Fearfully & Wonderfully Made | Young Adults

Hey, I am Kyle, we've never met before. We're lead pastor at Crossroads. I've wanted to come hang out with you guys for a very, very long time. So I'm super, super excited, honored to be here. Like you heard earlier from Jordan, tonight we're starting a four week brand new series in young adults called Originals. And over these next four months, we're gonna dig into what it means to work and try to discover the holy original, holy, unique purpose and design that God has for you. Now to do that, we're actually gonna start at the very, very beginning of the Bible, like literally the very first book. And the reason is because it holds this powerful original blueprint for what human flourishing your life going the best it can, well, looks like. I'm actually gonna ask you to stand, if you would right now, as I read this scripture. And the reason is just to recognize something. These words are not ordinary words. For some of us in here, we believe, maybe we believe they're allegory, we believe they're literal fact, but there's something sacred about these words to us. And even if you're in this room and you don't believe, man, that's great, I'm so pumped that you're with us tonight. There's something we can recognize and appreciate and honor

about the transcendence of words that for millennia, millennia have shaped humanity's understanding of who we are and who God is. And so we stand to hear the word of God, Genesis 2, verse four. It says this is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up. For the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground. But streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living being. Let's pray. God, I bless you for your words. There is depth and there is mystery in these that I will never understand in my life, God. But I'm asking tonight you would do what only you can do, that you would send your Holy Spirit to unlock our ears, to open our eyes, to crack open our hearts, that you would blaze a path for us to believe, to have the courage to believe that we are who you say we are. Amen. Amen, if you haven't already, reach under your seat. Good, go ahead and take a seat, by the way, sit down. Reach under your seat and take out this little package

right here. So you're kinda wondering what this is the whole time. Open that up. If you can, it's a little bit tough. It's like super vacuum sealed. If you're wondering what it is, it is candy. Go ahead and take a bite of it. Just kidding, it's not candy, don't eat it. That would be very, it's probably highly toxic. This, this is clay, is what this is. It's like very stretchy clay, and it's so warm outside that it's kinda like, it's like a noodle now. But as we go through the rest of our experience, I want you to just keep this in your hand. For my friends like me, you have ADHD, that will not be a problem, you will not put it down. But keep it in your hands and just kinda squish it around. It's clay. Now the most common picture in the Bible that God gives for who He is in relation to creating us is that He is a potter, and you and I are like clay in His hands. Says this in Isaiah 64 verse eight, it says, "But now, O Lord, you are our Father. "We are the clay, and you are potter. "We are all the work of your hand." It's just another fancier way of saying what we just read in Genesis, Genesis 2.7, the Lord God formed a man from the dust. Now the Bible actually wasn't written in modern day English,

don't know if you knew that, wasn't written in that. It was written in ancient Hebrew. If you go back to the ancient Hebrew, there's something very interesting here. We call the first people Adam and Eve. Adam or Adam means a man. And ground or dirt is the word Adam-ah. And so literally what this says is that God formed the Adam from the dust of the Adam-ah. God formed the earth, laying from the substance of the earth itself, the clay of the earth. Now why would God do that? Let me think about this for a minute. God created in this moment, He created like everything else. Plants, stars, planets, the laws of physics, animals. and he blows the breath of life into the nostrils of the clay. Why would he do this? What did he need? Well the answer is Genesis 2.5. Why would God do that? Because it says there was no one to work the ground. Do you know that work is part of God's design for your life? It might be a bummer. I don't know what kind of summer job you've had or whatever, where you're working right now. At points in my life, I was a dishwasher at Red Robin. And if I heard this message then, that would have bummed me out. I don't mean your current job, but I mean work. Original work that God has specifically purposed for you to accomplish in your life specifically sculpted you to do. We started at the very beginning of the Bible. This isn't like a beginning of the Bible thing. This is actually like a whole Bible thing. If you go to the end of the Bible, to the New Testament, the letters that Paul writes, you'll see the same thing being said, Ephesians 2.10. It says for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus. Why? For good works. Which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. The author of that letter was a guy named Paul. He's the most influential person I believe in history. The reason if you're in this room and you know Jesus or even if you don't, the reason that we're in this room having this

