For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You! (Part Two), Part 2

When the script of our lives doesn't play out as we plan, it's difficult to maintain a heart of gratitude. In fact, when suffering comes, when we're short on cash, when our children make costly decisions outside our control, sometimes it's much easier to question God than give Him thanks. Well, today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll presents his fifth and final program in a brand-new miniseries devoted to the subject of gratitude, even when giving thanks is hard. Chuck titled this message, founded on Psalm 139, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You. How grateful we are, our Father, for the minutiae interests of your will and plan.

Right down to the very details of our lives, from conception to the end of our days, from the womb to the tomb. You are there. You are ever aware. You are touched with the feelings of our infirmities. You care about the things that make us anxious. You meet our needs. You remind us again and again that you are here, now, ever available, full of compassion, marked by mercy and always grace. Thank you for giving us what we don't deserve. Thank you for doing so in such a bountiful manner that we run out of ways to express our gratitude.

At the time of the year, we're especially aware of your provisions, and we need them. Give us the grace to endure, the strength to be sustained by you, to trust you, to lean on you. In the name of Jesus, 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. Chuck titled his message, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You. Truly, we're fearfully and wonderfully made, and it all begins within the womb. When you stop and realize that that speck of cells, so tiny, leads to all of that, no wonder David doesn't go on before verse 14. He has a burst of praise to God. Thank you, he says, thank you for making me so wonderfully complex. And then he goes back, says, You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. In our earliest days and hours, actually, of life, God is there shaping us, forming us, making us who we would become. He goes on and looks at life after birth. Did you notice in verse 16? Every day of my life was recorded in your book.

Every moment was laid out, your Bible reads ordained, good word there, before a single day had passed. He's intimately engaged in our, what my dad used to call our put together. He is determined because of our skeletal structure, our size, our height, and that gives your kids encouragement. Let's say you've got one who is six feet seven in middle school and she's a girl.

Guess what? She needs to know Psalm 139, 13 to 18. This is not a freak of nature.

She's exactly the height her God wanted her to be. There's a purpose. There's a reason. There's a difference.

And this is a great moment for me to add. Let's stop comparing. That's what I used to say to parents, and I still do on occasion when I speak to them and they'll listen to somebody my age. Don't compare report cards. It proves nothing except that you can read. It doesn't help any kid, especially the one who doesn't bring home a boring report card. My brother, who had an IQ, approaching genius, true.

I think it's 168, 172, some ridiculous number. And he would he would bring home the same letters, week after month after month. My dad would go, oh, look at that. I had variety. I offered a lot of letters. He didn't seem to value the letters that I offered. Why? Because he compared the two of us. My brother was interested in science and the things of science, and he's still brilliant. I love him dearly.

We no longer being compared. But it's hard for my folks. And then there's my sister. She knows my sister back here. My sister never liked to study that much. And so my dad paid my brother to be her tutor. The problem was she hated my brother. So when you hate your tutor, you don't learn very well.

Finally, I remember my brother brought back the money and said, Dad, here's the five dollars. She can't learn. She took.

No, she says, I won't learn because I hate you. That would be her response. Loving family. Delightful time. My brother would be in there playing Pat Rifske's minuet and Bach's old Vigetto on the piano.

My sister and I are in there doing dishes, singing You Are My Sunshine or whatever. Different. Different kids. When I got to high school, they thought I'd be as brilliant as my brother or as popular as my sister. And all I could do was stutter. I couldn't get my words out. And thanks to a wonderful high school teacher, I learned to speak.

How helpful was that? And Nick Neamey didn't even know the contribution he was making to my life. That's another subject. Three different kids born from the same womb, born in the same place. My dad used to brag, same bed on which you were conceived, you were born. My mother never liked it that he told people that, but he was proud of it. Little, little tiny garage apartment in El Campo, Texas.

Three kids. Made by God, planned by God to be used for his purposes. Every day of our lives recorded in his book. I never knew my sister would die before my brother or I.

My brother's older and I've not lived such a great life that I deserve to live longer. She's terrific, by the way. Don't get me started. She was a terrific athlete. She she was all city and volleyball and swimming and popular everywhere she went. So they expected me to be a little bit of Orville and a little bit of Lucy.

And I was none of either. Here I am taking algebra. And our teacher says, you're really going to use it.

Right. I've really used algebra a whole lot in my life. It's another subject. I'm not made to be a mathematician. My brother could do that stuff thinking about something else. He built his own radios. Unbelievable.

