Good morning. My name is Junia and today's scripture reading is from Psalm 139 verses
13 through 16 and it's page 532 in the Bibles in the back of your pews.
For it was you who created my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb and
I will praise you because I have been remarkably and wonderfully made. Your
works are wondrous and I know this very well. My bones were not hidden from you
when I was made in secret. When I was formed in the depths of the earth your
eyes saw me when I was formless. All my days were written in your book and
planned before a single one of them began. This is God's Word. There are some
issues that the church does not like to talk about. Talk about prayer? Yeah, let's
talk about prayer. Talk about worship? Yes, let's talk about worship. Talk about
overcoming the enemy? Hallelujah. Amen. Talk about sin? As long as it's not the
sin that I embrace. Talk about racial reconciliation? Maybe not. Talk about life?
Well, it depends. One easy way to shoot down someone talking about an issue at
church that you don't like is to call it political. Oh, that's political. And then
demand that we keep politics and religion separate. That's the American
way. One issue that has consistently undergone this attack is the issue of
life. But what could be more foundational to our existence and purpose than the
questions surrounding life? And who has more authority to speak to issues of
life than the people of life and light? Than the people of the way, the people of
the Word, the people of God? Never has our culture and society needed to hear truth
more than right now. And the psalmist in Psalm 139, he's captivated by life and by
the God who would give such a life. He says, for it was you who
created my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb. And a
little bit later, he says, my bones were not hidden from you when I was made in
secret, when I was formed in the depths of the earth. God has fashioned together
in a directed way, he says. God isn't distant or uninvolved. God didn't wind up
the clock and then just let it run its course. The psalmist is glorying in the
fact that God didn't just show up in his life at some predestined moment of
revelation, but that God was there causing the very spark of life. He uses
the metaphor of knitting. When he says, my bones were not hidden, it's another way
of saying, not just the parts of me, as if they were delivered on a truck for
assembly by God. No, the bones were like the very substance of a person. God knows
both our shape and our substance. The vast majority of who we are operates in
secret. I love you, but I never want to see your kidneys. And you're probably not
going to show up to small group this week, burying your small intestines for
everyone to examine. Some of you guys do like to come and show really gross
pictures though of injuries. You got to stop that. And I'm never going to see the
inner workings of your eye or the secret thoughts of your mind. Most of you exist
in secret, out of reach, beyond my gaze. But none of that is secret from God. None
of it. So woodworking is not for the faint of heart. In my experience, it is
an arduous work. It often doesn't go as planned. And the truth is, to make
anything effectively out of wood, you ought to start with a plan. And I am
notorious for going into things without a plan. I'll wing it. And what do you find?
Corners don't match up perfectly because you're measuring down to the 32nd or the
64th of an inch to get a tight joint on a piece of furniture. And then glue-ups,
right? Glue-ups for cabinets. Don't you wish, any of you guys who've been in
carpentry or woodworking, don't you wish you have 13 arms for like a glue-up or
trying to hold different things? It's inevitable that you start to glue up,
right? And then you remember, oh, the clamp is across the room and the
brad nailer is over here. And now I'm holding all these pieces with my feet, my
tongue, and I'm trying to keep it all together, yelling for someone to please
come grab the clamp for me. A lot of projects began with the creation of just
a box or multiple boxes. And if you were to look at any of them at that stage,
they would be pretty rough and unattractive, even if they might be
functionally 80% done. It's usually here where I go, wow, I'm almost done. I've got
a box. But in truth, I'm probably not even 60% of the way there because there's
still doors and filing, you know, filling nail holes and joints and sanding and
trim to add and stain and paint and hardware. And that all takes time and
adds a hundred more possibilities for failure. Something that I learned over
the course of watching many YouTube videos and doing it myself is that
nothing is perfect. Every piece of handmade furniture has a story of some
problem that had to be overcome. And finally, what began as an idea in the
mind of the craftsman, rough lumber and fasteners in a box and stain in a can,
has now been brought together under the watchful guidance and deliberate actions
of that craftsman to create the piece of work. And there's this moment where you
step back so you can see the whole thing edge to edge. And the only way I can
express how I feel in those moments is joy. There's some sort of joy, a joy over
what you have made, a joy as you begin to think of all the possibilities that
this thing will serve in your home as a cabinet or by your bed as a side table.
