'm working deep down inside of you." Where you can't see, you can't measure, you can't understand, I'm actually working inside of you with my vision and understanding.
For those of you who just want kind of the extra, add a little bit of the sermon, inward parts there actually means kidneys.
You formed my kidneys. Why?
Because even the ancients understood the connection between our biology and our emotions, our anxieties, as though the Lord is saying, "When nobody else knows what you're feeling inside, I know. I know you from the inside out. I even formed your inward parts so that I know your thoughts and your emotions and your joys and your stresses.
I know what makes you tick."
And when God sees all that and knows all that, He is saying, "I don't see as you do.
I see what goes on inside and more than that, I am there for you."
Even if you make your bed in Sheol, sometimes the place of the dead, sometimes even in the Bible, hell.
Even if you make your bed in hell, I'm willing to be there for you. Is that true? You think of what it would mean. People who don't care about us, when we have made our mistakes in life, they say, "You make your bed, you lie in it."
God says, "You make your bed in hell, and I'll still be there for you."
And the great evidence of that is when His Son hung upon a cross for my sin and your sin in His suffering, He did go to hell for us. He was there for us, providing for us, providing the penalty that we deserve, and the God who knows us inside out, who knows what we hide, what we cannot tell, He's saying, "I know,
and I'm still there for you."
Not only is He inside seeing, He is infant making.
The second half of verse 13, "You knitted Me together in My mother's womb," writes the psalmist to God. Isn't that wonderful language? "God, You knit Me together in My mother's womb." In this society, kind of the cliche of expectant motherhood is that You'll take up knitting.
And the idea that the mother who is knitting the sleeper for the baby who's coming is to understand God is knitting the baby who is sleeping in your womb.
And as dear and sweet as that image is, it's actually meant to be powerful because what people say in our culture now, thinking, "Well, my body is making this baby. It's my cost, my effort, my energy, my biology that's making the baby because my body is making this baby.
I have control over it. I have choice concerning it. What I make, this fetus, this embryo, is my right to determine what happens." But that all comes undone from the scriptural perspective where God is saying, "I'm knitting the baby.
I'm putting together the baby," which in those choices means ultimately it's God who is saying, "I have the choice and I'm choosing to make this child precious to me." It's what we understand even if we will go into the science of our times in saying, "Is it really true that any single person is determining the making of a child?"
You just take what we know about biology that every single one of us, our human life began as an egg was fertilized, an egg about the size of a pinprick in a mother's body
begins human life for us. But when did that egg get there in your mother's body? Do you know?
The egg actually was formed in your mother's body while she was an embryo in her mother's body. All the eggs that a woman will ever have were formed in her while she was still an embryo in her mother, which means if your mother has you at about age 30, the essence of you has already been around for more than 30 years, which means when you're celebrating your 18th birthday, you're actually about 48 because no one person is responsible for that life and it boggles them up. It's actually supposed to boggle our mind. So when God says, "You need to know you are fearfully and wonderfully made," that we are recognizing the preciousness, the treasure of what God has made in the womb that is not any particular person's doing. Because ultimately you will say if God can handle the intricacies of the knitting together of a child, then He can handle the intricacies of the trouble whose end I cannot see or the crisis that I cannot explain.
After all, I'm really to understand that God's care in our complexities is actually being proven by the God who cared for my origins in amazing ways. After all, God says, "You are fearfully made."
What does that mean? Remember from the book of Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Is that about terror?
No, it's not about terror. Sometimes we substitute other words for what that fear means. It's reverence.
It's awe for the reality of who God is. And when we say, "I am fearfully made," we are not saying people are supposed to be afraid of us. You're not Godzilla, right? I'm fearfully made. This is something I could not do. My mother could not do. My dad could not do. I'm the evidence itself of the hand of God.
The biology beyond my control, beyond even my explanation fully. It's a God thing when you see a baby that comes into this world or even recognize how God is forming that baby in the womb. And so the psalmist says, "I'm not just fearfully made." It's to say, "God gets the credit." This is a divine thing.
I'm wonderfully made as a consequence.
In this place, science is not our enemy. It is our friend to help us understand how wonderful is our creation.
Every single person here, on average, is an amazing puzzle put together of seven octillion atoms.
An octillion, I had to look it up, 27 zeros, seven octillion atoms. And the atoms are held together. Some of you know this better than I do. The atoms are held together by forces that both keep them together and keep them apart
are a billion, billion, billion, billion times stronger than gravity.
