Today from Bible teacher Chuck Swindoll. I can never go to a place and know God's not here, because He is there, no matter where. No matter how evil the setting may be, God knows exactly where you are. God is all about you. No matter how frightening the situation may be, God is right there. He's not frightened. He knows what will happen.
He's in charge. Traditionally, Thanksgiving is a time when we express our gratitude for the things God provides. It's common to thank God for His provision of food that sustains us, a home that shelters us, and a family that loves us. Well, today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll urges us to take our gratitude a step further.
In Psalm 139, David cites several facets of God's character that prompt His unrestrained worship. You see, when we truly understand the attributes of God, we're compelled to give Him praise. Chuck titled today's message, For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You.
Thank you, Father, for your attributes, the greatness of your character, the magnificence of your mercy, the glory of your grace, the significance of your plan, your knowledge of us, your presence with us. Thank you for holding us fast. Even when we would run, as we often have, you're there. We can't escape. We can't hide. We can't ever be in a place where you aren't, for you are everywhere at the same time and nowhere more than somewhere else. You are as much here as you are on the opposite part of this globe.
You are engaged in things as much in heaven as on earth, under the earth, around us, above us, beyond us. You know our past, even the things we would love to forget. You know them all, those things we have brought before you and confessed.
You have forgiven and removed them as far as East is from West. How good you are, knowing us so well, and yet you couldn't love us more. Thank you. On the season of the year, we thank you for being you, for there is no other like you, no other God, no other Lord, no other one to hold us fast. We rest in this, we rejoice in it, and this week we pause in a very special way to reflect on it and to do so solemnly, reverently, and gratefully. We worship you today with our voices, our silence, our words, our gifts. In the name of Jesus, our Savior, we pray. Everyone said, amen.
You're listening to Insight for Living. To search the scriptures with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. We're looking at Psalm 139. Chuck titled his message, For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You. David is thankful, it seems, for four things about the Lord.
Lord, I'm thankful you know everything about me. That's in verses 1 through 6. This is called, in the theological world, the omniscience of God. Omniscience, it means God knows everything.
He knows it all, past, present, future, everything. Verses 1 through 6 focus on his omniscience. When you get to verse 7, look now, I can never escape from your spirit, I can never get away from your presence, and that he named several conditions.
If I go to heaven, if I go to the grave, if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, what's he talking about? God's omnipresence. So he is everywhere at the same time. He is no more here in our church meeting than he is on the streets, or any street, of any place, in any village, or any city, here, or anywhere around the world. Any place or space in earth or heaven, under the earth, in the seas, around the earth, in the heavenlies, he is everywhere at the same time, and at all times. He neither slumbers nor sleeps.
You never awaken him. You will never ever be away from his presence. You cannot escape omnipresence. Now when we get to verse 13, oh this is a fabulous part, I'm saving this for next time, you made all the delicate inner parts of my body, you knit me together in my mother's womb.
Verses 13 through 17 take us, of all places, into the most intimate place, the womb of the mother, as the baby is being formed. You and you alone are the only you who will ever be made distinctly and specifically by God, and he has that ability to do so because he is, here we go, omnipotent. Omnipotent. All-powerful.
All-powerful. He's never frustrated. Never comes up against something he can't handle.
Never knows an obstacle. Never encounters something that is beyond him. Not only is he not surprised because he's omniscient, not only is he there because he's omnipresent, he's able to take care of whatever it is, should that be his will to take care of it then or later, because he is omnipotent. Omnipotent. Now when you get to this fourth section, he gets into the details of life, some of the things that have to do with the wicked, and the fact that the wicked go on, and God is righteous, and the Psalmist is all concerned that wickedness takes place, and he struggles with that, and he says they're your enemy, so don't I have a right to make them my enemies, and he realized that God is always righteous.
He's never wrong. At the end, David is so caught up in acknowledging his God, he says in verse 23, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and then he says at the end, and then lead me in the path of everlasting life, that I might live the kind of life you've planned for me, which is everlasting. Eternal is not only in length, but eternal is in quality. Lead me in a quality of life that is super normal, so unusual in a day when I'm surrounded by lies, and deceit, and wickedness, and the puzzling events of my time. Lead me in your way.
You got it? God is omniscient. God is omnipresent. God is omnipotent. God is omni-righteous.
Always at work, forever loving us. He could not love us more, even though he could not know us better. Look at these first six verses. Let's dig right in here.
