Why did God make you the way you are?

In Psalm 139:13-16, David marvels that God personally formed him in the womb. In this study, Dr. Toby Holt explains why your design, identity, and purpose come from God — and why that is good news.

David says he was “fearfully and wonderfully made,” knit together by God Himself. Dr. Holt explains that because a personal Creator made us on purpose, our identity and even the number of our days are set by His will, not by chance. He addresses why some are born with hardships or disabilities — we live in a fallen world, and we are unfinished works whose full restoration awaits heaven. A God who designed you can be trusted with your story.

Questions this study answers:

1. What does it mean to be “fearfully and wonderfully made”? It means God formed you deliberately and with care, not by accident. You are the work of a personal Creator.

2. How does God’s knowledge of us shape our identity? Our worth and purpose come from the God who made us, not from our achievements or others’ opinions. He defines who we are.

3. Why can we trust God’s plan for our lives? Because the One who designed us also ordained our days. A Maker that careful can be trusted with our future.

“I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.” — Psalm 139:14 (NKJV)

Speaker: Dr. Toby Holt is the President of New Geneva Theological Seminary, a Reformed seminary in Colorado Springs. He is known for clear, down-to-earth Bible teaching, and his sermons have been downloaded more than 1.9 million times on SermonAudio.

Listen and go deeper: This sermon is part of the Psalms Explained study from New Geneva Theological Seminary. Find more verse-by-verse teaching across the Bible at newgeneva.org. To support this teaching ministry, visit newgeneva.org/give.

Why did God make me this way? Why did God give me this particular strength or this particular weakness? Why did God do this? Why did God put me in the given situation that I'm in? Why did God put me in the particular family that I'm in? Why has God allowed me to be in this vocation with these giftedness and this strength, and these abilities, or these weaknesses, or these deficiencies? Why did God do it? Now, these are good questions. They're reasonable questions to ask, even as believers. It's reasonable to wonder why we were made and to what end God has made us. Now, are there any answers? If these are good questions, if it's reasonable to ask, "God, why did you make me?" does His word provide any answers for us? Well, we're going to consider all this across the breadth of today's text. But let me stop for a moment. One of the very first theological statements I learned in seminary, there is a God, and you are not Him. There is a God, and you are not Him. The minute you understand this, you are well on your way to a right orthodoxy. There is a God. He has made all things. You can deny it, you can suppress it, and many do. You can object to it. You can try to narrow that down, water that down, dress it down, do all manner of things. It doesn't change the fact. You and I are created beings, and if we are created beings, then there must be a creator. And if there is a creator, then how we are to live and what we have been made for, what our purpose in life is to be, flows from His own volition and not ours. If God has formed a hammer, does that hammer have the same utility as a spoon? No. Try and eat with one, and you'll find out the hard way. The hammer and the spoon are different. They have different utilities. Their purpose, what they are to be used for, is determined by the one who made it. The ironsmith who can form vessels to different ends, it is he whose volition determines what end that vessel or that instrument will be used for. The creator does this, not the created. You want to know what your purpose in life is? You want to know what your purpose, your identity, what you were made to do, how many days you're to have, what you're to do with those days? You have any of these questions, all these questions? You have to look up. You have to say, "There is someone transcendent over me." If you don't start with that premise, there's nothing I can say this morning that'll help you. If you don't start with the premise that there is a God and you're not Him, and that in order to know truth, you need to look out for His revelation. If you don't start with this premise, you'll be left with nothing but guesswork. If you want to know anything, how you are to live, why you live in the first place, you look to Him. Now, some would deny or object everything I just said on the basis that there is no God in the heaven, that we formed ourselves, and therefore, our utility is for us to determine. This is the dominant view in the culture around us, certainly in all of our institutes of higher learning, that we're all just cosmic accidents. Folks believe there is no God in the heavens. Now, if that is true, if we really are just cosmic surprises, cosmic accidents, we crawled out of the goo to you, if that's the way things work, then the very notion of purpose or identity, it's academic at best, and a silly question at worst. If you and I are fundamentally no different than the ants outside these doors, we're just silly creatures who fret and strut our hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Then Hamlet was right, and life is nothing but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. If you are not formed by hand of a creator, there is no purpose. There's no utility. There is no objective that transcends you by which you are to live your life. And anything you do with your life has no ultimate meaning, whatever you might do.

