Have you ever seen the movie Interstellar? It’s one of the most powerful science fiction movies ever made, by Christopher Nolan, staring Matthew McConaughey as Cooper.
He was a pilot serving in Nasa, but later became a farmer after global changes on Earth that put humanity in danger of extinction. The story follows his life, as he is called into a heroic adventure to launch off into outer space, to try to save humanity, by finding a new home for the species on a new planet.
It would otherwise be impossible, any habitable planets would be much too far away for colonization. But at various points in the film, we see a mysterious force that guides Cooper forward, first by providing coordinates to lead him to Nasa, then by providing a wormhole for their space craft to travel through to find habitable worlds. We keep seeing in the film this mysterious hand reach out and make a way where there seemed to be no way.
If you’ve seen the film, it’s an adventure beyond imagining. And I’m telling you guys, if you live your life looking for the hand of God in the small things and the big things, your life will become a surprising and peculiar quest you never imagined was possible.
Many climb mountains, visit exotic cities, go on safaris and cruises, they jetset across the globe, but without the purpose of God leading this adventure, it's just consumerist pleasure seeking, there is no greater meaning to it. Do you long for something more?
We can’t do it without him. It’s impossible without Him. But when we allow Him to be our God, our life becomes a mysterious adventure. If, we let God lead us.
As it says in the word, “The Lord is my shepherd, I have all I need”
We can’t do it without him. It’s impossible without Him. But when we allow Him to be our God, our life becomes a mysterious adventure. If, we let God lead us.
As it says in the word, “The Lord is my shepherd, I have all I need”
-Psalm 23:1
We began this series 12 weeks ago, with that simple phrase. The healing journey we’ve gone on together has led through many ups and downs, highs and lows, it started with God leading us, and it ends now, with God continuing to lead us.
Our topic today, is the blessing of God’s presence. Our scripture today is Psalm 139.
I’ve found in my life that in any hurt or trauma, once it’s healed, the presence and power of God in my life grows stronger. My heart was hard, now it’s soft. And so I’m able to sense and respond to the presence of God in my life much more clearly.
The gift of having experienced real healing, is the presence of God on the other side of the journey. For many of you, you’ve experienced healing in this series. You’ve taken it seriously. You’ve reflected on past hurts. During the prayer times you’ve honestly sought God. And he’s answered. For some of us we’ll need to continue to seek healing.
This series has laid at each of our feet a simple spiritual toolkit, a toolkit labeled “How to find Healing.” I encourage you to continue to utilize this toolkit for your past hurts, and for future pains you may face. But we find the final piece of the puzzle today.
Let’s dive into our scripture today, verse 1-2:
“1 O Lord, you have examined my heart
and know everything about me.
“You know when I sit down or stand up.
You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.”
The NIV translates it: “you have searched my heart!” God has through this series, been searching (or examining) our hearts. Exposing hurts, and guiding us to lift them into the light, to be healed. He’s been softening areas, healing areas, exposing sins, teaching us repentance, and building faith.
God knows everything about us. God is closer than we think he is. Sometimes we think of God as far away, up in heaven, we look up and talk to Him. This is good, because the word of God tells us Jesus looked up to heaven when he prayed (John 17:1). But also understand that God is very very very close.
I remember I was going through a hard time, praying and fasting, and at the end of the fast, I was seeking a word from God. And at 4pm I ended the fast, and not a few minutes later I got a message from a salvationist women in London I’d never spoken to before. And she said she had a message from God for me. It was powerful, spoke directly into my situation. But in the message she included this simple statement, from God, which said, “I am near you, nearer more than your Carotid artery.”
God is very very close to us. He is literally living within you, as the Holy Spirit.
Next, verses 3-5: “You see me when I travel
and when I rest at home.
You know everything I do.
4 You know what I am going to say
even before I say it, Lord.
5 You go before me and follow me.
You place your hand of blessing on my head.”
