Hi!
I think Psalm 139 is one of the most intimate chapters in the Bible, which is God’s love letter to each one of us.
Verse 1: “O Lord, you have searched me thoroughly and have known me.” Verses 6-7: “Your knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high above me, I cannot reach it. Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?” Verses 12-13: “Even the darkness hides nothing from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You. For You did form my inward parts; You did knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Verse 16: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance, and in Your book all the days of my life were written before ever they took shape, when as yet there was none of them.”
Before we were born, God had plans for us, but Satan keeps working to destroy God’s good plan in many of us, so God sent His Son, Jesus, to redeem us and restore all things to their proper order. The Bible is His will for us as we believe it, confess it and live it.
To become a successful witness for Christ, you have to ask this question: “How do I know the living God?”
When were the moments in your life when you saw or experienced God most clearly? Mine wasn’t the conversion experience of the apostle Paul. It was the determination, prayers and love of my mother as she raised me in the church. It was reading the Bible with childlike amazement at the history, the power and the depth of our Lord’s love for us. It was open rebellion against God and people I care about. It was knowledge of God’s forgiveness in the stories of the prodigal son and in Luke 7 when the woman anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume because Jesus forgave her and freed her from her many sins and she has to show him how much she loved him for that, and when Jesus forgave the criminal just before their earthly bodies died on crosses. It is a growing faith because of a love that will not let me go.
Dear Abba, Daddy, thank you for being in my life, for my family and friends, and the people you can use me to help. Amen.
~ Bob Sidlinger