I told you when I started, this is a sermon on theology, so without apology, let's think theologically. O Lord, you have examined my heart. The Hebrew word means to sift, to sift, as you would sift flour, as you would sift sand.
To sift, it even carries the idea of digging through the sand or the dirt, as an archaeologist would to find something precious, some vital discovery looking for. Lord, you dig me. You dig deeply in me. You sift through me.
He's describing the greatness of God's omniscience, and it's not an omniscience just about things. It's about me. You examine me. You get into me. So show me what you see as you examine me. You know everything about me. There's omniscience. He knows everything. Now, before you skirt away from that, all the things that are a part of your past that maybe no one else knows, completely open and known to God.
Completely. You know every single thing about me, private times, public times. Words said, words held back. Reason I said them, reason never stated. You know it all.
Look at what he says. You know my thoughts even from afar. You know the thoughts before I have them. You know where they come from.
Or even if I'm at a distance, it may mean that. You know those thoughts. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. I love the New American Standard Version rendering of that verse. You scrutinize my path and are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
Isn't that great? Scrutinize. You scrutinize my path.
You don't miss a thing. You know everything. Plutarch, one of the early biographers from the first century, wrote, man may not see thee do an impious deed, but God thy very inmost thoughts can read. You know my thoughts even before I say them. You go before me and follow me and place your hand of blessing on my head. I love that.
There's grace in that. You don't follow me to slap me in the face. You follow me to put your hand of blessing on my head. You love me. The one who knows us the best could not love us more.
What a marvelous thing. That's not true of everybody. Some people who know us really well, you don't want those people to say much because they know everything about you. I read some time ago about a trial in a small town in southern Mississippi. The local prosecuting attorney called as his first witness an elderly grandmother, tough-looking lady, faced like four miles of bad road. She sat down the witness stand and he approached her and said, Mrs. Jones, do you know me? She quickly responded, why yeah, I know you Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a little boy and frankly you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, you manipulate people.
When you do, you talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you don't have the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yeah, I know you Mr. Williams. I know you really well. Well the lawyer was just about to faint, didn't know what else to do, so he pawned across the room to the prosecuting attorney or to the defense attorney. He said, do you know the defense attorney?
She said, yeah I know Mr. Bradley. I've known him like you since he was a youngster. He's lazy, bigoted, had a serious drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anybody, so his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state of Mississippi.
Not to mention, he cheated on his wife with three different women and one of them was your wife. Yeah, I know Mr. Bradley. I know him. About that time the judge leaned over the desk and said, you two attorneys come up here real close. He leaned over the desk and said in a quiet voice, if either of you idiots ask her if she knows me, you're going to the gas chamber.
Some people who know us, you don't want them to be on a witness stand. God knows it all. The beautiful thing, he keeps it to himself. And everybody said, amen.
What a great relief, huh? It's called grace. It's called grace. The shameful things you should never have done and I should never have done, the dreadful things we should never have thought or participated in, he knew those thoughts.
He was right there. In fact, you go before me and you follow me and bless me. He adds, verse 6, I can't wrap my head around it. This is the way the Psalmist says it, such knowledge is too wonderful for me to understand. We would say today it blows my mind. It does.
It really does. I've never known anyone else like that. As well as my wife knows me, she knows me better than I know myself. She knows me better than anyone else.
But God knows me even better and loves me even more than she, and she loves me a lot. God understands us. He sees through us. We never pull the wool over his eyes. He doesn't have eyes. He is God. It is his nature to know. He doesn't discover.
He knows. Now the beautiful thing about this wonderful God of ours is he not only knows us fully and completely, understanding us, we can never break free from him. Oh, we can escape. We can try to get away.
Look at what it says in verse 7. I can never escape from your spirit. I can run, but I can't hide. I can never get away from your presence. I can never go to a place and know God's not here because he is there, no matter where. No matter how evil the setting may be, God knows exactly where you are. God is all about you. No matter how frightening the situation may be, God is right there. He's not frightened. He knows what will happen. He's in charge. Psalm 115 3, our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he's pleased to do.
So he's engaged. Now David begins the next line with several ifs. If I go all the way up to heaven, you.
I love the way that appears in the original. I go all the way to the presence and there is one great you. He's all about heaven.
Interesting, when I finished my life on this earth and my body is dropped in the grave, you. Not alone. We're never alone. He's everywhere at once in all places, no place more than any other.