Now, those who believe that, I believe it's a weak argument. This is not going to be a sermon on intelligent design, but I tell you this much, I believe it's a weak argument. But furthermore, it's the most unsatisfying one. There's an old saying that one thing about Christianity that gives it meaning is that it operates under the preconditions for intelligibility. And what that means is this. In order to make life and love and work and labor and everything that you do intelligible at all, in order to be able to understand why we have laws, why we have love, why we have emotions, you have to start with a structure that makes those things intelligible. Christianity does this. Other approaches, evolution and the like, do not. In any case, presuming that you and I were formed by someone greater than ourselves, presuming that God exists, and presuming that we are His handiwork, presuming that Psalm 139 is true, it still is reasonable to ask why He's made us the way that He has. Now, some people ask that out of curiosity. They genuinely just want to know. Why was I given this ability or strength? Why do I have this health condition or this issue? Some people ask it out of curiosity. Others ask it out of a wellspring of pain. They look at their life, they look at the circumstances, they look at their health, they look at their future, and they say, "Why?" They say, "God, I know you're supposedly good, and I know you're supposedly in charge. I know these things. In fact, I believe these things, and yet I have trouble reconciling your goodness and your sovereignty with this terrible thing that has come into my life, this health condition, this relationship problem, my job I lost, the poverty I'm suffering from.

You see, if you're good and you're in charge, shouldn't you have fixed all that stuff?" Sometimes it can be hard to reconcile God's goodness and His sovereignty with our circumstances. If you live long enough, life will give you plenty of reasons to ask why about any number of different things. As you seek to understand what God is doing with you and through you, you will ask why. Are there answers? That's what we asked at the outset. If this morning if you have questions, if you have doubts about these issues, I'm hopeful that our study will be an aid. Okay, I'm going to read now verses 13 through 15, and we'll go through the passage. Verse 13, "For you formed my inward parts." Now, right here, it's starting with the presupposition that there is a God. David wasn't Him. He looks up. He says, "For you, you formed my inward parts. It wasn't determined by my mother. It certainly wasn't determined by me. You did it. You formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." David looked at the rocks and the trees and the squirrels and the acorns, and he said, "I am not of these. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I have been made different. I have been made in the likeness and image of the one who made me."And that makes me different than all the animals I might see outside these doors. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works, and that my soul knows very well. Verse 15: My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Before my daughter was born, my wife and I had the opportunity to observe one of these prenatal sonograms on one of the biggest screens they had up in our hospital room, and this was the most amazing experience. My son had only been born a few years earlier, but the technology had improved dramatically. So as I sat in the room, as I watched this, as they had put this sonogram up on the largest TV they had in this room, I was astonished. Before, they just gave you a little piece of paper, and they'd point with a red pen and put a little dot there, and they said, "That's your child." You'd go, "Yay." Well, in this case, you could see all manner of things. You could see fingers. You could see toes. You could see movement. It wasn't a static image. There was so much about this, and my jaw just dropped, and I thought, "This is the most amazing thing." And as I watched these tiny little fingers moving about, I didn't see a cosmic accident. I didn't see chance. I saw the handiwork of God. And in watching this sonogram, I realized there's things going on, even at a molecular level, that I couldn't see with the greatest technology that were not an accident, not a coincidence, but rather my child's tiny body was being fashioned by the hand of the same one who made the cosmos, by the same one who fashioned all the massive things within the created realm. Now, in a nutshell, that's what verses 13 through 15 of today's text are declaring. You formed my inward parts. In places that no one could even look, in my mother's womb, you were at work, oh, God. It was not just chemicals bouncing off chemicals that did this. But when I look at rocks and trees, when I look at mountains, when I look at an infant, I see the hand of a creator. And where I see the hand of a creator, and where I see something that was made, and where I see something like fingers, I know those fingers, each one of them, from the thumb on down, has utility and purpose assigned to it by the one who made it.

