Fearfully and Wonderfully, Even You

I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. My soul knows that very well. (Psalm 139:14, WEB)

When a man has used his body to indulge the very thing he is trying to escape, he can come to see his body as an enemy, and himself as a botched piece of work. Every impulse feels like evidence that he was made wrong from the start, assembled with a flaw he can never repair. He starts to treat himself as damaged goods, something better thrown out than mended.

David, who knew his own failures well, saw himself differently, and he did not arrive there by ignoring his flaws. He writes, I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. Fearfully made means made with awe-inspiring care, put together by a God who was not careless with a single part of you.

Here is the distinction worth holding. Your desires have been bent and misdirected by sin, pulled toward things that wound you, but the capacity for desire itself was God's good idea, made to be aimed at what is worthy. You are not a mistake with a few working parts. You are a wonderful work of God who has been wounded and pulled off course, and those are very different diagnoses.

The first diagnosis says throw it away; the second says it can be healed. One writes you off; the other calls for restoration. That difference changes how you treat yourself in the fight, whether you approach your own heart as an enemy to punish or as something valuable that has been damaged and can be repaired. David says his soul knows this very well, as a settled conviction, not a fragile hope he has to keep talking himself into. Ask God today to help you see yourself the way he sees his own handiwork: not ruined, but wonderfully made and worth restoring, and thank him for the making, even the parts that ache.