Every atom inside of you is experiencing that force in this very moment or you don't exist.
There are two octillion molecules.
There are four million, million cells in your body, 20,000 genes with eight million possible combinations of your 23 chromosome pairs. And all that puzzle being put together is not just static. It doesn't just kind of sit there like a photograph. We live and move and breathe and blink and play and cry.
And those who just examined the biological processes say that if you were to try to program it for a single day, all the processes that we know about even, if you were to try to
catalog all those, that is 10 septillion bits of information that your body is processing every day, 10 septillion. I got no idea how much that is.
And so the author I read said what that means is if you take every bit of information in all the libraries of the world and combine it and multiply it by a million, that is how many bits of information your body is processing in a single day.
Are you odd yet?
I'm awesome.
No, it's not your handiwork we're praising. It's God's handiwork that we're praising. And we're saying it's just amazing, but I must tell you that when you begin to hear the science, if you're like me because I'm not a physicist, I'm not a chemist, I'm not a biologist, I start to glaze over. The numbers stop having impact on me. And so I just love hearing a doctor explain what does it mean when that baby comes into the world after all that puzzle piece put together by God at the end of nine months, what actually happens? A doctor explains, "The baby's brain sends a hormone through the placenta into the mother's pituitary gland." It is a complicated process, but there is a simple message being communicated.
It's time.
I'm ready.
All the baby's complex systems, lungs, heart, gastrointestinal, nervous system, brain, they are ready to make it on their own. But the baby's skull is not yet fused so that it can come through the birth canal without being broken.
As the process of birth starts, the baby's adrenal glands give a shot of stress hormones so the baby can cope and also not breathe too soon.
The baby will not breathe until after it has left the birth canal. If it breathes too soon, it will suffocate. If it waits too long, it will suffer brain damage. So just before a mother and child separate, the newborn gets a last-minute blood transfusion from the mother through the umbilical cord and the placenta has got just enough stored energy ready to send so that the baby can on its own draw its first breath.
Who planned that?
Who put that together?
I am fearfully, divinely in God's method, means, and love put together. This is amazing. This is every single one of us have gone through this amazing work of God to be here. And what we are ultimately doing is saying, "This is God's masterpiece from first cells to final breath on this earth. You are God's masterpiece in function." What does that mean? I've told you before, I love watching the Antiques Roadshow because I'm absolutely convinced that somewhere in our house there is a da Vinci or a Rembrandt or something that's going to make us rich, right? We just have to find it. And it's going to bear those marks of the author-painter originator.
And when we see children even in their unborn state with all the complexity that God is working in them, we say, "That's a Jehovah. Look at the marks of God on that. Look at who painted, made, put together that child." It's a wonder.
It's a masterpiece of God.
And I must tell you that is not simply an article of faith, that we see what is happening even inside the womb and say, "That is absolutely amazing. That is wonderful."
You know, if we just kind of politically think through what's happening in our culture right now, what you would expect is that the younger a generation, the more close to childbearing years and self-serving, the more likely would be people to desire the choice of terminating life in the womb. Actually the opposite is happening. The younger you are in this culture, the more likely you are to object to terminating life in the womb. Do you know why?
Because millennials and those younger have lived all of their lives with access to prenatal photography.
I mean the reason that the pro-life movement has for so long now said, "Just let us do high-definition sonograms," is because we recognize when mothers see the masterpiece,
they say, "That is precious. That is wonderful. That is good." And it's not because a preacher preached a good sermon or the church has control. It's that people are expressing what is at the end of verse 14, "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works." My soul knows this very well.
You know, that understanding of what we know at a soul level, this is precious and good and miraculous and wonderful, that has led pro-lifers to say for a couple of decades now that if an expectant mother will see an ultrasound of a coming baby, 90 percent will not terminate that pregnancy.
Because we see what God has put together, and whether you're religious or unreligious, spiritual, you say, "That's amazing.
That is wonderful.
It must be precious." And it's, it's treasuring the care with which God is forming children, even in the womb that is causing the psalmist to say, "If God, if God spends that much care and treasures so much what He is putting together in the womb, then He must still care for me who is a product of the womb so that when my life is dark, when I can't explain what is going on, I still treasure the God who treasures me."
Why? Because I know God knows us before birth. God does not need the ultrasound. And so verse 15 says, "My frame was not hidden from you, Lord, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance." Now for those critics of the Bible that says, "Here's this birth, here's this verse about babies being formed in the depths of the earth." You know, those Christians think that, you know, babies come from elves who are working in caverns somewhere.