conversation is because of what Paul did after Jesus to take the gospel, to take this idea we're talking about even tonight and to put it all over the known world. And Paul, in his very last letter at the end of his life, when he knows by the way his life is about to end. He says this in the letter itself. He says, I know I'm at the end but he writes this letter to a young adult in his 20s, a guy named Timothy and he says this, but you be watchful in all things. Indoor afflictions. Do the work of an evangelist fulfill your ministry. Now you might hear ministry like that Kyle, that's what people like you do and Jordan does or whatever. That's like what pastor people do, ministry stuff. No. That's not how the Bible defines it. What the Bible says is that you and I, all of us, have a ministry, that specific set of work that God has for you to accomplish. That's why he says fulfill your ministry, not a ministry or the ministry, your specific ministry. Do you know what that is? That's also worth asking the question. Why would Paul use his last letter to write to a 20-something about finishing his work? Isn't that getting ahead of himself, you know what I mean? Like why talk about the end to the guy at the beginning? The reason is because most people would never find their work and most people, even if they started to, even if they grabbed a spark of it, maybe that's you. You grabbed a spark of this thing of following Jesus. Maybe it happened through the collective nights or maybe it happened at church before, maybe it's going to happen for you tonight. You grab a spark of it and you get started, but most people who start don't actually finish. In that letter, Paul this eight people by name. Here they are. Phagellus, Hermogene, Hyminius, Philetus, Demus, Christians, Titus. He says, "All these guys left me." And then the eighth, he says, "Only Luke is with me." And now you know why no one's named Phagellus. It's because he sucks and he left, okay? That's why you're named Luke instead. You can thank Luke for that. Now the thing is one out of eight, not great, right? Not super amazing. And these were guys who were following Paul. Like Paul was pretty good at helping people understand their purpose and their design and lean into it. One out of eight was his batting average, apparently. You know, it's really not much better today. There was a recent study done around church workers and it found that 70% of church workers don't end well. They flame out. They lose their beliefs. They walk away. Something happens and they don't actually fulfill God's original intent and purpose in their life. A similar study done on people who grew up in Christian

households, grew up in and around the church. A survey of 3,000 people found that only 30% kept their faith through adulthood. This is a big deal. What's happening here? What's the dividing line? What was different about Luke? What's different about the few people who actually do manage to keep their faith? What is it? Well, I believe it comes down to one question. And the question is this, do you truly believe that And I want to emphasize an underlying, truly believe. I am actually deeply, deeply uninterested in you knowing the right answer to any of the face stuff on a test. Deeply, totally, absolutely uninterested. What I am interested in, and the purpose of my life, of my work, is to help people like you know, find, and follow the truth, to believe it for you. And since we go through this tonight, I don't want you thinking about the right answer. I don't want you thinking, oh, yeah, I know. I heard this power source before. I want you really genuinely, honestly, asking yourself, do I believe that I am who God says I am? Do I believe that I've been made well? Most people don't. And so they give up. They hit hard times. They get discouraged, they quit, they stop trying. Now, in the next three months of this series, we're going to lean way more into the work part. What's the work that I'm made for? Tonight, we're going to dig in on the U part, the original U. What does it mean to be made and made well? I know a lot about making stuff.

I love to make stuff, actually. I made this hammer, which is not what I set out to do with my life. I thought, when I was in high school, that I was going to be an oil painter. I was actually recruited to one of the best art high schools in the nation, and it was like the path paid for me as a freshman to my senior year. Go be an oil painter. Thankfully, my dad loved me enough. He was very supportive, by the way. He was like, hey, if you want to go to art school and be an oil painter, Kyle, totally cool. And he meant it. He really did, and I knew that. But he came to me one day, and he was like, Kyle, I just have a couple of questions for you. Do you think someday you'll want a house? I was like, yeah, I do. He was like, OK. If you check what oil painting pays, like, nah, it's not great. Another question. Do you think someday you'll want a family? I was like, yeah, probably. He's like, do you think you'd like to feed them food? I do think that. And so instead, I went to design school, and I became a designer. And in design school, I learned to make stuff. And even though I'm a pastor now, my hobby, my passion,