The NASB renders verse 3 I think a bit more clearly, it says you scrutinize, or you winnow my path.”
Winnowing is the process in farming of separating the wheat from the chaff, the good product from the waste materials. God winnows our path through life, separating what is right from what is false or wrong in us. He clears away the useless, and he prunes the good branches, so that they will produce even more fruit.
Next it says God knows what we are going to say, before we even say it. God literally knows what we’ll do next, before we even do it.
God’s knowledge is infinite.
I love that next line, God goes ahead of us, and behind us. The NASB says he circles me in. God is so present and active in our lives that he literally goes into the future ahead of us to forge a path for us. He also follows behind us, as a rear-guard protecting us when we don’t even realize we’re being protected.
God places his hand of blessing on our head. In the context of the word of God, there are both curses and blessings. We often use the word blessing when talking about something good that happened. But a biblical blessing from God is a big deal. Isaac blessed Jacob, and it meant Jacob had authority, influence, and favor handed down from his father to him.
The blessing we seek today is for God to bless us with His presence... To sense his presence, to walk in His presence, to enjoy His presence.
We’ve made our hearts ready. He’s searched our hearts. He’s poured oil into our wounds. We’ve walked into the dark valley, of those hidden memories, those intense traumas, we’ve wept the tears, and we’ve faced our demons head on. We’ve faced sins, repented of evils done, and forgiven others those evils done against us. We’ve come out the other side, healed, hearts softened, mind’s cleansed, and now we seek God to lay his great blessing upon the victory, the blessing of a new level of His presence in our lives.
Our cups overflow. As it says in verse 6: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!”
His blessing, His presence is too wonderful for me to understand. Too perfect. Too good. Too righteous. So far beyond us. Yet here He is, with us, loving us, arms wrapped around us, protecting us, and simply, with us. In every way someone can be with us, God is with us.
Next, verses 7-8: “7 I can never escape from your Spirit!
I can never get away from your presence!
8 If I go up to heaven, you are there;
if I go down to the grave, you are there.”
Where could we go to escape from God’s Spirit? Could we go into some hidden place, a dark room, or a mountain top, or into the depths of the ocean and escape him? No. God is everywhere.
Even if we died, and went to heaven, God is there, if we went to the realm of the dead, God is Lord even of that place.
His love pursues us. His authority defines reality itself.
Next, verses 9-12:
9 If I ride the wings of the morning,
if I dwell by the farthest oceans,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
and your strength will support me.
11 I could ask the darkness to hide me
and the light around me to become night—
12 but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.
To you the night shines as bright as day.
Darkness and light are the same to you.”
Wherever we are, we can rely on the fact, that his hand will guide us, show us what to do next, and his strength will be our support. I rely on God’s strength constantly, when I’m weak, the Lord provides the strength I need.
But next it speaks of light and darkness. Could we hide from God in the darkness?
I remember one night, a night I’ll always remember, I was in my early twenties, my friend Greg and I had traveled to southern Wisconsin, and we were visiting our mutual friend Brad. And we stayed up all night that night in the basement, doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, and playing music, talking, and then the morning came, and the light begin to break into that dark basement. They began to cover the basement windows with tape, to try to block out the sun. I don’t know why exactly, but that image has always stayed with me.
We began this series 12 weeks ago, with that simple phrase. The healing journey we’ve gone on together has led through many ups and downs, highs and lows, it started with God leading us, and it ends now, with God continuing to lead us.
Our topic today, is the blessing of God’s presence. Our scripture today is Psalm 139.
I’ve found in my life that in any hurt or trauma, once it’s healed, the presence and power of God in my life grows stronger. My heart was hard, now it’s soft. And so I’m able to sense and respond to the presence of God in my life much more clearly.
The gift of having experienced real healing, is the presence of God on the other side of the journey. For many of you, you’ve experienced healing in this series. You’ve taken it seriously. You’ve reflected on past hurts. During the prayer times you’ve honestly sought God. And he’s answered. For some of us we’ll need to continue to seek healing.
