I knoq your touch, Lord!

Devotional for 4/22/11

“For You did form my inward parts;

You did knit me together in my mother’s womb”

Psalm 139:13

Amplified bible

If you are anything like me, there have been times in which you have thought about all of the things that have been allowed to “touch” your life. I am talking about the things that you would never have chosen, had you been given a choice. I am talking about the things that you could never have been prepared for, even if you had been aware of their coming.

Because we live in a fallen world, there are things all around us that “touch” us. Sin touches our lives, both our own sins and the sins of others. Sometimes the sins of others touch us before we are old enough to understand. Sometimes those sins touch us when we are older, but we still don’t understand why. At times those sins can leave us in a constant battle, always trying to overcome the ways in which they have affected us and our lives.

What I love about the above verse is that before anything else had ever been allowed to “touch” us, the Bible says that it was God Who touched us first. It says that He “formed us in our mother’s womb”. When I think about the word “form”, I think about a piece of clay which is being held in someone’s hands. I think about that piece of clay being carefully “molded” into shape.

It causes me to think that the one who is molding has a desired shape in mind, and is carefully working with the clay in order to form that shape. I imagine that he would have “formed” the clay into this shape in his mind first, and that he would then have had to approve of it. After that he would have set about the task of pouring himself wholeheartedly into the making of his creation. I know that he would do this lovingly, for that is what creators do. This is what our Creator did with each one of us.

How wonderful to think about God creating us in this way. It amazes me to think that He actually purposed us to be exactly the way that we are. There are so many thoughts that we could choose to examine here, but the one that I would like to stay with is this. Before anyone, or anything, else ever touched our lives, it was God Who touched us first.

This has to mean that we are acquainted with Him. Whether we like it or not, there is nothing that comes close enough to touch us that we do not become deeply acquainted with. Often times with this thought, we remember those things that have “touched” us in an undesirable way. There’s any number of things that could be named here. Death, abandonment, abuse… perhaps you would name other things, so I will let you fill in the blanks. But then, here it is clearly stated, that before anything else in our lives, we had first been touched by God. That thought is completely comforting and beautiful to me.

So often I have found myself going through life with a feeling of “searching” for something. I have come to understand that it was the touch of God in my life that I was searching for. No matter what else it was that I could find it had always left me empty inside. There was nothing that could ever truly satisfy that “empty” place inside of me. Sure, there were things that at the time, felt as if they could, but they never lasted. In fact, they inevitably caused a place of deeper emptiness for me to fill than the one with which I had started with.

I believe that God does everything with a purpose. I believe that He purposes to touch our lives first, before anything else does, because He desires for us to know what it is that is true. He knows that we will be born into this fallen world, and that there will be a vast amount of deception here. He wants us to know the difference between what is true and what is counterfeit. He actually gives us the “advantage”, if you will, by touching us first with truth, the truth of His love for us.

I  believe that it has always been God’s desire for us to choose to come back to Him. How is it that we could “come back” to someone whom we had never known to begin with? A lot of us have grown up thinking that we have never known God. I believe that the exact opposite is true. I believe that the truth is this. The truth is that we have always known Him, and He has always known us… long before we were ever born.

Written by Beverley A. Napier

on April 20, 2011