This is part and parcel of what David is saying here. Now, other translations, we read from the ESV earlier, it expresses the same sentiment by saying this, that God has knitted

our parts together in the womb. Think of the carefulness of that image. Think of a master weaver seeking this great product, this great outcome. For all of God's might and his power, and yeah, he's mighty and yeah, he's powerful. You can't see to the end of the created realm with the most powerful telescope we can make today. You can't see to it. You can only speculate. And that's speculating that there is an end to what we see outside these doors through a telescope. But the point is this, you can't see all that he has made. There's planets and stars and all sorts of things that are beyond your ability to see, let alone to experience. And God formed every molecule, every rock, every toadstool, whatever exists, on every last one of them. He has done this. This is a God who's mighty. This is a God who's powerful. And yet, this is a God who's tender and looks upon infants with this sort of care and this sort of deliberateness in what he does and in how he forms them. This is a God who looks upon us with this love, and by which David says, we have been fearfully and wonderfully made.

Anything from abortion on out, euthanasia that strikes against this is striking against the very hand of God in creation. We've been fearfully and wonderfully made from the womb to the tomb and on into glory. Now, assuming you believe that to be true, the question remains, how do you reconcile that truth against the issues we mentioned earlier? Where a man might be born blind. A child might have cancer when they're young. Where there are more miscarriages than we could possibly know in the world around us. How do we reconcile those who are born blind, those with Down syndrome, those with genetic predispositions towards anger or alcoholism or something similar? How do we reconcile these things in light of what we've just read, in light of Psalm 139? You see, if theology is going to hold water, it needs to be stress tested against all the pain and questions that can be brought to bear against it. If our theology holds water, if our theology is credible, it needs to be stress tested against the pain you're facing this week, against the things and the doubts and the things you wonder about on the horizon. But that said, let me offer two specific thoughts. There's not enough time to get in all the answers we might provide here. But let me offer two specific thoughts or responses to those sort of questions. First of all, this almost goes without saying, but we have to be realistic. Living in a fallen world inevitably will mean suffering fallen ills. Living in a fallen world means we suffer from fallen ills. In other words, the reason for any deficiency or any depravity in the world around us is because the world's entire nature is deficient and depraved. The fall is real. Following the fall, it wasn't just that mankind fell, but the whole created realm fell into chaos. And because of this, it's the same way if you were to jump into a pool. You jump into a pool, it does you no good to ask, "Why did I get wet?" It's the nature of your environment. It's the nature we are, and it will affect you. Every bit as much as jumping in a pool will get you wet, living in the here and now, living in a depraved, fallen world means you will suffer from fallen ills, and they will manifest themselves differently. For some people, it's hardships or sickness or things we experience in our physical condition. For others of us, it's just the hurt and pain of broken relationships and the like. But this is part and parcel to where we live. The good news is we're made for something different. We're made for something better, and we'll get to that before we end today. In any case, as long as we live in a fallen world, we will suffer from fallen ills, all of which will affect us from the womb on forward, and they will affect our cognition. They will affect our addictions and our affectations, our behaviors, and all of it will culminate in the grave. This is our reality. You think differently? You think you're going to fashion utopia out of a fallen landscape? Out of a charred horizon? You're wrong. It doesn't work that way. Now, because of thisAsking why one person suffers from this particular issue and someone else doesn't, well, this gets to be a bit more challenging. Asking why one person lives for years longer than someone else lives. Asking why one person has an affliction that someone else doesn't suffer from. This is challenging, but it also presupposes that there's some optimal standard that we should all meet. And we don't meet it, whether it's life expectancy or various health issues or what have you, we think, well, somehow this is a tragedy. We've fallen short of some optimal standard, some bar that we should all be at. Again, that's not anything you see in scripture. Comparing one's lifespan or impairments against someone else or against some normal mean, some average curve, in order to seek out or to try to attain some optimal standard that we hope to reach, that fails to recognize we're all two inches from the grave. The fact that any one of us suffers from a different health condition, the fact that any one of us has a different challenge in our lives, misses the point. We all have health conditions, and we all have challenges in our life, and the ultimate reality of that is found when you walk into any cemetery in Cobb County. They all end in the same place. I don't know why Bob has diabetes and Carol has cancer. I don't know exactly what God is doing in every last circumstance, and anyone who claims to know is speaking out of turn. But I do know this, that both Bob and his diabetes and Carol with her cancer, they're suffering from the same common denominator, the same affliction. We call this sin. And its consequences will eventually claim them both, because the wages of sin is death. How it manifests itself and when it manifests itself does vary from person to person, but we all end up in the same place. Some of us don't want to hear this. They don't want to hear that bad things happen because we live in a sinful world. Because they say, "Isn't God greater than the world? Is anything greater? Can't he override our condition?" And some of us will object to everything I've just said on the basis that it's insufficient against the backdrop of God's sovereignty and his power to do something. That's fine. I know folks have this objection. To them, talking about sin and the fact that we suffer is because we live in a fallen world, they look at that as insufficient, it's less than helpful, especially if they're on the outside looking in at matters of the Christian faith. But as a pastor, my job is not to be a social worker, but rather my job is to open the book and explain, this is what the book has to say on the matter. And every last condition we suffer from, things we don't understand, every last hurt, every last pain, every last tear that we have, all can be traced back to the same exact root, to sin. I was a chaplain in the hospital. I've been in people's rooms who are suffering from just about everything you can suffer from. When you're a chaplain, you enter into all midst of trauma, all midst of hurt, all midst of pain, all manner of different diagnosis. And the common denominator behind every last one of them is sin. The common denominator behind every last one of them is sin. If I look in the mirror, I often use the example, I've been getting grayer, it seems, by the week. I look, and I see more gray is sprouting up. Why do I get old? Why do I get sick? Why will death ultimately claim me? Sin. The world doesn't like that, and again, they don't find that to be a sufficient explanation. If we don't like it, it doesn't change the facts. Now, with that said, let me offer a second observation. Sometimes we have a tendency to see a healthy child or a healthy adult, we'll see as that's the pinnacle. That's the pinnacle of God's work in forming mankind. Look at the health. Look at the vitality. And many of us will be envious of that. We'll say, "I remember back when I was 20 pounds less. I remember back when I could run, and the joints didn't ache," and so forth. We have a tendency to look at a healthy child or a healthy adult and we say, "That! That's the pinnacle of God's work in forming a man, forming a woman." In other words, we have a tendency to think that a day should come, for many of us, it's already came and went, when we will be all that God has made us to be in terms of our physical being. Now, that is incredibly shortsighted. Do you think that God is done forming you and I at any time while we live on this mortal coil? Do you think that God is done forming man at such time as he reaches that apex of his physical, spiritual, emotional maturity? Do you think we can or are completed works while we're here?