This series has laid at each of our feet a simple spiritual toolkit, a toolkit labeled “How to find Healing.” I encourage you to continue to utilize this toolkit for your past hurts, and for future pains you may face. But we find the final piece of the puzzle today.
Let’s dive into our scripture today, verse 1-2:
“1 O Lord, you have examined my heart
and know everything about me.
“You know when I sit down or stand up.
You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.”
The NIV translates it: “you have searched my heart!” God has through this series, been searching (or examining) our hearts. Exposing hurts, and guiding us to lift them into the light, to be healed. He’s been softening areas, healing areas, exposing sins, teaching us repentance, and building faith.
God knows everything about us. God is closer than we think he is. Sometimes we think of God as far away, up in heaven, we look up and talk to Him. This is good, because the word of God tells us Jesus looked up to heaven when he prayed (John 17:1). But also understand that God is very very very close.
I remember I was going through a hard time, praying and fasting, and at the end of the fast, I was seeking a word from God. And at 4pm I ended the fast, and not a few minutes later I got a message from a salvationist women in London I’d never spoken to before. And she said she had a message from God for me. It was powerful, spoke directly into my situation. But in the message she included this simple statement, from God, which said, “I am near you, nearer more than your Carotid artery.”
God is very very close to us. He is literally living within you, as the Holy Spirit.
Next, verses 3-5: “You see me when I travel
and when I rest at home.
You know everything I do.
4 You know what I am going to say
even before I say it, Lord.
5 You go before me and follow me.
You place your hand of blessing on my head.”
The NASB renders verse 3 I think a bit more clearly, it says you scrutinize, or you winnow my path.”
Winnowing is the process in farming of separating the wheat from the chaff, the good product from the waste materials. God winnows our path through life, separating what is right from what is false or wrong in us. He clears away the useless, and he prunes the good branches, so that they will produce even more fruit.
Next it says God knows what we are going to say, before we even say it. God literally knows what we’ll do next, before we even do it.
God’s knowledge is infinite.
I love that next line, God goes ahead of us, and behind us. The NASB says he circles me in. God is so present and active in our lives that he literally goes into the future ahead of us to forge a path for us. He also follows behind us, as a rear-guard protecting us when we don’t even realize we’re being protected.
God places his hand of blessing on our head. In the context of the word of God, there are both curses and blessings. We often use the word blessing when talking about something good that happened. But a biblical blessing from God is a big deal. Isaac blessed Jacob, and it meant Jacob had authority, influence, and favor handed down from his father to him.
The blessing we seek today is for God to bless us with His presence... To sense his presence, to walk in His presence, to enjoy His presence.
We’ve made our hearts ready. He’s searched our hearts. He’s poured oil into our wounds. We’ve walked into the dark valley, of those hidden memories, those intense traumas, we’ve wept the tears, and we’ve faced our demons head on. We’ve faced sins, repented of evils done, and forgiven others those evils done against us. We’ve come out the other side, healed, hearts softened, mind’s cleansed, and now we seek God to lay his great blessing upon the victory, the blessing of a new level of His presence in our lives.
Our cups overflow. As it says in verse 6: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!”
His blessing, His presence is too wonderful for me to understand. Too perfect. Too good. Too righteous. So far beyond us. Yet here He is, with us, loving us, arms wrapped around us, protecting us, and simply, with us. In every way someone can be with us, God is with us.
Next, verses 7-8: “7 I can never escape from your Spirit!
I can never get away from your presence!
8 If I go up to heaven, you are there;
if I go down to the grave, you are there.”
Where could we go to escape from God’s Spirit? Could we go into some hidden place, a dark room, or a mountain top, or into the depths of the ocean and escape him? No. God is everywhere.
Even if we died, and went to heaven, God is there, if we went to the realm of the dead, God is Lord even of that place.
His love pursues us. His authority defines reality itself.