the thing that I love to do is to make stuff. Furniture and tables and all kinds of stuff. And I made this hammer right here. It's actually a mallet. And the mallet, this purpose of this mallet is to hit a chisel into wood so I can carve mortise and tenons and do scroll work and all kinds of awesome stuff. Now, I want you to imagine for a minute, though, OK? Imagine this mallet-- it's not alive. But imagine I breathe the breath of life into it. I sculpt it like God did from the dust of the earth. I make this mallet, which I actually did. It was a log in my yard. So I kind of did that part. And then I breathed the breath of life. And it gains consciousness. And the moment it gains consciousness, the thing about this mallet, it doesn't know it's a mallet. Doesn't know it's a mallet. So the mallet looks around. In the mallet, in the workshop, it sees a saw. And that saw looks awesome. It's cutting stuff. Saw dust is flying everywhere. It's just doing work. It's like, that's a-- I'm a saw, too. And it tries a saw. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. The saw sees this, OK?

Thankfully. Saw sees-- the saw goes, hey, you're not a saw. I think you're a screwdriver. I think you're a screwdriver. Because it's awesome, OK? Looks at the screwdriver. Screwdriver's like turning bolts looks amazing. So it goes over, tries to grab a bolt and turn it. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. The screwdriver looks at the mallet and it goes, you're not a saw. You're not a screwdriver. I don't know what you are. You're like an accident. You're like a mess. Friends, this is basically us. See, after that moment in Genesis where God says, I need you for this reason. I purposed you. I designed you. I created you for good work. Humanity basically went, no thanks. Walked away from the plant. And because of that, you and I, when we're born, we're not waking up knowing who we are and what we're made for. Like Jordan said, it's actually a complicated quest to figure out who am I. What am I made for? And the problem is that you and I can be just like this mallet.

We look around at somebody else who has a gift set that we like, who has a skill set that seems interesting. And we're like, oh, that's me. And we jump in and we try it. It doesn't work. And we look at somebody else. Oh, I'm not that. Maybe I'm making this over here. And we try that and it doesn't work. And at some point, we start to wonder, maybe I'm not a masterpiece. Maybe I'm just a mess. I'm just a mess. But to be clear, scripture says, we were made by God. I believe, made well by God on purpose, for a purpose. But it's hard to believe. I first got my burn for this. And when you work for a church, no one knows what you do when you're not doing like church, like this. You know what I mean? Like, what do you think I do on a Tuesday? You guys have no idea, right? People are like, do you practice baptizing? No. I probably should. I drop people sometimes, okay? But what do you do? We do like meetings and you know, plan stuff and all that. And we also do one thing that probably doesn't happen at other workplaces.

We actually pray together every morning, 30 minutes. And in this one day, I went to prayer and my friend Josh Sir Camp was leading prayer. Josh is amazing. And he said, today we're gonna do gratitude. And he said, this is gonna be challenging and uncomfortable because I want you to be grateful for some way that God has made you. What are you grateful for about how God has made you? And he read this verse from Psalm 139. It says, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. He goes, okay, let's do it. Out loud, go. Somebody say, what do you thankful for? How God made you go? And then pray, thank God for it. Praise His name for it. And I watch for 30 minutes as my teammates who've given their life, by the way, who've given their work, by the way, to try to get more people to understand this good news of how God sees me and how I'm made. I watch for 30 minutes as they struggled person after person to say something out loud about how God made them that they were thankful for. The ones who were courageous enough to say anything, they all started with the same caveat. They were like, you know, it's a lot easier to think about things about me I don't like.

