“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
What do you do before you go on a date with someone? Don’t you try to look for clues or for insight on who this person is before going out with them? You might check their Instagram account, or watch their TikTok videos to kinda look for any sort of information that might help decide what this person might be like in real life. After all, how can we have a meaningful conversation with someone if we don’t know what they are actually like?
When we start to consider making a new connection with God, we can’t exactly check out God’s Instagram profile, can we? But we can look for little things that help point us in the right direction. If you want to get to know a creator, you just need to look at what has been created. We can know what an artist is like by looking at the art they make. We can know the style of a composer by listening to their music. This means if we want to know what God is like, we can look at ourselves as part of God’s creation.
The Bible says you are made in the image of God. There is this verse in the Bible that says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” The writer is not only talking about himself, he is actually including you and me in that verse. We are all fearfully and wonderfully made, even if we don’t always feel like it.
When we begin to understand that we are uniquely, intricately, and intentionally designed by God, that changes us from the inside out. It helps us know him better and it begins to soften our hearts as we begin to learn about God’s heart for us. Your spirit reveals something about who God is. You can love because God is love. You have a sense of compassion because God is compassionate. You have an inbuilt moral compass because it reflects the kind of justice God wants to see in the world. You are made in the image of God. Yet if we are honest there is a problem with this idea. If we really are a reflection of God then the mirror of our lives often feels dirty, clouded, and broken. Our own selfishness, struggles, stresses, and failures mean that the personality of God fails to shine through us.
No matter how many times we update our profile photo or take our social media to the next level with perfectly posed photos and the right color schemes, we are just not good enough on our own. This is where Jesus comes in. Because in Jesus we start to see, as the verse says, that God’s works really are wonderful. God sent Jesus to show us what He was really like. If God took a selfie, it would look like Jesus. By looking to Jesus as the perfect reflection of who God is, we start to find the way to make our own image clear again. And if this really is true, then finding out who Jesus is, is definitely a conversation worth making time for.
Take a second and journal out some answers to these questions:
What does it take to really get to know a person?
Have you ever had someone know you better than you know yourself?
Who knows you best now?
What makes Psalm 139:14 difficult to accept?
Why do we sometimes fight this truth?