Next, verses 9-12:
9 If I ride the wings of the morning,
if I dwell by the farthest oceans,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
and your strength will support me.
11 I could ask the darkness to hide me
and the light around me to become night—
12 but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.
To you the night shines as bright as day.
Darkness and light are the same to you.”
Wherever we are, we can rely on the fact, that his hand will guide us, show us what to do next, and his strength will be our support. I rely on God’s strength constantly, when I’m weak, the Lord provides the strength I need.
But next it speaks of light and darkness. Could we hide from God in the darkness?
I remember one night, a night I’ll always remember, I was in my early twenties, my friend Greg and I had traveled to southern Wisconsin, and we were visiting our mutual friend Brad. And we stayed up all night that night in the basement, doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, and playing music, talking, and then the morning came, and the light begin to break into that dark basement. They began to cover the basement windows with tape, to try to block out the sun. I don’t know why exactly, but that image has always stayed with me.
If only the darkness could stay darkness around me! Let the darkness hide me from the face of the one I knew might really be there. In a deep dark corner of my mind, I knew the answer might really lie with Jesus. Yet my life did not match his standard, and I did not want to have to make the effort necessary to make it match.
We do things in secret as humans. In the darkness. We tell ourselves, God doesn’t see. We do things in front of the computer when no one is looking, on our phone in secret, when no one is home, and we assume, its safe, no one saw me. But God saw it all.
Our entire civilization has interpreted and re-interpreted everything from marriage, to entertainment, science, psychology, morality, philosophy, all of it re-interpreted to exclude the reality of God and His word. But in the end, they cannot dissolve God’s light, they rely on it even as they reject it.
The famous philosophy Voltaire said, “"One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker" 50 years after Voltaire had passed, his predictions had not come true, and the house he had lived in was in use by the Geneva bible society as a place to store and print bibles and Christian literature.
So if you have things you’re hiding from God, he already knows. What God asks, is that we stop hiding them, he wants us to bring them into the light, of our own choice. Because one day all things will be brought into the light by God himself, for judgment. Bring them into the light now, confess it to God, ask God to forgive it if it’s sin, ask God to heal it if it’s broken.
There are no separate categories of our lives that God isn’t allowed into, there is no division between our religious life and our personal life, it’s all one thing. It’s all before God’s eyes.
Judge yourself now, and bring those things into the light. As Ephesians 5:13 says, “ "But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light."
In verses 13-15 it says, “13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
15 You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.”
In all the endless thousands of years before you, all this human history took place, and then one day, through your parents, you began to exist. And God wove you together in your mother’s womb.
Lungs, kidneys, liver, pancreas, muscles, tendons, ligaments, all forming together in a magnificently complex series of pre-programmed functions written into your DNA.
If God can cause your mother’s womb, your DNA, and all those functions to weave together to form your birth, how much more can God be trusted to weave the strands of your life together to form a blessed and holy adventure?
All of this, from the intricate design of your body in the womb, to the intricate weaving of your life journey, all proves one thing about God:
He is love.
And when we see this incredible love of God in action, it causes us to trust Him.
But here’s how the journey works: We’re going through a rough reality on Earth, we’re walking through the curse of the fall.
So on our journey, God is training us.
It starts with love, and as we love God, and God loves on us, we learn to trust God.
Love and trust are deeply and intrinsically linked.
So then we learn, through love, to trust.
But what about when a difficult trial occurs in our lives? Or some traumatic event?
We remember God is love at the source. We’re going through a trial though, and its painful. Yet we do still sense God’s love for us through it. So we hold on to the two realities, of the fact of His love and the sense of His love, to continue to trust.
But as God weaves our journey together, he winnows our path as well.
So what happens is, we go through even tougher trials. And then we also don’t sense God’s love through it. He even feels distant and cold at times. Far off even.
It’s in those moments that we can’t sense his love, and we are in suffering, that all we have to hold on to is, the fact that we know God is love. And, during those hardest moments, if we remember God is love, we will trust, despite the distance and the trial.
