I
am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139.14)
The psalmist ponders the care and thought God invested in
creating him and he’s awestruck. “I am fearfully
made!” he sings. The utter genius of his physiology and all of its functions
flabbergast him. But it’s more than that. It’s how his body has been shaped to house
the mind and spirit God placed in him. We are God’s finest creation—God’s
ultimate masterpiece. And each of us is all
of a piece. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit
within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” Paul asks
in 1 Corinthians 6.19. We must know that. And we must respect the truth of our
making, accepting who we are and what we’ve been given. We are fearfully—perfectly—made so that we can witness
our awesome God’s perfection in the world. We are made to love, to bless, to
honor, to serve God and our neighbors. We are not broken, incomplete, or
misshapen in any way. We are mirrors of our Maker: awesome, perfect,
miraculous, and complete. Everything about us is fearfully made.
2 comments:
Please repent.
Hello, Tanya, and welcome to Straight-Friendly! I must confess that your comment mystified me at first, as I believe accepting and honoring the awesome wonder of our making is central to true repentance. It is the thing that leads away from fears and doubts imbedded in manmade dogma; it is the open door to knowing a God of love and grace.
True repentance is reliant on honesty, not pretense--integrity of faith, not compliance to pressure. Each of us must begin with what we've been given and seek wisdom regarding God's purpose in creating us as we are. Labels don't work here, nor do culturally based presumptions and stereotypes. As this psalm says without question, it is God Who makes us, Who has known us from the first, and Who sustains us to the last. Repentance returns us to God by turning us away from human logic and compulsions to condemn and categorize. To repent is to put one's entire trust in one's Creator, Who knows, sees, and understands us as we are made--and Who is glorified when we honor our making. Thus, repentance is not rejection of self, but its wholehearted acceptance so that we may seek and serve God's will in our lives.
In light of that, I fully endorse your statement: we must all repent, for as Scripture says, we all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory.
Thank you for opening this strand of the conversation. I hadn't considered repentance's role in helping us live out the uniqueness of our making before. But it makes a great deal of sense.
Many blessings,
Tim
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