Or they'd say like, it's really, awkward to say because I just, I don't even know if this is right. You know, and then they'd say something, they'd say something. The fact is it is hard and it broke my heart. It broke my heart. So I have a lot of empathy for this. I know it can be actually, if you're really honest, difficult to believe that God actually made you well. But I'm telling you, in my life, this is the thing that has given me the confidence in the courage to pursue the work that God has for me. And if you do not reconcile this belief, if you do not come in to full belief, you will be limited in what the work God has for you, be limited in your ability to actually see it through. What about you? Would it be hard for you right now? If I said, hey, why don't you turn to the person next to you and just say something that you're grateful for about you that you think is just awesome and then pray a prayer thanks to God. You'd be like, I am not doing that. No way. 'Cause it's awkward, it's hard to believe. But to get to a new place, we're gonna stick with that verse. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. There are three things you need to believe. Number one, you need to believe you are not an accident,

you were made really and truly. There are many people in the world who they want you to believe, you and I to believe that we are a cosmic accident. There was like a pool of goo and then some lightning randomly struck the goo and then the goo like it. They're gonna make a person, it grew legs like this and another leg and then that became you. I promise they went to art school, we didn't do clay. So that's why this is not so good. That's what they think, this is you. You're an accident. And what I find very interesting is the same people who will look at me, call me crazy because I believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, themselves believe in the virgin birth of the entire universe. No mother, no father, no creator. How could this be? I don't wanna be very clear too. I don't mean that as a demeaning thing. I don't mean to disrespect somebody's belief, just my honest opinion and there are, there are some really positive upsides to believing you're an accident. It's why some people will trend in this direction. And this is what I see happening in your generation, by the way, you are a generation of extremes. You are either going to go to the cynical side, the checkout of life side or you're gonna go to the on fire side for God.

There's no middle ground. It is disappearing, it is disappearing. So this question comes, what do I think about how I was made? Now, the upside, by the way of this belief, is if you think you're an accident, you don't have to do anything. There's no responsibility. You don't have to have hard conversations. You don't have to seek character growth. You don't have to do any of that stuff. Why? Because downside, there is no purpose and there is no meaning. It's nothing, it's just a mess. The whole thing, the whole universe, the whole world, your whole life. That is the bitter downside. Twelve years ago, there was a book that was espousing this concept. And it was really cleverly written. It was some really interesting stuff inside of it. It's a book called Sapiens, 12 years ago. You guys didn't read it 'cause you were like nine and your parents were good parents and they decided not to bum you out with the book. So I'm gonna read you a quote from it. You've never heard this before. It says this, "In itself the universe "is only a meaningless hodgepodge of atoms.

"Nothing is beautiful or sacred. "Any meaning that people ascribe to their lives? "It's just a delusion." I didn't read that book or read that quote and think like, oh man, how could he say that? I'm like, actually thank you for saying it. This is an intellectually honest look at the ends of the belief that you are an accident, you are a mess. It is deeply dissatisfying. It is deeply riddled with anxiety, which is this is why you and I, if we have this belief in Jesus, but we continue to carry around some sense that I am a mess, this part of it will infect us. This anxiety, this fear, this feeling that I'm actually not enough. And that's all just a chant. That will infect us and it will eventually take us down. I just wonder, have you ever believed that you are a mess, that you're an accident? Have you believed that? Some of us, I know we feel like that, we feel like there's no purpose, there's no design, no idea why we're here, we feel deeply unwanted, deeply unvalued, deeply unloved. And to us, God comes along and he says, "You are not a mess, I made you." Not hastily, not sloppily. I think some of us feel like,

well yeah, God made me, he was shaping me one day. And I think he was going great and then he dropped me and I got a dent. God was like, all right, we're gonna put that one on the dent shelf and then make a different Emma. I'm gonna go back back. God's like, no, it's not what I did. I've made you, I've shaped you intentionally. Look how scripture says that God made you. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Fearfully doesn't mean scary or bad, it means worthy of awe and reverence and wonderful means distinct, unique. God's saying, I didn't make stuff like Costco. I didn't make a 12 pack of Emmas and you're one of a dozen. That's not what he does, there's nine Eric's and they're all the same, no. You are wholly original and his purpose for you is the same. And there's a time in your life, not too long ago when you actually believe this. You believe that you were fearfully and wonderfully made. You thought this of yourself. It was when you were five years old. I have never met a five year old who thought they were average. Have you? You know how high can you jump? Ah, average amount. No, they're all like, watch this.

