Filled to the Measure

I was reading a book recently by Dr. Deborah Newman entitled, "Comfortable in Your Own Skin". The book primarily focuses on exposing your past feelings and opinions about yourself from experiences in childhood and beyond, and how it shapes your view of who God made you to be. Mostly, her opinions seem to revolve primarily on Psalm139:13-16, in which David marvels at his personal worth in God's eyes.

"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

David prefaces this portion of the Psalm talking about how he cannot flee from the God who created him. God will not abandon the work he placed on earth, nor will he allow it to depart his sight, because he has ordained a plan for it, as he has for all of the things he created. 

I loved the quote Dr. Newman used from George MacDonald: "I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking."

Those who have struggled with depression can tell you that the last thing on earth they feel like is a "precious thing". They feel lost in darkness, where beauty and joy no longer reign; yet in David's simple Psalm, he cries out to a God in that same darkness. "Where can I go from your Spirit?" He asks, "Where can I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7)

 In speaking to the church in Ephesus, Paul remembers that limitless love. In Ephesians 3:17-19 he declares, "I pray that you [the believers in Ephesus], being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." He recognizes again the God that surpasses the darkness in order to take to his heart the created works, giving them fullness in his very self, in his own glory.

It is with adoration and relief that we, too, can look up and know we are worthy, that through the darkness we cannot "flee" from his presence, but that he has predestined us to be filled with all of the fullness of himself and the worth he has granted us as his created works.