Not really. It's the way God made him. You see, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And look at verse 17. How precious are your thoughts about us? Oh, God, you really vote for all of us. Because you made all of us. There's no reason to doubt your importance or the reason for your being here, your significance. God made you. You're made by God. And it reads, I can't even count those thoughts.

They outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. Remarkable. Stop and think. You are the height you are because of God's plan in your life. You have the color of skin because of God's plan for you in your life. You have the color of hair.

Well, you used to. The color of hair that God wanted you to have. The color of eyes that God wants you to have. The type of personality. Interwoven within you are innate abilities. An intelligence capacity and level. Artistic gifts that others don't have and others even have more of. Some of you have athletic skills and you can just shine when you get in that field of athletics.

Others are not coordinated at all. Some have an inner determination and others are emotionally frail. And they're given to a much more delicate form of life or way of thinking.

It's the way we're made. How priceless are his thoughts? How numerous are his plans for us? How near and dear he remains to us. Realizing how thoroughly and beautifully we're made, David pauses and makes a final prayer.

Verse 23. Search me, O God. Now the one who makes us is certainly able to search. He knows every particle of our being. Search me, O God.

Know my heart. Now God doesn't search us so he can learn. He never learns anything. He's omniscient, remember? He searches us so that we can learn the condition of our hearts. He can reveal to us the truth. See, he's able to search under every rug of cover-up, every closet, every room of our house, every secret, every passing thought. He even knows our anxious thoughts. Search me, O God, and know my heart and test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out, literally the Hebrew says, any way of pain in me.

Isn't that an interesting way to put it? Anything that pains you in my life, show me. He does that. I've asked the Lord to do that in my life and there have been times that he's revealed things that had been there for some time and I had never realized it until I'd come to him and genuinely said, show me anything that brings you pain. Within a matter of minutes, it's like it's clear as the screen we look at.

It's as clear as the hands in front of us. And they lead me along a path of everlasting life. Help me, Heavenly Father, to shape my life according to your plan, which is always perfect. Now, I've saved something important to last, to the last.

Not only a fact but also a story, a true story. My message today is really politically incorrect because we live in a day when life really is not that valuable. One of the most unprotected and scariest places to be is the womb of a mother where a helpless child awaits birth to breathe and to carry on life that began nine months earlier. There are those who will take that life in the last term or even after birth, of all things.

But you see, Psalm 139 is so pro-life you can't see any other position that you could defend. How grateful we are that our mothers had us when they didn't have to have us. Years ago, a couple married in the Great Depression. Ten months after their wedding day, she gave birth to her first born. Thirteen months later, she gave birth to her second born.

The first one, barely a toddler, and along comes the second. She wasn't too strong and didn't do real well with small children. Her husband traveled quite a bit selling insurance and so he was on the road a lot and she was alone a lot. And the place where they lived was small and they didn't have much money. And adding a child only added to the stress of the Great Depression which must have been a terrible time. And then wouldn't you know it, before their fourth anniversary in January of that year, 1934, she's pregnant again. Abortion at that time was illegal but it wasn't impossible.

You could get one, there were physicians who would perform that but you just had to do so in hiding and you told no one. But she chose not to do that. Sickly, struggling, financially strapped, she and her husband decided we're Christians, we are to accept this even though this baby wasn't planned by us.

Obviously, he was by God. So in October of 1934, I was born because that is my family's story. The first two children were, shall we say, planned. But as my mother reminded me rather often, you were a mistake. She, I'm sure, meant that nicely but just didn't sound quite like you would hope. But I grew up realizing I was the mistake in the family.

But in God's book, all of my days were written exactly as he would have me live them. The same for my brother and the same for my sister. We were close, we sang trios together. We used to stand on the counter of Red Hummershacks Pharmacy and sing Hiled Right in the Fuhrer's Face.

It was a great trio. We sang for ice cream cones and played together and did all kinds of stuff together but we couldn't have been more different. All three of us engaged in ministry, my brother over 33 years, missionary in Argentina, my sister over 20 years with Women of Faith, and I've been involved in ministry for not quite 60 years. And here we are coming from a little financially strapped family in a little tiny garage apartment in El Campo, Texas, by the grace of God. When this is true in your own life, you realize God's sovereign plan is at work. He gets all the credit, all the glory, even in the life of a mistake. I kind of like being a mistake. I kind of think that's good.

That means they didn't plan real hard to have me. I sort of went, hi. And from then on, oh, the changes. Oh, the grace that brought salvation's plan. I speak to you today, though, it's not about me.