Oh my God, ah, you know how fast are you? Oh, I'm so fast. When you're five, like you just, right, you're like, I'm amazing and then life sets in, the stuff happens. You look at somebody else doing the thing and you can't do the thing and you start to believe something different. I wanna know what you wanted to be when you grow up. What was that thing? Remember back, what did you dress up for most of Halloween or were you thinking about the pictures that your parents have of you? What are the pictures of you dressed up as? Whatever that is, I want you to sculpt it right now. Take your clay and make something. We're not gonna play mess or masterpiece with your sculpture. Don't worry. Doesn't have to be good. You saw my human being earlier, okay? Maybe you dressed up as Superman. Just make a cape. Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut. Make a little spaceship. Maybe you were always dressing up as a princess. Make yourself a little tiara, a little crown. What did you think? What did you want to be? What did you dream of? Make that thing.

Me, I wanted to be Superman. I thought I could fly. Tried jumping off a chair one time. Didn't work, didn't fly. Hit the ground pretty hard. I'd be Superman. Strong, fast, come to the rescue. And then life started. I remember when I was eight years old, I played soccer. And when I grew up, And in the fall, all the leaves would come down and they would pile on the ground. And after a few rains with a thing that happened with the leaves is they would get moldy. And when I would run in the soccer field, that mold would affect my lungs, because I learned I had something called asthma. That made me slow, not like Superman. All the other kids would run and they'd get the ball. I'd be literally on the sidelines, struggling to breathe. Sometimes I'd have to be taken home and hooked up to a breathing machine or given a steroid injection, just so I could continue to breathe. Ah, I'm not Superman, I guess. I remember being about 12 years old and this thing started for all of my friends. It's called puberty. And in puberty, apparently you grow. Didn't happen to me,

but that's what happens for most people. All my friends is shot up. I did not, still haven't. Peak of my life, I was five, seven. I don't think I am anymore. Getting to high school. And I get called on sometimes by teachers. Terrified to get called on. Hate getting called on. Turn bright red to get it called on. Why? Because I didn't know what they were talking about. Because I was absent-minded, because I was daydreaming, because I was thinking of something completely different, I forgot I was in math class. All of a sudden, my math teacher's talking and she's looking at me and calling on me. And I'm like, ah, I learned to have something called ADHD. Not Superman. In your life, you have stories, you have moments. They're not mine, they're not my moment. But they're moments you learned, you're not the thing you're holding in your hand. I'm not a princess. I'm not the one that everybody desires. I'm the one that everybody looks at. I'm not the hero to the rescue. I'm not the smart person, I'm not the wise person. We have these moments that tell us that we're not. We start to believe we're somebody different.

Now we're just not enough. We're too big, we're too plain, we're too quirky, we're too slow, we're not smart enough, we're not pretty enough, we're just not enough. Now, what you and I do when that happens is we don't tend to sit still. Instead, we realize, okay, we're a lot, why don't you take the thing to squish it in your hand? Just, I am not the thing, right? I'm not a mess, or I'm not Superman, I'm a mess. That's what I am. But we're not content with this. And so what we do is we start to reform ourselves. Okay, well, I guess I can't be the, I guess I can't be the fast one, or this. So maybe I can be the funny one. Ooh, it's all a joke, you make people laugh. Well, that was fun. We start to push the limits to get more laughs, right? And what happens for us is we started to sculpt little parts of us, we start to obsess. Sometimes it's over our bodies. Sometimes we do things to make ourselves look a certain way that compromise, that are unhealthy for us. We make choices to fit in with a certain crowd because then we'll be accepted. We just round the corners of the things that we know, and we end up trying to reform ourselves in it does not work. You know, when we do the one who made us,

