Pay Attention to How God Has Made You

Scripture — Psalm 139:14 (NRSV)

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.

Devotion

If you want to know your purpose in life, I encourage you to pay attention to several key things. The first of these things I wrote about in yesterday’s Life for Leaders devotion: Pay attention to what God is putting on your heart. This could be the same as your personal passion, though often what God puts on our hearts wasn’t there before. Plus, though sometimes what God puts on our hearts is a kind of passion, it can also feel like conviction, excitement, challenge, or even a burden.

Today I’d like to offer another suggestion to help you with your purpose. If you’d like to receive, clarify, craft, and live your purpose in life, pay attention to how God has made you.

Psalm 139:14 includes this memorable and moving line: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The Message puts it this way: “I thank you, High God – you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made!” Psalm 139 teaches us that each human being is a unique creation of God. Even though sin corrupts the goodness of creation, every person still bears God’s image. Every person is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” including you. The Message is right. You are “marvelously made.”

Sometimes Christians assume that God has made some people to be crucial to God’s purposes and most people to be, well, less useful. We can suppose that only certain talents and gifts are really useful for God’s work. We tend to value things like preaching, leading, and other “spiritual” gifts, while manual, artistic, or “secular” gifts count for less.

But the Bible tells a different story. It helps us value everything that God gives us. Consider the case of Bezalel in Exodus 31. He was an artist who was primarily responsible for designing the furnishings and vestments for the tent of meeting, what we often call the Tabernacle. Why was he able to do that work with excellence? Because God “filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, in carving wood, in every kind of craft” (Exod 31:3-5). We can also assume that Bezalel had been trained to do the work for which he was gifted by God. He had experience that could be applied to the artistry needed for the tent of meeting.

Then, of course, there’s the example of Jesus. Yes, he was endowed with unique abilities to preach, teach, and heal. But remember, Jesus spent the majority of his adult life using other talents such as sawing, hammering, and nailing. . . and perhaps also bookkeeping, negotiating, and managing. The example of Jesus shows us that such “ordinary” talents matter to God and God’s purposes.

God has given you distinctive talents, skills, strengths, personality traits, motivations, values, perceptions, and spiritual gifts. No doubt you have developed and used many of these throughout your life at work and home, in your church and your community. In fact, some of your gifts may have emerged when you were quite young. Others may be developing later in life, even well into their third third. For example, you are probably familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the series of books we associate with Little House on the Prairie. But you may not know that Wilder didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65 years old. Today, over 60 million of Wilder’s books have been sold. I’m glad for her late-life gift development!

If you’re not sure about your talents, skills, strengths, personality traits, values, spiritual gifts, motivations, and the like, I’d urge you to ask people who know you well. Community is essential for this aspect of discerning purpose in life, though all too often people speak of it as a solitary venture.

You might also find various tools helpful that will identify your particular strengths, motivations, and personality. Possible tools include:

• The CliftonStrengths assessment (formerly StrengthsFinder) – which will help you identify your personal strengths
• The Enneagram – which will help you identify your personality type
• TruCenter – which will help you know what motivates you

Each of these tools can help you see things about yourself that you might not have seen quite as clearly before. They might bring into focus things about you that will help you know how God has made you and therefore what your purpose in life should be.

When you use all that God has given you for God’s purposes, God is glorified. But I believe God is also delighted. As the Old Testament prophet puts it, God “will rejoice over you with gladness” (Zeph 3:17). A more recent version of that same idea appears in the film Chariots of Fire. In a scene that has been quoted thousands of times by pastors like me, Eric Liddell is explaining to his sister why he will run in the Olympics before going back to China as a missionary. He says, “Jennie, you’ve got to understand. I believe God made me – for a purpose. For China. But he also made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure.”

Summing up today’s devotion, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. By paying attention to how God has made you, you will see all the gifts and talents God has given to you. Using these for God’s purposes will glorify God even as God rejoices over you with gladness.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The Work of Marriage, Raising Children, and Caring for Parents (Psalm 127, 128, 139).