We have no idea.

We have no idea. See, the truth is that every last one of us is a work in progress. Even an Olympic athlete doesn't hold a candle in this life to the sort of health and vitality we will once experience. In a time and place where joints don't ache. In a time and place where you don't grow old, where there's no aging and sickness, there's no death. Even an Olympic athlete in the here and now doesn't hold a candle to the health and vitality you will one day have. Even the greatest genius in our midst today and on the globe today doesn't know one-tenth, one iota of the things that he will one day know, the things he will one day comprehend. Even the greatest poet couldn't dream of that which God's prepared for those who love Him, of the beauty and the sights that we will one day see, of the experiences that we will one day have, and how our bodies and souls will be equipped to see and to partake in things that you can't even dream up right now. Oh my goodness, you are not a completed work, no matter how healthy you are tomorrow. No matter how sick you may be right now. The good news is this, that in God's time, every ounce of sickness, every ounce of disease, every ache, every pain, every scintilla of dementia, everything like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, all that, [snaps] gone. Our God makes all things new. In the here and now, we experience these things because these things remind us to look up to something better. Part of the reason we suffer, part of the reason we have the health conditions we have, why did Paul have the thorn in the flesh? Because it reminded him that God's grace is sufficient. God allowed Paul to have a thorn in the flesh. Even the Apostle Paul cried out, and he said, "God, take this away. Take it away." And what was God's response? God said, "No, you need this. My grace is sufficient for you." Even that which Paul and probably the people around him determined was a weakness or a deficiency, God knew what he was doing. And in the here and now, in the present experience that Paul's undergoing, I guarantee you that thorn doesn't still exist. It has been removed. All of us, if you live long enough, will become so infirm you can't get out of bed. If you live long enough, it'll happen.And God will use even those moments, even our infirmities, even our sicknesses today, He will and is using for our betterment and His glory. I can't pretend to know exactly how, and neither can you. But we know God is in charge, and we know He is good, and we know that what we see in this present existence is not the end of the story. Thank God it's not.

