TPW 28 Psalm 139 God's Loving Thoughts for His Sad and Broken Ones

Psalm 139 and the Love of God for the Broken

The broken spirit and the mourning and the hungering and thirsting for righteousness are not proof that you're lost. They are the very proofs that you've been found. And so rejoice in your mourning. Be happy that God would favor you to make you broken.

And let your confidence rest in Jesus as you kneel on the ground with the repentant prostitute to wash Jesus' nail-scarred feet with your tears. He will never send you away.

For the Protestant Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines.

We're in Weld Heights Presbyterian Church. Good Reformation services this past Sunday.

I was really encouraged.

I preached on the Reformation of Biblical Ecclesiology and talked about the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and what those marks historically mean and also the proper preaching of the Word and the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments and church discipline and really tried to hammer those points home.

I really think that those are vitally important for the rising generations. In fact, I may post that message here on the Protestant Witness. I think it's an important and timely one. I wanted to give y 'all a sermon I preached last year.

A number of people have contacted me and told me that this was really helpful to them. Occasionally, as I'm preaching through books of the Bible, we'll come across passages in my own daily regimen of Bible reading that really jump out at me and really speak to my heart and really touch me or convict me or a bit of both.

Psalm 139, verses 1 -18, is such an encouraging, glorious, wonderful psalm explaining the thoughts that God has towards His own, the love that God has towards His own children and how His thoughts towards them are innumerable.

They cannot be numbered and how deep that love really is. I think it's really—we're not really going to fully appreciate and understand the depths of the love of God for us until we're actually in heaven, although we certainly see it here.

The Scripture says in Romans 5 that God has demonstrated His own love for us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So while there was nothing here to love, there was no antecedent prompting of God's love whatsoever, the love of God has come to us in Jesus Christ and it has been demonstrated in His giving His life to pay the full penalty of our sins and to reconcile us perfectly to God and that we are blessed with that grace and that mercy.

By faith alone, it is not based upon or determined by our works, our response, our sanctification, our putting sin to death, our pursuit of holiness at all, nothing. It is entirely and only the blood and righteousness of Christ and because we're in Christ, the love of God is upon us and His thoughts are always with us and as that passage says, as you'll see, His thoughts towards us cannot be numbered.

They are so great. And yet so many Christians, I think, struggle. I have struggled for my entire Christian life to really have a sense, a deep and abiding sense that God loves me and I've always just thought I'm such a wretch and I fail so often and so regularly and the way that I am and there's still so much that's wrong with me.

How can God love me? Well, He only loves me because I'm in Jesus Christ, because I'm hidden in Christ. But that love is real because my sins are forgiven and I am accepted and accounted as righteous by the righteousness of Jesus Christ that is imputed to my account.

And so God's love is high above the heavens. It's so vast and so great that it really is unfathomable to us. And yet there's a passage, I think it's in Hebrews chapter 2, where Jesus, quoting from the Old Testament, speaks of appearing before God and says, Here am I and the children whom you have given me.

And so those that were entrusted to Christ by the Father before time began and He was commissioned to come into the world and to save them, He said in John 6, 38 and 39, I have come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of Him who sent me.

And this is the will of Him who sent me, that of all He has given me I will lose none. Jesus loved us to the end. The love of God is not something we need to think in abstractions about. It has been demonstrated in history.

When Jesus carried that cross and when He willingly laid down His life, it was because God loved us so much and chose us to be the special objects of His redeeming grace that we need not have any doubt that the love of God is absolutely unstoppable and that that love will carry us all the way into heavenly glory because the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is perfect and God has left nothing in our hands and we are the most blessed and the most happy people in all the universe because we have the love of the majestic and glorious Creator who spoke all this glorious beauty and the galaxies and the stars and the sun and all the creatures into existence and formed them by His hands.

God has troubled Himself even to redeem and save us and yet we feel broken and we feel a sense of mourning and sadness. And that's why I put that clip from this sermon in the introduction here. So often people feel so sinful and so broken and just think, you know, I just must be so lost and yet it's that sense of mourning over sin, that sadness over sin and that sense of being spiritually poor.

That's what Jesus pronounced in Matthew 5 to be blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That's the heart and soul of what it means to be a Christian.

You live your life in a state of perpetual brokenness and in constant and complete reliance upon the love of God and Jesus Christ, in constant and complete reliance upon His shed blood for the full forgiveness of your sins and His righteousness which is given to us as a free gift, imputed to our legal account before God as a free gift, such that God is able to love us and to adopt us into His family and He'll never disown us.