This is about you and what you need to hear. Some of you quite likely are right there. You may even be carrying a child you hadn't planned but God had planned. You maybe weren't ready for what it would bring, but that's part of his plan.

Having you not ready requires you to trust him like my mom and dad did when they had no way of knowing what the future held. It's also a great moment for you to give thanks for your precious mother who bore you and reared you and trained you in a day when parents really are sort of glossed over like necessary evils when in fact we are the secret of the next generation and the next and the next. May God use you to help young mothers and mothers-to-be to learn from what we have learned that God is at work even when we can't see the plan unfold. Oh, and by the way, since we're here together, it's a great moment for me to tell you that the Savior is available to each one of you.

Maybe you didn't know it. You may be a little like my physician, our physician who helped in the birth of our firstborn. You may just think there isn't a God and all you have to do is look at your hands and realize just from the wrist down you're a miracle what your hands can do and the eyes what they can see and the ears what they can hear. Your life is a gift from God. How great that you give it back to Him in faith and trust. Let's take care of that right now.

Bow with me, will you? Let's say you're just sitting alone in this big room and it's just you and your thoughts. Think back. Can you return to a time when you trusted in Christ?

I don't mean you could name the hour, the day, or the date. That's not important. The fact is you remember when you and Christ began to relate to one another. You believed in Him.

If you can't remember that that ever happened, it probably didn't. So this is a great moment to take care of that. Simple words and a prayer. Lord, thank you for making me. Thank you for my birth. Thank you for giving me my life. I now want to give it to you. I want to trust your Son as my Savior.

Just like my physician did all alone. I believe in Him now. I trust in Jesus. I take Him as my own. He will hear you and He will come to live within. He will forgive you of all those things in your past that bother you. As far as East is from West, He'll remove them from you. And He'll use you from this day on.

Trust Him now. Now to Him who is able to guard us from stumbling and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding great joy to the only wise God. Be glory and majesty forever and ever and ever and ever world without end. Everyone said Amen.

Amen. Our teacher, Chuck Swindoll, concluding a special five-part study founded on Psalm 139. He titled this brand-new miniseries For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You. And please stay with us because Chuck will return in just a moment with a closing comment here on Insight for Living. To learn more about this ministry, please visit us online at insightworld.org. You often hear me say it's not the purchase of products that sustains this nonprofit ministry. Instead, Insight for Living is made possible through the voluntary gifts of friends like you who value Chuck's teaching and want to share this program with others. So thanks for remembering the importance of your generous support. And with that in mind, we're asking you to join us in giving generously so others will hear the truth about the unconditional grace God offers to anyone who's willing to trust in Him. In fact, every dollar God prompts you to give will go directly toward delivering a fragrance of God's grace all across this country and even around the world.

Chuck? Dave, I have a personal theory about Christmas. It explains, at least to my satisfaction, the mystery of its magnetism. You see, for years, I've wondered what draws people into the yuletide mode. Sure, some of us get turned off in early October when we see all those fake trees popping up at the mall. But somehow we can't resist the spirit of the season once we find ourselves enveloped in the sights and the smells and the sounds of Christmas.

Now, why is that so? My theory, I think, explains it best. Christmas scratches the itch of grace deep within all of us. It provides an opportunity to do something tangible for someone else with no agenda for ever getting paid back.

It gives us a chance to counteract that selfish streak we all hate in ourselves. In the simplest of terms, Christmas prompts us to demonstrate grace. Our Lord knew exactly what he was talking about when he taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive. As another year comes to a close, I'm inviting you to scratch the grace itch by joining Cynthia and me in giving financially to Insight for Living Ministries. In this hostile, me-first world, people are craving just one gentle whiff of God's goodness and grace. And when we respond today, our simple act of generosity will be transformed into that irresistible sweet aroma of grace for someone we may never meet this side of eternity. Of this we can be sure we will never regret responding to the need. Please jot down our contact information and follow the Lord's prompting.

When you do that, you'll become an elegant bouquet, a sweet fragrance of God's grace, here at home and all around the world. Let's do this together, okay? Thanks so much. And here's how to respond to Chuck Swindoll. First, you can give us a call right now if you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888.

That's 1-800-772-8888. Or if you prefer, it may be quicker and more efficient to give online at insight.org slash donate. Your donation will be applied directly toward reaching others with the kind of grace-based Bible teaching you've come to expect from Insight for Living. So thanks for responding today. Again, to give generously online, go to insight.org slash donate. Join us again Monday when once again Chuck Swindoll opens the Bible to present Insight for Living. The preceding message, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You, Part 2, 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.