Joy in what is and what will be as it functions in this world to whatever ends
you made it for. Genesis chapter 1 tells a similar but different story. We're told
that God, out of nothing, created everything. We're told that no raw
materials or fasteners were needed when God embarked on his endeavor to
create. But by the word of his power he spoke and it burst into existence. What
began in the mind of God was created by the word of God. And the crown jewel of
his creation, the icing on the cake, the cherry on the banana split, was humanity,
humankind. And he makes them with a purpose and a job that they might share
in all of his creation by ruling over it, by being co-regents, by being queens and
kings and queens to rule the land in all of life. And when God had finished
bringing all of this about, we're told in Genesis that God saw all that he had
made and it was very good indeed. He saw and he declared it was good. Now, Google
it and you'll find out. Google it and you'll find out that our friends and our
neighbors and our family members are all desperate to be seen and validated. It is
a human condition that we need to be seen and validated. What is social media
except a case study in folks who want to be seen, even if it is in a particular
light, staged? But we watched some videos a little while ago when we
were preparing for Operation Christmas Child and I pointed it out then, I'll
point it out again today, that one of the things that always strikes me in those
videos when a kid receives a gift and they go to interview him, they
inevitably say something to the effect of, I feel seen. I feel like someone saw
me. People want to be seen. People want to be truly seen. But sin and shame tell
us that if we are truly seen and known, we will never be loved. We will never. No
one can truly see who we are and still actually love us and actually validate
our existence. And some of you in this room struggle with that. You hate who you
are but you desperately want someone to know you, see you, love you, in spite of
your failings and shortcomings. Some of you have done things that you think are
unforgivable and you would never want to share here. Some of you are caught in the
trap of self-hatred, never feeling valued and loathing your very existence. You are
hurting and you need to hear this. God was there at your very beginning. He was
there when you were formed in your mother's womb. He was instrumental in you
coming to be. He knew everything about you before you took your first breath. He
knew the outcome of every choice you would make or could make. He sees you as
you truly are right now. When the psalmist realizes this, he erupts in verse 14 into
praise and he says, I will praise you because I have been remarkably and
wondrously made. Your works are marvelous and I know that very well. He's telling
us that you don't need to go to the Amazon forest or to the Angel Falls in
Venezuela or to the glaciers in Alaska or to the Azores of Portugal to see the
glory of God's creation. For God has deposited wonder and glory into humankind.
What is more amazing than the meticulous design of a human body? Each part of
virtual universe unto itself. And while we are similar, we are very similar in
some respects. We're all 100% unique. Everyone in this room, every single one
is uniquely made. There is truly no one who was made just like you. And here's a
big idea. Verse 16 said, your eyes saw me. There's that being seen. Your eyes saw me
when I was formless. All my days were written in your book and planned before
a single one of them began. All my days written in your book planned before a
single one began. That means there's no mistakes. God saw you when you were a
single cell fertilized egg. And shortly after that, about 30 hours later, when
you divided into two cells, he saw you and he knew your days. And a little bit
after that, you divided into four cells and he was there, present, working his
handiwork. When after three days, you became like a little raspberry, 16 cells,
he was there, working his handiwork, knew the number of your days and had planned
them.
It wasn't just you planning out your days. It was God way ahead of time, not
just planning out your days, but also planning the days for you. The days that
you would occupy were planned out for you as well, by God. You are no accident.
You are no mistake. You are supposed to be here right now. In the book of Acts,
chapter 17 verse 26, what does it say? It says, from one man he has made every
nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times
and the boundaries of where they live. God, from one man, made all humankind to
fill the earth and he has appointed their time to be and the boundaries of
where they will be, all of humankind. As Pastor Matt Chandler puts it, these are
the days he made for you and these are the days you were made for. Don't believe
the lie that you are insignificant and don't believe the lie that others have a
purpose in this life, but your purpose is to exist in perpetual
hopelessness. Remember that agreement gives accusation power. Agreement gives
accusation power. What you need to do is glory in and rejoice in the precious
words of Scripture and believe them as true. They are truth and let them govern
and direct and lead your life. God saw to it that you were made for these days, but
why? You heard earlier that God sees you. We want to be seen and God sees us, but
just being seen, just being laid bare in all of our naked shame, doesn't sound
like good news, does it? Oh, you see us. You see all of me. Oh, that's not good
because we don't just want to be seen, we also want to be loved and validated. And
the verse that comes right after Acts 17 verse 26, verse 27 says that he did this.
Why did he determine the times and the seasons and the places for all of
humankind? Why did God do that? Well, Paul answers in verse 27. He says he did this
so that they might seek God and perhaps might reach out and find him though he
is not far from each one of us. He put everyone uniquely in a position, in a
time, in a place, so that they uniquely could reach out to him and find him, that
they could seek him and find him. He is not far. Back in the story in Genesis, we
will only find our true identity and purpose when we are reconnected to the
source of life, which is God. Sin and disobedience has separated us from God
and we need him to look on us again as he did in Genesis. We need the eyes of
God to look on us and declare us good. We desperately need that. But what does the
world do? Instead of seeking God, what do they do? Most want to deny him. They want
to deny his very existence. They want to deny his character and they want to do
whatever pleases them. They deny what can be known of God through his creation.