And He knows our frailty. He remembers that we are dust. He knows how easily taken in by sin that we are. That's why Jesus came and suffered the terror and horror of crucifixion and becoming the direct object of God's unrestrained wrath against our sins so that that unrestrained wrath would never come against us.

So the love of God is something that true Christians need not doubt. It has been demonstrated and this Psalm, Psalm 139, is a wonderful exposition of God's loving thoughts for His own and I hope that it blesses you today.

Let's pray for God's blessing on our time in His Word now, please. Heavenly Father, we are the most blessed and happy people in all the world because you sent Jesus into the world to seek and to save us while we were lost.

And you have given us your whole Word in our own language so that we can read and understand it and rejoice in what it says. Help us to understand it, that we might receive its truths with faith and love, lay them up in our hearts and practice them in our lives.

In Jesus' name, amen. Turn in your Bibles, please, taking a break from the book of Romans just for a Sunday. Psalm 139. Psalm 139. Psalm 139. And I'll be reading verses 1 through 18. Verses 1 through 18 of Psalm 139.

Psalm 139, verses 1 through 18. This is God's Word. For the chief musician, a Psalm of David. O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off.

You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before. You laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in the grave, behold, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me.

Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to you. For you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Marvelous are your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 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 of them.

How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. May God bless the reading of his infallible word.

There was once a man who had three sons. Two of those sons were godly, the other rebellious. The man had raised all three of them in the same way. Two of them responded well, the other did not. But his love for all three was exactly the same.

His rebellious son, for him, the father had a very soft heart. He saw so much potential in his son, but it was as yet unrealized. The more rebellious the son acted, the more heartbroken the man was. He at times got angry with his son, but never once considered disowning him.

Such a thought never crossed his mind. He was committed to loving his rebellious and wayward son all the days God gave him in this world. When the rebellious son was old enough, he decided to move away.

The father helped him load the moving truck, but his heart was heavy with the thought that he would miss his beloved rebellious son. After the truck was loaded completely, the father and the son sat on the ground near the garage door.

The father handed his rebellious son a wrapped present that was in the shape of a book. The rebellious son asked, what's this? The father said, it's a going away present, so you'll know how much I love you and how much I've thought about you.

The rebellious son shrugged his shoulders and as his father drove off down the road, the son carelessly threw the book-shaped present into a cardboard box marked books and quickly forgot about it by the time he arrived at his new home.

We'll come back to that at the end of this morning's message. If you'll look at Psalm 139, let's look at the first point I've given you there in your outline. The intimacy of God's knowledge of his own.

The intimacy of God's knowledge of his own. Verse 1. For the chief musician of Psalm of David, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off.

You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it.

Okay, stop there.

The God who created all things has perfect knowledge of us. This is both frightening and wonderful. That which we successfully hide from other people is laid open and naked to God. And that's perfectly.

While most professing Christians will happily affirm the omniscience of God, here we have David rejoicing that God's omniscience extends to every detail of his life. His thoughts, his motives, his paths, his lying down.

Even before he speaks words, God knows them all. God is acquainted with all of our ways. When we speak, before we say the words, He knows them all. I want to encourage you. When you study God, when you contemplate who He is, when you study the attributes of God, it is a good exercise to think of how those attributes apply personally to us.

God is all-powerful. Think about that. He's omnipotent. God is able to do all things, as long as it's not contrary to His nature. But He's omnipotent. His power is power over me. It's over my life, over my circumstances, over my salvation.

God is all-knowing. He knows me in every way. Everything about me. Everything that bothers me. Everything I'm afraid of. Everything I worry about. Everything that makes me happy. Everything that makes me sad.

Everything that makes me feel awkward. God has searched me and known me, as verse 1 says. Now, some people are very stoic in the way they present themselves to other people, and they're very hard to read because of that.

But they are open books to God. He knows everything about us. And David is rejoicing that God has searched me and known me. He knows all my ways. He knows everything I think. Everything that bothers me.

Everything that makes me happy.

All of it.

Nothing in creation can be hidden from God. He sees it all. God takes notice of our moods. He notices every step that we take.

Our thoughts.

Our doubts. Our fears. Our joys. Our sadness. And therefore, we can never say or think, and I want to encourage you, apply the omniscience to God to yourself. You can never say, no one understands me.

No one understands what I go through in my life. Not only does God understand you and what you're going through, but He understands you better than you do. And He always knows the good plan that is behind everything that happens to you.