No, even the ancients could see that when a person died, body and bones went back to dust.
And they recognized that the body and bones then must be of the same substance as the dust. After all from Scripture's earliest pages, "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return."
But God has somehow worked to put that together. And it's confirming the amazing nature of who we are at the hand of God. Again, science, not our enemy here, but our friend. I actually read with fascination the reports that say every single person here is a combination of earth's compounds and ancient stardust.
I didn't make that up. That when we actually examine what is in your body and mind, yes, all the carbon and the calcium and the iron and the magnesium and the gold.
So that we recognize it's not just the elements, but those who understand how our systems work. Say what's making you up and what you're breathing and what you're processing are molecules even from generations past.
So that every single person here is probably part da Vinci and Mozart and Einstein and Adam and Eve.
And there's the rub.
Because as glorious as the reality of who we are, even by science's estimation, what we recognize is that these bodies of ours are what Francis Schaeffer, the great 20th century philosopher, called a glorious ruin. Like you go to an ancient city on a tour and you say, "This is glorious!"
And yet the columns are falling down and the grass is growing in the cracks. And as glorious as we are, we recognize that in our fallenness and our inherited corrupted state from Adam and Eve that our sin has tainted every single one of us. And the very God who made us glorious had to redeem us. And so He sent His Son for us. And the one who knows us from the inside out, who knows the past and the precious of how we were formed and how we've messed up in the days that we have, is still saying, "I made you knowing full well about you."
And God says, "I sent my Son to claim you none the less." To this point in the Psalm, you recognize the psalmist is praising God by looking backward. Look at how amazing is the hand of God in all these processes, even into the womb. But that is not the end, the end of verse 16. "In your book, Lord, were written every one of them the days that were formed for me, even as yet there was none of them."
I like the way the NIV talks about it. "All the days ordained for me before one of them came to be." That God has said, "I know, I know the faults and the frailties. I know the complications, the crises, the difficulties."
But as much as there is design and purpose all the way back into your soul, there is design and purpose all the way forward. All the days ordained for me, God knew before one of them came to be. And that becomes important for us. I must tell you, we're a church of many generations here, you know that. And for older generations, sometimes with that diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer's, one of the greatest fears among Christians is, "Will I remember God?"
And I must tell you, I don't know.
But what I do know is God remembers you.
All the days ordained for me before one of them came to be. God knows us. And because He knows us, He knows not just our biology, He knows our spirits, He knows our souls.
And for that reason, it becomes all the more important to raise the God who said, "I know you inside out, and I know what you are doing and what you're going to do, and still I sent Jesus." It becomes all the more important. And it's not just for the oldest, for the children who may be forgotten or abandoned by family, by mother. God says, "I love you even when the world forgets. I knew you in the womb, I formed you there, and I know all the days to come. I will not forget you. And I sent my Son for you because you are so precious to me." When we really understand that neither the darkness of our circumstances nor the darkness of our sin is blinding God to His love for us, His care for us, what can we do but say, verse 17, "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sun!" Magnitude of the thoughts of God in our behalf. I mean, what God is saying is, "I've done more to make you precious to me than you can possibly imagine." And when the psalmist who gets just a glimpse of it, he says, "Your thoughts for me and every person that I can know are precious, God. I can't even get my arms around it. How vast is the magnitude of your love and your care." And what we're being called to do is simply this, to count precious what God counts precious.
If His thoughts are precious and it's taken His mind to bring every one of us into existence, then we say, "We count precious what He counts precious, His thoughts that He has put into action in our behalf." And if we don't count precious His thoughts, depending on our wisdom, inevitably there are dire consequences in China right now because of four decades of the one child policy.
The greatest threat of infant mortality is a consequence of being a girl.
Because if parents know a girl is coming who does not have status in that historic culture, that is not the child that is wanted, which has caused what? Some of you are in business, you know far more about this than I do. What that means is in this Chinese century in which China is supposed to race way ahead of every other nation in the economic world, that the greatest threat to that prosperity right now is a declining Chinese population.
And that is not the only threat.
Because of the absence of women, China has become the greatest importer of young women
in the sex trafficking slave trade.
As men desperate for any flesh have turned a nation of scholars and engineers into desperate men just needing flesh.
