Bible in 90, Day 54: Thank God for me!

Jeremiah 1-10

*image courtesy of christgr at stock.xchng

Last week, I was praying with my youngest son, Tripp.  He hears me thanking God for him and his brother a lot, and so I guess he’s learning by example.  Without my prompting, he prayed, “God, thank you for Corbin (his brother), and mommy, and daddy.”  I thought that was great!  The next night was even better.  He prayed, “God, thank you for Corbin, and mommy, and daddy, and me!”

A few days ago we looked at God’s special creation of every human being as described in Psalm 139 (Day 45).  Today, we see another instance of God’s knowledge of the unborn.  In Jeremiah 1, God tells Jeremiah that he knew (or possibly “chose”) him before He formed him in the womb.  Even before he was fearfully and wonderfully made, God knew all about Jeremiah and his life.  Each person is made by God, on purpose.

We are no accident.

We know even more than this – that God knew all about Jeremiah before He formed him, and that He then formed him in the womb.  God also tells Jeremiah that before he was even conceived, God appointed him as a prophet.  This means that God had a plan for Jeremiah’s life before it ever even began.  God had something for Jeremiah to do before his parents even knew he existed.

We are created on purpose, with a purpose.

Jeremiah is initially scared of God’s call on his life.  He is afraid because he is young.  But to God, this is irrelevant.  God set him apart for this task before he was even a single cell of life.  How could he be too young now?!  God gives Jeremiah courage, even putting His own words in his mouth.  Jeremiah goes through the rest of his life and ministry with a great boldness and confidence because he knows that God has sent him (see Jeremiah 20:9).

Was it conceited of my 2-year-old to thank God for himself?  Well, for a 2-year-old, we might shrug it off.  If we heard a grown man pray that prayer, we might think it arrogant.  However, I think it’s perfectly biblical to thank God for ourselves.  If we recognize that we are God’s special creation and have value and worth because of that, then it is perfectly acceptable to thank God for us!  If we recognize that we have a divine purpose for existing because of God’s plan, then why wouldn’t we thank God for us?

Also, we can have the same confidence in our own lives that Jeremiah had.  When we realize that God has a specific plan for our lives, something great for us to accomplish, we can live life boldly.  We don’t have to be a great prophet or write  a book of the Bible.  We simply have to find out what God wants us to do, and do it!

When we were young, we believed there was something big out there for us to do.  There was a whole world of possibilities just outside.  Let’s recover that.  Let’s seek out what pleases the Lord (Ephesians 5:8-10), and then do it!  Let’s thank God for us, not because we are great in ourselves, but because we were made on purpose with a purpose.

*via Words of Reason

Bible in 90, Day 45: Fearfully and wonderfully

Psalm 135-Proverbs 6

I have these red birthmarks on my left forearm.  They’ve faded with age, but they used to be very red.  One day when I was about 5, I was minding my own business, eating my lunch at day care, when a teacher walked up behind me.  She looked down at my arm and saw these red splotches on my forearm.  She assumed I had a terrible rash/reaction, or worse yet, I was horribly burned.  She called out to another teacher, they both grabbed an arm and snatched me out of my chair.  They started running to the office, my feet barely scraping along the floor.  I asked in a panic, “Where are we going?” “The office!” they shouted.  Now I was really freaked out, the office was for disciplinary problems!  “Why!  What did I do wrong?” I pleaded.  “Nothing, it’s your arm!  The burns on your arm!”  “My birthmarks?” I said, confused.  They stopped.  “You have birthmarks?”  They put me down as let me resume my lunch.

I hated those birthmarks.

They were a constant source of low self-image for me all through my childhood.  Eventually, I stopped thinking about them as much, right about the time I got those warts on my knees.  Then there were the early teenage years, bulking up before the growth spurt, looking like a pudge.  Later it was my jacked up teeth.  I had a bad self-image most of my early life.

Psalm 139 is one of my favorite psalms.

It changed my view of myself radically as a teenager and early 20-something.  When I read David’s words, that I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God, it flipped everything around.  I no longer saw the birthmarks as in utero mistakes and blemishes on my forearm.  Now, I saw them as God’s own handiwork.  (By the way, it’s a big part of why I don’t have any tattoos, I got tats from God!)  I realized that the pudgy period was a step on the way to becoming the man God created me to be, from the womb!

God knits each one of us together in our mother’s womb.  He takes precious care to create each one of us.  David says that God’s thoughts toward us are innumerable (vv. 17-18).  I have a little jar of sand that an old friend gave me.  It serves as a reminder that, just as I couldn’t count the sand grains in that jar, let alone the whole earth, so also I couldn’t count God’s precious thoughts toward me.

In the last two verses, David makes an interesting application of this truth.  God knows us intimately.  Our forms were not hidden from Him while we were in the womb.  The same is true today.  We cannot hide from God, even in our inmost being.  God can search our hearts, He can test our thoughts.  He knows if there is any offensive way in us, and He can correct us.

Let’s remember that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.  We are just as God planned us.  Let’s love our own bodies, not in vanity and arrogance, but in appreciation of God’s handiwork.  Let’s remember that we are not hidden from God’s searching.  We cannot hide our sin from God, for He knows us inside and out.  Let’s bring our sins to God, including our self-hatred, confessing the wickedness of them, and seek both His forgiveness and His correcting truth.

*originally at Words of Reason