Because when you were in your mother's womb, He was fashioning you exactly the way He wanted, and He was going to make every day of your life exactly what He wanted it to be. You are always understood.

You are always loved if you're a believer. Always hedged in by God. And His tender, strong, and loving hand is always right upon you. The path that you walk was designed by God, and you cannot run from it.

This all-encompassing and unfettered knowledge God has of us is, as the psalm writer says here, it's too wonderful for us. It's too wonderful for us to even comprehend it. God has more knowledge of us than we do.

I can't even judge myself as God does. I cannot understand myself even as well as He is able to. God's knowledge is high and exalted, perfect and without gaps. It is so far superior to our own that all David can say is, such knowledge is too wonderful for me, verse 6.

It is high, I cannot attain it. You know, many parents, as we watch our children grow up and we've watched them their whole lives, and we know these kids really well. We know them sometimes better than they seem to know themselves, and we can point out their tendencies, but none of us as parents knit together that child.

We didn't fashion its days. We didn't plan it all out the way God does. God's knowledge of and love for His children is beyond our capacity to understand it. Now look at verses 7 through 10, the intimacy of God's presence with His beloved ones.

We've seen God's knowledge of His own, but think about God's presence with His beloved ones. Look at verses 7 through 10. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there.

If I make my bed in the grave, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.

God is infinite, and He is also omnipresent. He is everywhere. There is nowhere you can go in the entire created cosmos where God is not there. That is an astonishing attribute for us to meditate upon.

We who are finite and limited in our spatial capacity, God doesn't share that attribute. It's an incommunicable attribute of God. His omnipresence. Where can I go from God's spirit? Where can I hide from Him?

Nowhere. What can I hide from Him in my life, or my thoughts, or in my heart? Nothing. I can't go from His presence. I can't have anything in my life that is a secret from God. God has no bounds to His being.

He is everywhere present. There is nowhere we can go to escape from God, no matter how much we run. Jeremiah 23 -24 God says, Can anyone hide himself in secret places so I shall not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth, says the Lord?

Remember the opening verse of the Word of God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God knows both realms, the heavens and the earth. He governs both realms and fills both of them.

Heaven and earth.

Because of this, God is everywhere and is always with me and knows everything about and including and especially me and you. When we are frustrated or weary of being somewhere or of being by someone, we can simply relocate ourselves to escape them or relocate ourselves to get away from someplace we don't like.

Such is always a possibility with regard to the finite people and the finite places that we experience, but such is never the case with the infinite and omnipresent God. There's nothing I can hide from Him and there's nowhere I can go that He is not present.

Where can we go from His Spirit? Where can we flee from His presence? This is why people, in order to live as if God doesn't exist, they must suppress the truth in unrighteousness because they can't escape it.

They can't go somewhere where God's not there. I want to go somewhere where God's not in my thoughts anymore. I want to go somewhere where I don't have to deal with Him. You can't go anywhere to get away from Him.

He fills heaven and earth. He created both and He fills them both. Do I not fill heaven and earth? That's why the non-believer has to suppress the truth of His existence. But for we who know Him, why would we want to?

We love God. I want His presence to fill my life and my mind. Sinners work very hard to hide the obvious and the pervasive presence of the Almighty from themselves, but His presence will never stop haunting us, never stop bubbling back up, no matter how much of our might that we dedicate to hiding from Him.

We can't successfully hide from God. And before He graciously makes us alive in Christ, we are like the men who murdered Stephen in the book of Acts. Acts 7 -54, after he preached the gospel, it says that they gnashed at him with their teeth and they cried out with a loud voice, stopped their ears and ran at him with one accord.

That's what people do to run from God. I can't get away from Him anywhere. So what do they do? Gnash their teeth, scream, and stick their fingers in their ears. Adults acting like little kids to get away from His presence.

Why do people run from God when His loving heart stands ready to embrace them? If only they will let go of the sin that is killing them and making their lives miserable. Why do people hide from the only source of happiness that they could ever truly know?

Why do we seek out death when the life and love of God's gracious heart is calling out to us to turn and to live? Why do people want to nibble at the table scraps with dogs when the triune God has planned the great supper from before the foundation of the world for His people?

What's our excuse?

Why run from Him? Why hide from Him? We can't run and we can't hide. There is nowhere else to go. Why do we run like a hamster on the wheel in its cage? That wheel never has an end. He never gets to the end of it.