And the reality of that is what we talk about in polite culture is that we're in a race with China over things like smartphone dominance and oil and ocean territory and not recognize the future great battles may be well over a new version of the slave trade.
We don't just have to look to China to think about the consequences of not thinking clearly with God's thoughts. The greatest risk to infants in this country is being poor and being black.
It's not because the majority of children who are not taken to term are African American. No, the majority are still white.
But one-third of all terminated pregnancies in this country are African American, far out of proportion with the percentage of African Americans in this culture, which is causing even young leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement to say, "How can we possibly go on supporting policies that are actually damaging our influence and numbers in this culture?"
We recognize and talk about Black Lives Matter and not care about the infants who will carry on, perpetuate the communities we know is but hollow sloganeering if we do not consider these children precious to God. And we don't just have to look at some other nation or other ethnicities. The hollow words are not limited to any ethnic community in this nation. I mentioned to you earlier, on Thursday of this week, Mindy Bells, editor of one of the nation's most politically conservative Christian magazines, addressed the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, one of the most biblically minded and conservative of the think tanks in the United States. And as she addressed them in Washington, D.C., she just spoke straight truth.
Here's what she said on Thursday of this week, "Nowhere does Scripture say we should stand aside indifferent to suffering and oppression.
The love of God in us is what compels us to want to strive for an end to this kind of suffering. In the United States, the pro-life community has long understood the connection and has in fact excelled in mercy ministries to help the unborn while at the same time pursuing political and legal strategies to protect unborn life and provide families through adoption for those that are born.
Yet many in this same community," she said, "if you'll allow me, have ignored the importance of policy and engagement when it comes to the persecuted, to refugees, and to war victims.
I would argue that God does not make a distinction," she said, "between whether the vulnerable are here or there. All are His children.
We must engage in mercy ministries. We actually see modeled in the developing church, in the developing world. The letters from early reign pastors Wang Yi, now jailed in China, should become required reading in every Christian church. Middle Eastern churches have fed hundreds, even thousands of displaced Syrians for over a decade now.
Chaldeans and Assyrians in Iraq totally impoverished are building camps and churches to serve the displaced.
The evangelical churches have turned their classrooms into apartments for the refugees. And when we dare to see and hear their testimony in this way, the West will also be changed, and we will be more conformed to the image of Christ by following their example."
What is she saying? But that life is precious, every life, young, old, near death, not term, every life precious to God, His masterpiece, His work, how do you affirm that? How do you help in this cause for the life that God calls precious? I hope you will support and participate in the heartbeat ministries, the adoption and mercy ministries of this church.
Support and participate in the special needs ministries of this church, both adult and children. We have tremendous responsibility and tremendous privileges to call every life precious in this church. Support and participate in the seniors and widow care ministries that the deacons of this church are valiantly leading.
Support and help the Empower Life Center that cares for expectant mothers in this town.
Support, help, and even attend the deeper still seminars for post-abortion women who want to know the help and the healing of the gospel and the love of Jesus Christ.
No decision, no action of your past denies the grace of the gospel. And for that reason, we speak and we hold Christ high. These ministries and others are described, if you don't know, in the Get Connected book that's at the information desk, every single one can pick up.
Most of all, I want to say to you, those of you who participate in the political process, we have people in amazing positions.
Part of party or candidate, encourage those that you support to be consistently pro-life, from womb to tomb, nationally, internationally, in child care and senior care and care for the disadvantaged, care for the poor, care for the persecuted, care for the refugee,
every child precious to God because they're all product of His thought.
And every thought is precious of God.
Does it make any difference?
I said to you, Mindy Bells gave this talk on Thursday of this week in Washington, D.C.
And yesterday, the president announced his proposal for the help of 300,000 refugees in this country from war-torn nations. Are the two connected? I have no idea.
What I do know is this.
God's hand in the darkness is far beyond our comprehension and His ways far beyond our understanding and every thought of His is precious, which means every life is precious. Oh, Lord, how vast is the magnitude of Your hand and of Your love. We are precious to You. You are precious to God.
Praise God. Amen. Father, so work Your word into our hearts that the beauty of the gospel, that Christ has given Himself for such as we, and God the Father has given His hand to make a masterpiece of all who would ever stand before You, born or unborn. These, Father, are the evidences of Your care that give us hope even in our own darkness. So bless us with the wonder of a God who makes each one of us in ways we can hardly fathom.
You are God.
How precious are Your thoughts? How vast the magnitude of Your heart. So we bless You. In Jesus' name, amen.