They deny his eternal power and his divine nature. They say that life itself
isn't sacred, isn't an act of wonder of God, that life isn't given to us as a
gift, but instead that life is chosen by the strong over the weak. They refuse to
give God glory for all he has made and to live their lives in accord with the
reality of who God is. And so we're told that they are disconnected from the
source of life and their days are darkened with the senselessness of their
own hearts. This is the world we live in. Many around have denied God in his very
character, have denied him as the gift giver of life, and so have taken life
into their own hands as if it was a choice instead of a gift. But the good
news of the gospel is that God loved us so much that he gave his son, Jesus, to
take our place and to take on him our shame and our sin and our failures, even
the failures of those who once denied God. Some of you are in this room. He
takes away our sin and shame and failures and frees us from the burden
and the chains of our sin. And in Christ we can be declared righteous. We can be
seen by God and we can be told good, made good again in right standing before God.
In Christ we can receive the love and validation that we long for. God who is
perfect love and obedience. Christ who is perfect love and obedience secured for
us this longing of our heart which is met in him that we might be seen and
again we might be loved. We all make bad decisions, poor choices. Some of them have
huge consequences. All of them are denying the reality of who God is and
what he is doing and what his character is. But that doesn't mean that God can't
restore. That doesn't mean in Christ the good news is that he can restore and
that he can reclaim the days that were lost in our pursuit of sin. He can remove
the shame from our shoulders and instead give us a testimony of life of what he's
done in our lives. I wasn't planning on this but had a quick conversation with
my sister Junia beforehand. Junia would you mind sharing with us? Junia is going
to share from her own life experience about choices and the redemptive power
of God.
I haven't shared this story with the group this large but this this passage
was so near and dear to my heart because as a teenager 58 years ago I gave up a
baby girl for adoption and at the time I was in a very poor family and being
raised with four other children and it just it felt like the right thing to do.
And it was it was a painful decision because for 30 years I didn't know where
that child was and then God restored her to me when she was 30 years old. She
found me and I had a relationship with her now for almost 30 years. I had two
grandchildren that I didn't know about and now I have a great-grandchild and
you know in 1965 the other choice was available but God saw fit to restore
this this child to me and I'm I'll be forever grateful. She lives in
Colorado. We text pretty much on a daily basis and see each other very often and
I'm just so blessed and thankful for that. I just wanted to share that with you.
Thank you for sharing.
Christians have historically believed that all of life is precious and valuable.
That the craftsmanship of God created for his glory and purpose is sacred. In
ancient Rome they would rescue abandoned children. Christians are our brothers
and sisters who went before. They would rescue abandoned children who were
placed outside of the city gates or in trash heaps left to die and the
Christians would come to find those children and to bring them into a home
and a family. It's one of the reasons why we want to support an organization like
Village of Hope in Guatemala because that's what they're doing as well. As
these children who have endured trauma oftentimes at the hands of their own
family members are able to be rescued and brought into a family and to learn
and grow in the faith and experience what God has for them. In all of humanity
is the image of God that we are imagers of God's divine nature and his character
and that the imager is something special to God and therefore worthy of honor,
dignity, and value. We stand up for life from that single-celled fertilized egg
to the hundred-plus man or woman. We believe that life is a sacred trust and
that we must not meddle in its destruction. For those who have given
into the temptation to take matters into their own hands and to end a life
through repentance and faith there is forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Regardless
of the choice you've made in the past there is a future and a hope that you
can have in Christ. Only in him will you find relief from the guilt and shame
that comes from the sin of murder. Only in him will you find the hope of life
from the life giver. We live in a time of great darkness and in the very hour
that we've been together over 100 babies have been killed. About a million a year
in the US. We want to be a people that actively work for the good of others who
stand up for the helpless and the silenced and who bring the good news of
Jesus Christ to the lives of those who are hurting, to those who have
been deceived by the world and to those who are bound up in shame. They all need
Jesus and Jesus is the answer for all of it. So I want to remind you that you were
made for these days and these days were made for you and therefore you are
particularly and uniquely placed here in a time where I could quote a stat about
what has taken place in the last hour. You're here for a reason. You're here
because others have made choices to bring you here and to honor the image of
God in you but you're also here to look and to look for those who are helpless
and those who are voiceless and to stand up and say something. This world needs the
truth and we are the truth bearers. If we don't speak who will?