And then he gets really interesting. If I take the wings of the dawn, what does that mean? Well, if I could travel the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, like that light coming across the horizon, if I could flash across the horizon and go to the remotest part of the sea, you. There's no island I could wake up on and not find God. There's no distant reef. There's no oasis.
There's no place so alone that it is without God. One of the books on my shelves is a book named The Explorers. I like the book for a number of reasons, but one especially is that they've done a lot of calculation in there and I've learned some things about dimensions and size regarding the earth, which is of course the focus of all explorers.
I found out these things that I think you might find interesting. They measured around the equator and it is 24,901.55 miles around. It's different by the way, polar dimension, but around the equator it's 24,901.55 miles. The earth's surface, okay, we're not the largest by any means among our planets in our galaxy, but it's a vast planet. The surface itself has been measured 196,800,000 square miles in the whole of our surface around the earth.
57,300,000 square miles are dry land and then that leaves 139,500,000 square miles are covered with water. Mind-boggling, but for a moment, if you were to travel incognito to the remotest island, leaving everyone who knows you in your past, leaving no forwarding address, saying nothing to no one, and you found yourself in the most remote of places, in the middle of the vast oceans, even there, you could speak with and know for sure that your Heavenly Father is right there. There's nowhere we can run on the surface of the earth to hide from God's presence. The psalmist said of God, I can never escape from your spirit. You're listening to the Bible teaching of Chuck Swindoll and this is Insight for Living.
In light of the holiday on Thursday, the entire week is devoted to a singular subject. Chuck titled his message, founded on Psalm 139, For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You. And to learn more about this ministry, please visit us online at InsightWorld.org. Before we hear a closing illustration from Chuck, we'll take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all those who support Insight for Living through prayer and generous gifts.
We couldn't possibly accomplish our mission without the partnership of friends like you. So thanks for standing with us in an all-out effort to carry God's message of grace to all 195 countries of the world. Chuck, you've often reminded us about the power of God's grace. And in our study of Matthew's gospel, you also showed us the antithesis of grace, and that's legalism.
Over and over again, the Pharisees and other religious extremists provided a living example of the damage caused by graceless living. Well, a few years ago, a fresh wind of God's grace swept through an unlikely setting. It happened in a courtroom near your home in Dallas, Texas. Those who saw the news clips would agree it was an amazing expression of grace.
Yes, it was, Dave. Let me summarize what happened. The defendant testified that after returning from her shift as a Dallas police officer, she mistakenly went to the wrong floor of her apartment building and she entered what she assumed was her place of residence. According to her testimony, she opened the door, saw the apartment's rightful resident, believed he was an intruder, and shot and killed him.
The jury later found her guilty of murder. Before she was ushered off in handcuffs, the victim's 18-year-old brother took the stand. Face to face with the woman who took his brother's life, this courageous young man told the former officer that he loved her, and he forgave her, and he didn't even want her to go to jail, that he wanted the best for her, that the best would be for her to give her life to Christ, and that God would forgive her if she went to him. When the young man finished his words, he asked the judge if he could hug his brother's killer. The judge said, yes.
The former officer ran into the young man's embrace with tears streaming down her face. Wow, I'll tell you that was a demonstration of grace. God's amazing grace is our overarching theme every day on Insight for Living. In fact, it's quite possible that God has used our daily program to extend his grace to you. And I know, as your Bible teacher, I have been a grace recipient as well.
Now it's time to respond. In these final days of the year, would you join me in helping one more soul unwrap God's priceless gift of grace? These sacred moments of discovery are orchestrated by God's Spirit and brought about through the generosity of people like you.
Our world is filled with broken-hearted people who are burdened by guilt and confusion and shame. I can't think of a better way to celebrate our Savior's birth than to give generously so others might hear about God's grace and run into his forgiving embrace. Thank you for being generous with your gift today.
Thanks, Chuck. And by responding today, you can be the one who delivers this gift of grace to a listener in need. Please jot down this contact information and get in touch today. It might be quickest to give online at insight.org slash donate.
That's insight.org slash donate. If you prefer, you can call us. If you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888.
Again, 1-800-772-8888. We look forward to hearing from you soon. And thank you for your generous support of Insight for Living Ministries. Join us when Chuck Swindoll continues to list the many reasons God deserves our gratitude.
That's Wednesday on Insight for Living. The preceding message, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You, Part 1, was copyrighted in 2020 and 2021. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2021 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
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