Next verse 16: “You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.”
Not only did God form us in our womb, not only did he fashion our soul, not only does he weave our lives together through trials and joys, he also saw us before we were born.
This is a profound mystery, but some claim to have memories of before they were born. They were with God in heaven, about to be sent to Earth, into the womb of their mother. This of course can’t be proven. Whether you believe this or not is up to you, but the word of God does tell us, even before we were born, God saw us.
We get another interesting fact about our journeys on Earth, we’re told our lives are written in books in heaven. There is a book in heaven describing the events of your life and the choices you’ve made. It’s all recorded in heaven, every time you helped a homeless person, or prayed with a family member, or showed kindness to a waitress, or loved one of your children. Your book is in heaven, and will be opened on the day of judgment, and we as Christians will be able to say, every page where I sinned, it was washed away with the blood of Jesus, and that page would then be blank, and God would be able to search our book, and say, well, I only see the good things you did, because Jesus covered the bad. And we’ll be rewarded.
For those who did not receive and faithfully follow Jesus, they will be judged based on the sins recorded in their book in heaven. And the good won’t be able to make up for the bad. Only Jesus can forgive sins.
Verses 17-18 tells us: “17 How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!”
18 I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
Like the grains of sand on a seashore are the thoughts of God toward you. He is working on you in so many ways. And the best way to have the language and mindset to interact with those actions of God in your life is to know His word deeply, and to spend times in deep prayer, listening for His voice, and to spend time in heart felt worship. As you do those three things you’ll be engaged in the process God is doing in your life, able to Hear, and respond to His voice.
But I also want you to keep in mind the healing process that we went through together. It is vital to keep this process as a toolkit in your life. New traumas will come, new challenges will occur, and we can face them with the healing principles God has taught us in the psalms.
Let’s review the process God has taught us. The first message dealt with Psalm 23, seeking the restful healing God provides. 2nd, we talked about healing through prayer, Jesus will heal us through times of deep prayer. 3rd we talked about building faith, that by studying the evidence for God we can strengthen our faith. 4th we examined where suffering came from, how it came about through Adam and Eve’s fall. 5th, we talked about racing thoughts, and the tool of wrestling with God through these racing thoughts. 6th we talked about overcoming fear by allowing God to be our deepest foundation. 7th we talked about the dark night of the soul, that the rock bottom experiences actually bring us closer to God if we allow them to train us, 8th we talked about how we call our souls to hope in God after a dark time, 9th we talked about Joy coming after we’ve repented of sins, and found a clear conscience with God, 10th we talked about Gratitude, how we can choose gratitude by counting our blessings and rejecting negative thinking, 11th, we talked about humility, and how through God’s help, we can be freed from pride, remain humble, and lastly, today, we talked about the blessing of the presence of God, that after we’ve healed from trauma, and we’ve come out the other side cleansed, renewed, humbled and softened in our heart, we experience a deeper anointing of the presence of God, the greatest blessing imaginable.
Last portion, 18b: “And when I wake up, you are still with me!”
This is a great reminder. Going forward, life will continue to happen. We will face new challenges, and new trials, and new losses. We will also enjoy new blessings, new joys, and new adventures.
But the most wonderful thing about our walk with God is, than when we wake up tomorrow, the word tells us, “God you are still with me.”
He is there each day for us, ready to walk us through no matter what may come. He has future grace for us tomorrow. Even knowing life still happens, I can trust you God. I do trust you God.
I remember finishing writing this message, and thinking to myself, I’m missing something. There were all these elements of the message, healing, God’s presence in our lives, His overflowing love for us constant each day, difficulties we face and how God guides us through them, real trust that God develops in us, where we just trust him completely, how he weaves and winnows our path through this world, all God’s endless thoughts toward us, the records of our books in heaven, how God sees it all, and how he’s so much closer than we think.