he's hurt by that. He's insulted by that. Why? Because he made you well. Says this in Isaiah 29, 16. It says, "You turn things upside down. Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? And the thing made should say if it's master, he didn't make me. Or the thing formed of him before me. He has no understanding. God didn't know what he was doing. God messed up. I must have been on the day where God was half asleep as he was making people. No, God says, no, I did a good job. I did a good job. I have made you fearfully and wonderfully made. He is the master creator. What do you call an average Michelangelo sculpture? A masterpiece. What do you call an average Leonardo da Vinci painting? A masterpiece. What do you call an average Frank Lloyd Wright house? A masterpiece, why? Because a master creator made them. That's why. You're a masterpiece because the master creator of the universe himself scooped you out of the day. looking at before one of your days came to be. God had all of them written down in a book. Before a word is on your tongue, he already knows it. He plans you and he's

purposed you. You're a masterpiece. This is the second thing you have to believe. You believe you are a masterpiece. Ephesians 2-10, different translation says, "For we are God's masterpiece. He created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago." You're a masterpiece. Now, particularly for those of us who grew up in religious households or in churches, this can be very difficult for us to actually grasp. This can be very, very difficult. It feels like I'm getting too high on myself. I get too prideful to think that well of me. I can't possibly. I don't want to get too high on myself. I don't mean too high and mighty. I don't mean too prideful. Well, do you know what's high and mighty? Thinking you know more than God. Do you know what's prideful? Disagreeing with whatever God says about whatever he says it about, because he's God and you're not. Humility is to agree with him about what he says. I'll just say it this way. If you wear a low opinion of yourself as a religious merit badge, get a new religion. That's not Jesus. There's a scene in John chapter 4 in my favorite scenes in the entire Bible. Jesus goes to a well because, guess why? He's thirsty. Want some water? That's why. Trick question. You thought there was something more. Nothing more. He just wanted some water. It goes to the well. And this woman walks up to the well to get water. And Jesus, because he's God, he knows everything about her. He knows that she's been married and divorced five times. And she's with another guy. She's not married to him yet. And Jesus talks to this woman. This is a woman, by the way, who everybody else walks past. Everybody else looks at and goes, oh, there she is. There's the mess. She made a wreck of her life. She is not a masterpiece. She is just a mess. And Jesus sees her despite the way she's tried to reform herself. I'm not good enough. I'll make myself more desirable. I'll get another relationship. This one's really going to do it. This is the thing that's going to make me happy. She had reformed herself. She had changed herself. She had deformed herself. And yet Jesus walks by and he didn't condemn her. He looks her in the eyes and he sees his masterpiece still. And he says, hey, you look like you need a drink. She goes, yeah, it's good news for you. I'm living water. I am everything you need. I'm telling you, friend, he says the same thing to you, the same thing. I don't know when you started to believe that you weren't a masterpiece. I don't know where you picked up the idea that you are less than, that everybody else is good, but you're not. I don't know where you picked it up. That's not what Jesus says about you. It's not. He says you're a masterpiece. You know how I know for sure? He signed his name on you. It says this in 2 Corinthians 121. It says,

now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what's to come. He stamped you with this seal of ownership. He's like, this is mine. I made it and I think it's awesome. You're like, seal of ownership. I'd say he signed his name on you. You're right. Here's a different Bible for us. More direct, Revelation 22, 4. They will see his face in his name. God's name will be on their foreheads. God goes, there's a day coming. We're all going to have face tats and it's my name because I made you. And if you ever look in a mirror, I want you to see without a shadow of a doubt, it was me. So you know you are a masterpiece and that can be hard for us to believe, especially when you're a young adult. I think one of the biggest lies that young adults believe is that I should be further by now, right? Like I should have it figured out by now. I should have my major figured out. I should have my career figured out. I should have my life figured out. My relationship just figured out. My finances figured out. I should have it figured out by now. No. No friends, you're not behind. but the master is still working on you. Good news. It's okay. You can relax. This is the third thing you have to believe. You are not a finished work. Philippians 1, 6 says, "I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." Scripture says, "He started something awesome in you. He's made you amazing and great news. He's not done yet, but he will be. He's going to keep working on you day after day after day in your life." And this is my experience of following him. This is my experience of following him. I didn't wake up one day and magically go, "You know what? I think I'm awesome. I think I can do it. I think God called me to great things and I'm going to just kind of run after it with full confidence. Not how it happens. Not how it happens. Day by day God reshapes you. Day by day God pours his spirit into you. Day by day God can rewire your brain to different patterns of thinking about who you are. He's got big plans for you. It doesn't matter what you've done in your past too, by the way. You've been looking at this verse Psalm 139, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Do you know who wrote that word, those words? Yeah, he wrote that. Got him David. You might have heard him. David and Goliath, that guy. That was earlier in his life. That's when everything in his life was up and to the right. It was amazing. He did nothing wrong. He was like super tall, super handsome. He was a super strong warrior, defeats David and Goliath.