Think of the hardship and the tears you've cried over different things. Would you desire this to be as good as it gets? Would you desire this to be the end of the story, even on your best day? Now, I've been to Disney World a few times. You can drive there if you're from Georgia. And guess what? I look around Disney World, the happiest place in the world, there's still kids crying. There's still people with sad faces. That will not be the case there. Every last tear will be wiped away. This is a promise that's in Revelation 21. Every tear will be wiped away. By who? By God Himself. Remember the tenderness we talked about earlier? About the God who knits infants together in the womb, the same God who knitted you together and knew what He was doing. He has appointed a day when you will stand before Him, and He will bend down to you. He will condescend. And the most tender picture we have in any culture, in any tribe, or any tongue is when a parent wipes away a tear, maybe uses the back of the hand or finger to wipe a tear from someone's eyes. This is the picture of God's love for you and His care for you, and it's a picture of something you have yet to experience, but which you will experience. And if He wipes away your tears, He will wipe away everything that caused your tears. Every thorn in the flesh, every thorn in the spirit, it will be gone, and God has appointed a day for this.

We get so caught up in why is that not happening right now when I'm in the midst of the crucible of my pain? And the reality is that in this present life, this is the nature of this existence. And God Himself is not immune to this because He sent His own Son down to die on a cross. God can empathize with pain. When Jesus looked at those who were weeping, what does the shortest verse in the Bible say? It's two words. What are they? Jesus wept.

He's not compassionate with whatever you're going through. He's not somewhere off just with his arms folded, just seeing how you do. He has empathy. He weeps with those who weep. He mourns with those who mourn. He continually cups our chin and focuses it upward, and says, "Remember." He says, "Remember what you were made for."

He doesn't give us all the answers maybe we might want today. He gives us something better.

He gives us a blood-bought promise, a blood-bought promise that He makes all things new, and our future is more glorious than we could possibly hope for. But in this time, as darkness falls, we're to be busy being about our master's work. We're to be busy praying for our loved ones. We're to be busy sharing the gospel. We're to be busy studying scripture. We're to be busy doing that which He has made us to do. But the good news is that this isn't even halftime in terms of what we've been made for. And you know what? Even when you're there, even when you're in glory, do you think you'll be fully formed on the first day?

No. You will continue to grow in Christ in your knowledge of Him and your relationship with Him every day on into eternity. The mercies of God will be new every morning. Even there, there's a sense in which you are growing, growing closer with the one who has made you. Verses 13 through 16, their implications extend far beyond earthly genetics.

Okay, let's look at verse 16. Verse 16 says this, "Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book, they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none."

You know, in the past, I've suggested this. I've said that the main reason the secular world hates the idea of creationism, it's not just for purely scientific reasons. The main reason that they teach evolution and the like as the primary mode, not even as a contrasting option, but as the primary mode by which we came into being. The main reason that the secular world hates the idea of creationism, won't even talk about it, it's not based simply on the science or the biology. It really isn't. Rather, the main reason that people hate the idea of a creator God is because creationism implies that one's purpose comes from the will of someone other than you. The main reason people don't like creationism in all the ivory towers and academic worlds is because it presupposes this. If there is a creator, and if He formed you, if all that's true, without even defining who this God is just yet, presuming that there is a God and He made you,

that God has a say in how you are to live.