And I thought to myself, all of this culminates into the heart of what it means for God to be the king of our lives, the one who loves us, and guides us, the one we trust through the hardest difficulties of life, it’s all the blessing we receive after we’ve accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts. And it’s active every single day we continue to follow Him. It’s the active blessing.
It brought to mind Numbers 6:24-26: Let this word be your prayer over you and your family: 24 “The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Prayer: Lord, today we thank you for healing us. Please continue to heal us of our deep heart wounds. God please bless us today with your presence in our lives, in every moment, may we sense, enjoy, and bask in your presence Father, as you bless us along this journey of life, in Jesus name, amen.
We do things in secret as humans. In the darkness. We tell ourselves, God doesn’t see. We do things in front of the computer when no one is looking, on our phone in secret, when no one is home, and we assume, its safe, no one saw me. But God saw it all.
Our entire civilization has interpreted and re-interpreted everything from marriage, to entertainment, science, psychology, morality, philosophy, all of it re-interpreted to exclude the reality of God and His word. But in the end, they cannot dissolve God’s light, they rely on it even as they reject it.
The famous philosophy Voltaire said, “"One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker" 50 years after Voltaire had passed, his predictions had not come true, and the house he had lived in was in use by the Geneva bible society as a place to store and print bibles and Christian literature.
So if you have things you’re hiding from God, he already knows. What God asks, is that we stop hiding them, he wants us to bring them into the light, of our own choice. Because one day all things will be brought into the light by God himself, for judgment. Bring them into the light now, confess it to God, ask God to forgive it if it’s sin, ask God to heal it if it’s broken.
There are no separate categories of our lives that God isn’t allowed into, there is no division between our religious life and our personal life, it’s all one thing. It’s all before God’s eyes.
Judge yourself now, and bring those things into the light. As Ephesians 5:13 says, “ "But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light."
In verses 13-15 it says, “13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
15 You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.”
In all the endless thousands of years before you, all this human history took place, and then one day, through your parents, you began to exist. And God wove you together in your mother’s womb.
Lungs, kidneys, liver, pancreas, muscles, tendons, ligaments, all forming together in a magnificently complex series of pre-programmed functions written into your DNA.
If God can cause your mother’s womb, your DNA, and all those functions to weave together to form your birth, how much more can God be trusted to weave the strands of your life together to form a blessed and holy adventure?
All of this, from the intricate design of your body in the womb, to the intricate weaving of your life journey, all proves one thing about God:
He is love.
And when we see this incredible love of God in action, it causes us to trust Him.
But here’s how the journey works: We’re going through a rough reality on Earth, we’re walking through the curse of the fall.
So on our journey, God is training us.
It starts with love, and as we love God, and God loves on us, we learn to trust God.
Love and trust are deeply and intrinsically linked.
So then we learn, through love, to trust.
But what about when a difficult trial occurs in our lives? Or some traumatic event?
We remember God is love at the source. We’re going through a trial though, and its painful. Yet we do still sense God’s love for us through it. So we hold on to the two realities, of the fact of His love and the sense of His love, to continue to trust.
But as God weaves our journey together, he winnows our path as well.
So what happens is, we go through even tougher trials. And then we also don’t sense God’s love through it. He even feels distant and cold at times. Far off even.
It’s in those moments that we can’t sense his love, and we are in suffering, that all we have to hold on to is, the fact that we know God is love. And, during those hardest moments, if we remember God is love, we will trust, despite the distance and the trial.
Next verse 16: “You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.”
Not only did God form us in our womb, not only did he fashion our soul, not only does he weave our lives together through trials and joys, he also saw us before we were born.
This is a profound mystery, but some claim to have memories of before they were born. They were with God in heaven, about to be sent to Earth, into the womb of their mother. This of course can’t be proven. Whether you believe this or not is up to you, but the word of God does tell us, even before we were born, God saw us.
