Monday

PSALM 139:1-12

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. Read the text until you can understand what it says. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. Vv1-6: How does the psalmist describe God’s intimate involvement in his life? How does he feel about it? How do you feel about it?  

3. Vv7-12: Is the psalmist complaining that he cannot escape God or is he grateful that no situation can obstruct God’s presence? Is God’s presence a comfort or a nuisance or even unwanted? How do you feel?

4. Why is God so intimately involved with you? Does your relationship with him reflect this intimacy?

5. “You are there”, “your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” Ultimately God is God and therefore his involvement will always be a source of wisdom, strength and power. Write down a prayer in response. 

Tuesday

PSALM 139:1-12

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. Read the passage. Review the answers/thoughts you wrote down yesterday. Is there anything that you need to respond to?

3. Review the past day. What concerns/joys/events occupy your heart?

4. Write down a prayer in response.

Wednesday

PSALM 139:13-18

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. Read the text until you can understand what it says. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down. 

2. “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” The psalmist revelled in the fact that God was the author of his being; he was first conceived in the creative imagination of God; fearfully and wonderfully made. Can you imagine that you are God’s creation. What do you think he has decided you to be like? 

3. “I praise you”, “your works are wonderful”, “How precious to me are your thoughts, God!” The psalmist praises God for who he (the psalmist) is. Would you respond likewise?

4. “when I awake, I am still with you.” The psalmist awakes to cold reality: the reality of his sinful self (as we shall see in subsequent verses). But the reality of his true destiny in God’s will remains in his heart, as God is still with him in this reality. God is real; the “fearfully and wonderfully made” person is also real, encapsulated in the eyes and heart and will of God, even though he is the sin-blighted person right now. Can you find inspiration and encouragement that though you are the sin-ridden person right now, yet there is also that person that you can be and will be, as God has imagined you before you were even born? Do you think you can ever become that person that was conceived in God’s mind?

5. Write down a prayer in response.

Thursday

PSALM 139:13-18

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. Read the passage. Review the answers/thoughts you wrote down yesterday. Is there anything that you need to respond to?

3. Review the past day. What concerns/joys/events occupy your heart?

4. Write down a prayer in response.

Friday

PSALM 139:19-24

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. Read the text until you can understand what it says. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. “If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!” The inward reality that the psalmist has been contemplating is met by the external reality of sin and evil. Sin has turned the beauty of God’s creation into a wasteland of corruption. (If you can, read Romans 8:18-21) Can you see the ugliness and pain that sin causes in and around you? 

3. “Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.” Do you share that same aversion to sin and evil?

4. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Lead me in the way everlasting. So the Psalmist turns to God and asks Him to rid him of the sin within. Would you want that for yourself too? 

5. Read the whole psalm over again (out loud if you can) and as you come to the last two verses, join the psalmist in his prayer to God.

Saturday

PSALM 139:19-24

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. Read the passage. Review the answers/thoughts you wrote down yesterday. Is there anything that you need to respond to?

3. Review the past day. What concerns/joys/events occupy your heart?

4. Write down a prayer in response.

Sunday

THE ETERNAL REALITY OF GOD’S WILL

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Those of us who are older experience the deterioration of body and mind. And even for those younger, you know that all our life we struggle: we struggle with studies, we struggle with relationships, we struggle with health issues, we struggle with who we are — life constantly reminds us that we are imperfect; the result of sin that has blighted all of creation. Our only reality is the reality of sin.

In the psalmist’s experience, knowing the perfect will of God in fashioning him gives him a deeper sense of the destructive nature of sin; the corruption and decay that it inflicts on our being, and the havoc it wreaks on our lives. Knowing who he should have been caused him to hate the sin that has blighted his life.

Sin has also blighted his relationship with God. What should be a wonderful and intimate relationship generates a love-hate tension as sin gets in the way.

Paul cries out “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” and the psalmist writes of his disgust of those who enable sin. 

Certainly we must abhor sin but I think much better that we keep our eye on our God, and that wonderful mind of his that has created us “fearfully and wonderfully”. In this life we are not perfect, because of sin. But our destiny is not here, it is in the eternal reality of God’s will.

1. Take time to be quiet, until you can focus on being in the presence of God. If you have any initial thoughts, write them down.

2. Review the answers/thoughts you wrote down in the past week. What conclusion can you draw from the passages of Scripture you have been considering? Is there anything that you need to respond to?

3. Read the short sharing above. Does it add anything to your conclusion? 

4. Review the past week. What concerns/joys/events occupy your heart?

5. Write down a prayer in response.