And the world hates that. The objection is not simply based on science. Don't get fooled into thinking that. The objection is, if I agree, if I, secular humanist Joe, agree to you, agree with you, if I've been formed by someone other than me, that means I'm responsible to the one who made me. That means if He told me how to live, I need to live accordingly. People don't like that. They don't like the idea that there's something external that can tell them what to do. And that's the main objection. And that's why people will adopt even the silliest presuppositions, like the idea that we're made from an ape. People will cheer and applaud and say, "This is the greatest. Grandpa ape." They'll say, "This is wonderful." They would rather have that because that allows them to preserve their own autonomy.

It allows them to say, "I am the measure of all things, and all things fall subject to my purview and my judgment."

If there is no God, I suppose it's right. It's also hopeless in the final analysis, but that's a different story. But the point is this, the main reason people object to creationism is because they know the implications. They know the implications, and they don't like the implications. They don't like what it means. If God exists, if He created all things, what does verse 16 say? "In Your book, my days were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them." If God exists and if He created all things, then He must have a purpose and a plan for what He has made. That's what verse 16 declares, and that's what our culture objects to.Sinful folks want to determine their own purpose, and they don't want to bend the knee to a purpose that is external to themselves. Now, this idea of God having a purpose, that's explicitly referred to in verse 16 with this mention of God's book. God's book. Now, what in the world is God's book? There's a lot of different books referred to in scripture. What book are we seeing here? Well, verse 16 says that this book is a book in which our days have been recorded when previously there were none of them. In other words, it's saying our days were written down before we'd ever walked in them. Before we breathed the breath, God knew what we were going to do. And not only did God know what we were going to do through foreknowledge, but he would decree that we should do them. And that really stymies people. Even the people who are okay with God being in the picture somewhere, they want to redefine all this to mean that God only knows what's going to happen ahead of time rather than he decrees, but that's not what the word says. Scripture regularly talks about God decreeing the end from the beginning, not just knowing the end from the beginning. They are two totally different things. God's book refers to God's decrees and those things he has planned, those things he has intended before creation itself. Do the concepts of providence, election, predestination, does that stuff bother you? If you're being honest, the answer for some of us, maybe all of us, is either yes, they do, or they did at some time. See, the idea of God declaring any one man's future, let alone all man's future, flies in the face of our natural desire to plot our own course. We like to think of ourselves as free agents. We like to see ourselves as free agents who choose

God. Oh, how wonderful of us. I chose God. How wise I am. No, that's not it, again, not the way it works. We are not free agents. God is in charge. Now, he does, this is a different sermon, but he does give us latitude in making a whole host of decisions, because we can only choose that which is part of our nature, and we can only choose that which is an option for us. Can I choose right now to fly through this room? No. I might want to, but I cannot choose to. Why? Because my nature does not give me that as an option. Right there, my free agency has been stymied by my creation. Am I right? You can nod, yeah. My free agency has been stymied by the way I've been created. That's the most basic way to explain that free agency is capped, that our abilities to select certain things are limited by what God enables us to select from. Again, this is probably not just one sermon. There's probably 10 sermons I could preach on this. But the point is, people want to think they're free agents in all manner of different things, temporal, spiritual, what have you. And again, it's not only that God's word says this isn't so, but common sense says it isn't so. No man can just take off his feet and start flying around the room. Everyone should recognize their natural limitations, even if few do. In any case, when it comes to free agency, free will, all these different things, again, there's a lot to this. When I talk to folks about God or the gospel, most folks, honestly, they don't object to the fact that God is there in a general sense. They don't object to God in a general, abstract sense, almost like he's the force. That doesn't mess with people too much. They don't mind this idea that there's some deistic, benevolent force. They don't mind this idea of some sort of cosmic energy and karma and the like. They don't mind the idea of a God who's way far away, who kind of sends us his benevolence on the wind. They don't mind that, but they do mind a God who has an agenda. No, they do mind a God who shatters their self-deterministic lifestyle, a God who decrees and ordains the future. And when we say that this God does this, we fly in the face of what man naturally wants. Does the fact that God has ordained your future scare you or encourage you?