He's also an awesome heart player, by the way, randomly. I don't know. Amazing. But then his life starts to go downhill. He makes all these mistakes. And you might think that these words are written in the moment when David is just naive, when he hasn't messed up yet. You know, he's like 12 years old. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. No. No. David wrote those words at the end of his life. David wrote those words after he had an affair with Bathsheba, after he had her husband killed to clean it up. He wrote those words after he was such a bad father that his son, Absalom, were bells against him. He wrote those words after he took a census, even though God said not to, and it cost the lives of tens of thousands of people he was supposed to protect. After he says, I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. How could he say that? Because David believed that he was living his life on the wheel. David believed that his life, who he was, was in the hands of the potter. And that the potter wasn't done with him yet. The potter had good plans for him. It's telling you, he does for you too. He does. He does. Says this in Jeremiah 18 one through six. God's promise to continually remake us no matter where we get off track. Jeremiah 18 one through six says, this is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Go down to the potter's house and there I will give you my message. So I went down to the potter's house and I saw him working at the wheel, but the potty was shaping from the clay. It was marred in his hands. So the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seem best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does declares the Lord, like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand. Friends, I don't know how you've tried to remake yourself to fit in or where you've gone off. I just want to invite you to offer yourself to God right now. To say, God, this is me. Would you help me see myself the way that you see me and would you remake and reform me into the person who you've called me to be, who you've designed me to be, that original intent for my life? Would you do that for me? And he will, he will. Maybe you're in a spot in your life where you've never heard this idea of a God who loves you and who wants the best for you. If that's where you are, I just want to invite you right now. Maybe for the first time, just pray this prayer with me. You can just say, God, I believe I am who you say I am. Help me believe it even more. I'm sorry for where I got off track. I'm sorry for how I tried to reform myself. Remake me as the person you made me to be. Amen. Now for the rest of us, I want you to take

ago. What is it about yourself that you like? A way that God has made you that you might want to praise Him for, I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. How has He made you? Are you wise? Are you trustworthy? Are you a generous friend? Are you dependable? Are you resilient? Have you persevered? Do you encourage people? As you think about that, I want you just make something with your clay that represents it. Maybe God's made you strong. Maybe it's not physical strength that you grew up thinking but maybe it's emotional strength. Awesome, make something that represents strength. If He's made you wise, make something that represents wisdom, maybe a little owl. How has He made you? Because He's very clear with you. He did not make a mess. When He made you, He made a masterpiece. I just want you to see it. How has He made you? If we can't, I want to put that verse back on the screen. So I'm 139. I will praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. I'm going to ask you to be vulnerable if you would. Praise means an out loud confession because I just have to say, I just have to say thank you. I will praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. If you're willing to believe that or if you want to believe it, I'm going to count to three and I want you to read this verse loudly. Not quiet, not timid, but loudly. Praise Him. You ready? One, two, three. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. He made you, friend. He made you. We pray for you. God, thank you so much for how you've made us. Would you give us the courage to believe that you are who you say you are, that you are good, that you are for us? I'm asking over the course of these next four months as we're in this series called Originals, God, that you would take us from this place of understanding how you've made us. Then we would see what it means for the work you've called us to do. I want you to think about the thing you're thankful for, what you started to sculpt, declare it in your hand. What was the word in your mind? Was it generous? Was it strong? Was it faithful? Whatever the word was. This word. That is the start of you finding the answer to what work God has made you for. That's the start, that word. Hang on to that word for these next four months. God bless you for being with us, bless you for speaking with us. Amen. We're going to end this time