Just like God's presence in the lives of every human being on earth. As one of His image bearers, His presence has no end. It doesn't matter how fast the hamster runs, He's still on the wheel. No matter where you go, God is still there.

No matter what's going on in my mind or my heart, God still knows it. No matter how hard I work to hide it,.

God sees it all.

Why do people close their eyes and stop their ears and gnash their teeth? You see, your heart, like Adam's and like Eve's, was fashioned by God for God. You who are weary and heavy laden, let go of that burden.

Let go of the sin that has you in the grip of death. Let go of the unending anxiety. Let go of all of it. Jesus calls out to take His easy yoke upon you. And you will see that He is gentle and you will find rest for your weary souls.

You see, Jesus takes the jagged, crooked, iron heavy yoke of sin off of us and puts it on Himself and wears it to the cross and destroys it. If you ascend into heaven, God is there. If you make your bed in the grave, God is there.

Take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea and even in that place the hand of God still leads us and His right hand still holds us.

I have a question for us,.

We who know the Lord. Why do we doubt God's love? Why do we doubt His promise? Why do we forget His presence? He has promised us His presence no matter what is happening to us, in us or around us. Why do we who know Christ and His saving work, why do we who know Him as prophet, priest and king, fear?

Why do we fear?

Why do we who are dressed in the spotless robe of Christ's righteousness fear? Why do we doubt our salvation? The Lord tells His redeemed people in Isaiah 43 .1 Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name.

You are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

Since you were precious in my sight, you have been honored and I have loved you. Look at verse 11 in Psalm 139. If I say, surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, verse 12, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day.

The darkness and the light are both alike to you. You see in the horizontal realm of our human to human experience, darkness or nighttime often favors the escape of criminals or of defeated armies. But the text here tells us that darkness is light to God.

The darkness and the light together are the same thing. He can always see everything. The creator of darkness and light arises superior to them both, even if one or the other favors the cause of trying to escape from men.

Darkness is as light to God. There is nowhere sinners can hide what they do from God. We may shut ourselves into rooms away from the sight of men into darkness, but God sees in the darkness. The darkness and the light are both alike to God.

I may say, as the songwriter says here hypothetically, surely the darkness shall fall on me, but the eyes of God know no hindrance as ours do. What a comfort to God's people and what a terror to the unrepentant workers of iniquity who say, surely God has not seen.

Surely God will not require an account of me. I can hide things from him. God doesn't see, God doesn't know. It says that in Psalm 10, but he does. Darkness and light are the same to him. Point number three this morning, the intimacy of God's fearful handiwork shown in us.

The fearfulness of God's, the intimacy of God's fearful handiwork shown in us.

Look at verse 13.

For you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother's womb. In those first moments of our existence, when we were so very fragile, when we were but a single cell that then divided into two and then to four and then to 16.

Every single person in this room, you didn't come from that cell. You were that cell. That was you. That was a person and God was overseeing it. He formed our inward parts. He covered us as in our mother's wombs.

There's a man who's some kind of graphical artist and studying the growth of unborn children in the womb made just a beautiful, a beautiful video graphic representation of how it all works. The guy's not a believer, but his video presentation, you can watch it on the internet.

It's just amazing. It's like a sped up process of how it all fits together, how everything divides. And there's all these layers and there's bone and then there's the veins and everything else. And the guy, as he's presenting the video to an audience, says it almost looks divine.

And of course it was. Look at verse 14. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well. No one can look at the human body and not tremble at the marvel of engineering and creative genius and design that it is.

Even the ancients marveled at the fearful wonder of the human body. Proverbs 20 verse 12. The hearing eye, the hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both. Many years ago when I was in college, there was a physical therapy student there at Ohio University who suddenly started showing up at a Tuesday night men's Bible study at our church, uninvited.

He started showing up. He'd never been to church. And we asked him why he started coming to church. After he came to know the Lord and was baptized, and he said this to us. He was a physical therapy student.

He said, when I took gross anatomy, we took apart the wrist of a cadaver. And when I saw the structure of the bones and the carpal tunnel, I knew that God had made it on this dead guy and that therefore he made mine too and that I needed to know who he was.

And I thought, isn't that amazing? We are fearfully and wonderfully made. You can't look at yourself in the mirror. You can't look at your hand, look at your eyes,.

Look at your ears,.

And look at the way that you are an integrated whole. You are the special handiwork of Jesus Christ. You are handmade by Jesus Christ. I used to watch my pupils open and close with the bright and dim switch in the bathroom.