Does the fact that God has ordained your future fill you with dread? Or does it encourage you to know that every step, every breath has been enfolded into a plan and into a horizon that you can't possibly see? Does this scare you? Does it offend you? Or does it encourage you? Let me consider that with our remaining few moments here. If you were to hop on a plane tomorrow, if you could choose the pilot, what sort of pilot would you choose? Would you choose a pilot who had just this perfect, unblemished track record and a perfect view, a view all directions, a view onto the infinite horizon? Would you choose that pilot? Or would you choose the pilot with the spotty track record, the pilot with limited, maybe double vision? Would that be the pilot you would choose? Well, unless you have a death wish, you're going to opt for option A. You're going to opt for the first pilot. In the same way, if you were to be given right now autonomy to choose, autonomy to choose the pilot for your own life, would you choose God? Would you choose yourself? Well, given our track record, given our limited vision, if we were piloting our own life, we would have crashed and burned a long time ago.

I don't know all the backstories in this room, but I know people well enough to know most of us wouldn't have lived past our teenage years if it was left up to us, if there was no God in Zion, if there was no God in Heaven. David knew that. The author of Psalm 139, he knew that. Man alive, he looked back at his past so often, and he declared regularly in the Psalms how often God had come through for him, even when he knew he had been wayward, a sheep prone to wander. David knew who he was. He knew he was a sheep, and he thanked God for his shepherd. He didn't want to be on autopilot. He didn't want to command all things. He knew how much better it was that God is in charge. Just like you and I, David was prone to doing some silly stuff, and he would pay the price when he did so. And so when he finally stopped and looked at things objectively, he concluded that God being in charge is a good thing. God being in charge is a good thing. And he wanted a God to lead him. He wanted a God to put a hedge around his steps, to lead him beside the still waters, to restore his soul. That's the conclusion you see throughout Psalm 139. David trusted in God's hands and God's plans.

Do you?

For some of us, the answer is sort of.

We trust in God just enough to want an insurance policy against hell and the like, and to want some sort of benevolent force sort of looking after us. But we don't necessarily trust his plans, especially when his plans seem to develop along a path that looks dark to us or that we would never choose for ourselves.In this moment, we might be okay with God's hands, but God's plans, we're not so sure about.

Whatever the case, rather than seeing God's hands and God's plans as a negative thing, God knew it was for his benefit. In Psalm 139, he not only declares it, but he praises God for it. He says, "I would not have it any other way." The wise man doesn't get upset or angry that God is there and that God is in charge. The wise man wouldn't want it any other way.

Conversely, the people who reject God's leading are the ones who think they can end up someplace better without Him. Is that us? Do we think we know better than God? Do we think we ought to be the pilot of our own destiny? If so, we're in for a lot of heartache. If so, we're in for a lot of disaster. As for David, as for myself, and I trust as for you, I know this much. I don't want my fate dictated by coincidence or by my own whims because I'm a silly man, as are we all. But instead, I want a providential decree by a good and sovereign God. I want a God on the throne who looks down and can and does actively intervene in my life, even if I don't understand it. And most of the time, I don't. But I still want Him there. I still want Him there. If God's hand was so careful in forming me in the womb before I knew right from wrong, let alone could choose it, if God's hand was so careful in forming me in the womb, why in the world would I want to reject or let go of that hand somewhere down the road? Why in the world should I ever want to release that hand later on? When I look at the care God has demonstrated when He fashions a finger, when He fashions a snowflake, how can I not trust Him to fashion tomorrow?

When I look at the care He had on that sonogram and the diligence that He showed in constructing and putting my loved one together in the womb, how can I not trust my loved one's future to Him?

This morning, if you're struggling to understand your limitations, be they physical or otherwise, perhaps your circumstances, you don't get why God's allowed certain things to come in your life, join the club. There's a sense in which we cannot fully understand all these things on this side of glory, but we can know this, that God has ordained them. God has ordained them. And when a good and a loving and all-powerful God ordains anything in this life, it'll ultimately be for the best, even if you can't see it in the here and now. In time, King David saw it all. On the side of glory he is now, he's seen it all, and he rejoiced. Even when he didn't know it all, he rejoiced. He invites us to do the same. Let me pray for us.