We get another interesting fact about our journeys on Earth, we’re told our lives are written in books in heaven. There is a book in heaven describing the events of your life and the choices you’ve made. It’s all recorded in heaven, every time you helped a homeless person, or prayed with a family member, or showed kindness to a waitress, or loved one of your children. Your book is in heaven, and will be opened on the day of judgment, and we as Christians will be able to say, every page where I sinned, it was washed away with the blood of Jesus, and that page would then be blank, and God would be able to search our book, and say, well, I only see the good things you did, because Jesus covered the bad. And we’ll be rewarded.
For those who did not receive and faithfully follow Jesus, they will be judged based on the sins recorded in their book in heaven. And the good won’t be able to make up for the bad. Only Jesus can forgive sins.
Verses 17-18 tells us: “17 How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!”
18 I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
Like the grains of sand on a seashore are the thoughts of God toward you. He is working on you in so many ways. And the best way to have the language and mindset to interact with those actions of God in your life is to know His word deeply, and to spend times in deep prayer, listening for His voice, and to spend time in heart felt worship. As you do those three things you’ll be engaged in the process God is doing in your life, able to Hear, and respond to His voice.
But I also want you to keep in mind the healing process that we went through together. It is vital to keep this process as a toolkit in your life. New traumas will come, new challenges will occur, and we can face them with the healing principles God has taught us in the psalms.
Let’s review the process God has taught us. The first message dealt with Psalm 23, seeking the restful healing God provides. 2nd, we talked about healing through prayer, Jesus will heal us through times of deep prayer. 3rd we talked about building faith, that by studying the evidence for God we can strengthen our faith. 4th we examined where suffering came from, how it came about through Adam and Eve’s fall. 5th, we talked about racing thoughts, and the tool of wrestling with God through these racing thoughts. 6th we talked about overcoming fear by allowing God to be our deepest foundation. 7th we talked about the dark night of the soul, that the rock bottom experiences actually bring us closer to God if we allow them to train us, 8th we talked about how we call our souls to hope in God after a dark time, 9th we talked about Joy coming after we’ve repented of sins, and found a clear conscience with God, 10th we talked about Gratitude, how we can choose gratitude by counting our blessings and rejecting negative thinking, 11th, we talked about humility, and how through God’s help, we can be freed from pride, remain humble, and lastly, today, we talked about the blessing of the presence of God, that after we’ve healed from trauma, and we’ve come out the other side cleansed, renewed, humbled and softened in our heart, we experience a deeper anointing of the presence of God, the greatest blessing imaginable.
Last portion, 18b: “And when I wake up, you are still with me!”
This is a great reminder. Going forward, life will continue to happen. We will face new challenges, and new trials, and new losses. We will also enjoy new blessings, new joys, and new adventures.
But the most wonderful thing about our walk with God is, than when we wake up tomorrow, the word tells us, “God you are still with me.”
He is there each day for us, ready to walk us through no matter what may come. He has future grace for us tomorrow. Even knowing life still happens, I can trust you God. I do trust you God.
I remember finishing writing this message, and thinking to myself, I’m missing something. There were all these elements of the message, healing, God’s presence in our lives, His overflowing love for us constant each day, difficulties we face and how God guides us through them, real trust that God develops in us, where we just trust him completely, how he weaves and winnows our path through this world, all God’s endless thoughts toward us, the records of our books in heaven, how God sees it all, and how he’s so much closer than we think.
And I thought to myself, all of this culminates into the heart of what it means for God to be the king of our lives, the one who loves us, and guides us, the one we trust through the hardest difficulties of life, it’s all the blessing we receive after we’ve accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts. And it’s active every single day we continue to follow Him. It’s the active blessing.
It brought to mind Numbers 6:24-26: Let this word be your prayer over you and your family: 24 “The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Prayer: Lord, today we thank you for healing us. Please continue to heal us of our deep heart wounds. God please bless us today with your presence in our lives, in every moment, may we sense, enjoy, and bask in your presence Father, as you bless us along this journey of life, in Jesus name, amen.