And it just amazed me when I was younger, when I was 7, 8, 9 years old, that my eye would contract and dilate all by itself without me even moving anything or doing anything. And I asked my dad about it.

I remember asking him, why do our eyes do that? And he says that he told me that they do that for our protection. He said God designed your eye to contract so that not too much light will get in there and damage your eye.

I thought, what an example of God's love that is. You know, the whole day long, as you're walking around the world, your eye is doing that all day long, adjusting to the intensities of light so that your eye doesn't get hurt.

Why? The Lord is good to all and his tender mercies are over all his works.

Why do we doubt it? Why do we doubt the love of God?

You have an eye he designed to protect your eyeball from getting damaged by too much light. And it does it all day long. Have you ever thanked God that your iris contracts at the end of the day? If your eyes are generally healthy, your pupils do that all day long.

He knit your eyes together to do that. And in making them, he did good to you. And his tender mercies are manifested even in that wonder of wonders. If you've seen childbirth or held a newborn child, you know you're holding a miracle of God without a question, without a doubt.

It is fearful to look at the finished product of God's interuterine knitting, it says in this text. Knitting together, watching and forming that image of himself. And when you see those newborn little babies, you look carefully at them, look closely at them, and you see the perfection of their skin.

I look at myself in the mirror and look at my skin, it's all marked up and scarred up. But you see the brand new skin that God just got done mating.

It's just perfect. No flaws, no blemishes.

You're seeing a fearfully and wonderfully made creation of the Almighty. You see his goodness in it. Look at verses 15 and 16. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

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 of them. When you feel like there's no way God loves me, there's no way he's with me anymore, everything doesn't make any sense in my life, everything's falling apart, I don't understand what he's doing.

Remember, he was watching when you were created, when he was knitting you together. And every day that you would live in this world, and all of its events were designed by God, and he knows all of your thoughts, and he's always with you.

You can't go anywhere from his presence. His love is always surrounding you. My frame was not hidden from God. He was with me in the womb when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

God's eyes were watching my substance being yet unformed, and in your book they were all written. The days fashioned for me when as yet there were none of them. The skill that God uses to make a human being.

Is unimaginable.

Human beings could never do it. We could never ever create even one DNA molecule. And it wouldn't matter if we could, because we wouldn't have an enzyme that was coded to read the language of the DNA anyway.

We couldn't create even the simplest form of life with all of our knowledge and all of our skill that we've acquired through all the ages of time. And God creates the integrated whole human being in his image, and he says that is a testimony to what he has fearfully and wonderfully made.

You can't run from his presence. You are the handiwork of this being. Why do people run from the very God that created them and knit them together and oversaw their construction that he was doing in the womb?

The plan that God made for the lives of his children.

Is a perfect plan.

In the book of God, you've got to love that illustration from the psalm here, the book of God each day was written. The days he custom-made and fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them. God planned it all out.

Many of you who know Christ might be wondering, well, I sure wish you would have asked me before he planned X, Y, and Z to happen to me. But one thing that comes to us with Christian maturity more and more is knowledge that it is for our benefit that God does not give us everything that we want.

God does not give us everything that we want. I remember listening to the late Greg Bonson who was only 47 years old when he died, and he was a brilliant guy, just an incisive man, just a brilliant man.

The last conference he ever spoke at, and he got very emotional and very teary-eyed, and he said, I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed at how many times I have begged God to give me my health back. I don't want to die.

I want to live, and I've been called up short. God is not going to give me what I want. He's going to give me what I need, and he knows that this is what's best for me, and within a year he was gone. Delight your heart in God, and all the other things will come in his time.

Seek first his kingdom.

Walk with him first.

Keep the first thing first. Then all that perplexes you, and that giant question mark that's called your future will begin to make sense. Don't look at the future all the time. Don't look at the uncertainties.

Don't look at the question mark. What am I going to do? What am I going to be? What's life going to be all about? Seek first the kingdom of God. Get to know the God that knit you together and fashioned every day that you would live in this world.

Get to know him first, and he'll make all those things make sense later. You spend your days loving God, serving Christ, marveling at and delighting in who Jesus is and what he did to save you, and then all these things shall be added unto you.

Then everything else that doesn't make sense will begin to make sense. As Jesus said, for after all those other things, the Gentiles and the non-believers, they seek after all those things. Your heavenly father knows that you need a plan.

Your heavenly father knows you need something that's going to be a mission for your life or what kind of job you're going to have. He knows that you need those things. He will reveal it to you in time.