When I Question the Way God Made Me

Devotional

Sometimes it's the mirror. Sometimes it's a photo somebody tagged you in.

But sometimes it doesn't have a surface at all. It's just this long-running suspicion that you came out as the rough draft. That other people seem to live inside their own skin comfortably and you never figured out how. It isn't despair. It's quieter than that. It's been running so long you've stopped hearing it.

Psalm 139 walks into that, and it doesn't open by telling you how special you are.

"O LORD, you have searched me and known me."

And then David piles it on. God knows when you sit and when you stand. He knows the thought before you've finished having it. He knows the word before it gets to your tongue. "You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me."

Then David's reaction: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it."

The first response to being fully known isn't relief. It's awe.

And notice what this psalm does not tell you to do. It doesn't tell you to know yourself better. It doesn't say identify your strengths and reframe your story. We assume the cure for self-doubt is more self-examination. Psalm 139 goes the other way. The answer to who you are isn't found by staring harder at yourself. It's found in the one who knew you before you had a vocabulary.

Then verse 13. "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb."

Knitted. That's not a factory word. Nobody knits in a hurry. Knitting is slow, deliberate work where the hands stay on the material the entire time. God wasn't assembling units. He was paying attention.

"I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Fearfully there doesn't mean scary. It means the kind of made that ought to stop you.

Then verse 15. "My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret."

Before anybody saw you. Before anyone told you what you were and weren't. Before your father said the thing he said or didn't say the thing you needed. God's eyes were already on the work.

"In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." Your days were written down before you lived one of them.

Now I want to be careful here, because this psalm gets misused.

It isn't saying every impulse in you is good because God made you. David knows better than that, and he proves it by how he ends. The same psalm that says you're wonderfully made closes with: "Search me, O God... and see if there be any grievous way in me."

Both are true. You are made with intention, and you are disordered by sin. And the second one doesn't cancel the first.

This is exactly where the gospel does its work. The God who knit you is the God who sent his Son to buy back what sin ruined in you. And notice what redemption isn't. It isn't a replacement. He doesn't scrap you and issue a new one. He restores. The image is marred, not erased, and he is renewing it.

Then look at verses 17 and 18, which I'd want you to carry around this week.

"How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you."

His thoughts toward you aren't occasional. They're not rationed based on your week. More than the sand. And then that last line, so simple you could miss it: I fall asleep and he keeps going, and when I open my eyes he's still there.

So bring it to him. The comparison that tightens your chest. The thing about yourself you've been trying to fix since you were fourteen. The limitation you've carried like it was a verdict.

Not to have it explained. To be led.

He knew you before anyone did. He thinks about you in numbers you can't count.

And he isn't done with what his hands started.