January: Created to Add Value
Day 7 — 7 January
Worth More Than You Think
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, fashioned in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” — Psalm 139:13–16 (ESV)
You are not who they said you were.
I begin there because after six days of exploring what it means to be created to add value, there is a conversation we have not yet had, and it is the conversation that will determine whether anything we have discussed so far actually takes root in the soil of your real life or simply sits on the surface like seed scattered on concrete. It is the conversation about the voice in your head that has been telling you, for longer than you can remember, that you are not enough, and for six days now that voice has been listening to everything this devotional has said about your identity, your design, your capacity to give and to see and to become, and it has been whispering the same quiet objection after every paragraph: “That sounds wonderful, but it is not really about someone like me.”
I know that voice is there because I have heard it in my own head, and because in over thirty years of pastoral ministry I have never met a single human being who did not carry some version of it. It speaks in different accents depending on where you grew up and what happened to you along the way, but its message is remarkably consistent across every culture, every background, and every age group I have ever encountered. It says you are not smart enough, not gifted enough, not spiritual enough, not attractive enough, not young enough, not experienced enough, not healed enough, not together enough to be the kind of person these devotional entries are describing. And the most dangerous thing about this voice is not that it is loud but that it is familiar, so deeply embedded in the way you think about yourself that you have stopped questioning whether it is telling the truth.
Today’s entry is about dismantling that voice, not with positive thinking or motivational slogans but with the most intimate and most detailed description of your making that exists anywhere in Scripture, because David, the shepherd-king-poet who wrote Psalm 139, looked at the question of human worth and answered it not from the outside, where other people’s opinions live, but from the inside, where God’s craftsmanship is visible to anyone willing to look closely enough.
The psalm begins with David marvelling at God’s complete knowledge of him, moves through God’s inescapable presence in every corner of existence, and then arrives, in verses 13 through 16, at something so tender and so astonishing that it deserves to be read slowly, the way you would read a letter from someone who loved you more than you knew. David turns from the vast, cosmic scope of God’s omnipresence and omniscience and focuses his attention on something breathtakingly small and personal: the moment of his own making, the hidden, unseen process by which he came into being inside his mother’s body.
And the first thing David says about that process is this: “For you formed my inward parts.”
The Hebrew word translated “formed” is qanah (קָנָה, meaning “to create,” “to acquire,” or “to bring into being”), and while this word carries a range of meanings across the Old Testament, in this context it speaks of deliberate, personal, hands-on creation, the kind of making that involves the maker’s full attention and investment. David was not describing an automated process, not a factory line turning out standardised units, but the intimate, focused activity of a Creator who was personally and attentively involved in the construction of every internal system that would make David who he was. The “inward parts” (כִּלְיוֹתָי, kilyothay, meaning “kidneys” or, by extension, “the innermost being,” “the seat of emotions and deepest self”) refers to the most hidden and most essential dimensions of a person, the parts that nobody ever sees but that determine everything about how you think, feel, respond, and move through the world.
And then David adds a second image that makes the first even more vivid: “you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” The word “knitted” (תְּסֻכֵּנִי, tesukkeni, from the root sakak, סָכַךְ, meaning “to weave together,” “to intertwine,” or “to cover by interweaving”) is the language of textile craft, of someone sitting with threads and a loom, carefully interweaving strand after strand into a single, coherent fabric. This is not mass production. This is bespoke craftsmanship, the kind of work where every thread is placed with intention and the finished product is unique because the weaver’s hands were guiding every pass of the shuttle.
David looked at himself, at his own body, his own personality, his own emotional wiring, his own particular way of processing the world, and he recognised in all of it the fingerprints of a Maker who had been working with the patience and precision of a master weaver, building something one thread at a time in a place so hidden that no human eye could observe the process. And his response to this recognition was not theological analysis but worship: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
What “Fearfully and Wonderfully” Does Not Mean, and What It Does
This is where I want to slow down and carefully distinguish between what most people hear when they read this verse and what David actually said, because the distance between the two is significant enough to change the way you think about yourself if you let it.
Most people hear “fearfully and wonderfully made” as a general compliment, a divine pat on the back, a nice thing God says about everyone the way a kindly grandparent tells every child in the room that they are special. Understood this way, the phrase carries warmth but very little weight, because a compliment that applies equally to everyone starts to feel like a compliment that applies specifically to no one, and the voice in your head that says you are not enough has a very easy time dismissing a generalised statement of universal niceness.
But David was not paying himself a compliment, and the Hebrew tells us something far more unsettling and far more powerful than what the English translation typically conveys. The word “fearfully” comes from nora (נוֹרָא, meaning “awesomely,” “reverentially,” or “in a manner that produces awe and trembling”), and it is the same word used elsewhere in Scripture to describe encounters with the presence of God that leave people shaking, speechless, and fundamentally altered. And the word “wonderfully” comes from niphlethiy (נִפְלֵיתִי, from the root pala, פָּלָא, meaning “to be set apart,” “to be extraordinary,” or “to be beyond ordinary comprehension”), which describes something so far beyond the normal category of things that it resists being classified alongside anything else.
David was not saying, “I am quite nice.” He was saying something closer to, “The way I was made produces the same kind of trembling, reverent astonishment that God’s own presence produces, because the craftsmanship that went into my making is so extraordinary, so far beyond ordinary human categories, that when I truly contemplate it, I am left standing in awe.” This is not self-esteem language. This is worship language, and the difference matters enormously, because self-esteem is something you generate from within yourself based on your own assessment of your own qualities, while worship is what happens when you see something so magnificent that the only appropriate response is to fall silent and let the magnitude of what you are looking at speak for itself.
And this is exactly where the voice in your head loses its authority, because the voice has been telling you that your worth depends on your performance, your appearance, your achievements, your usefulness, or your ability to measure up to some standard that always seems to move just beyond your reach. But David’s psalm does not locate your worth in any of those things. It locates your worth in the craftsmanship of the Maker, in the quality of the work that went into your making, and that craftsmanship is not something you can improve or diminish by anything you do or fail to do, because it was completed before you were born, in a hidden place where no human opinion could interfere with it, by a God whose work is described by the same language Scripture reserves for encounters with the divine.
And David goes further still, because in verse 16 he says something that ties this entire first week of the devotional together in a way that I did not want to reveal until now: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” The word translated “unformed substance” is golem (גֹּלֶם, meaning “embryo,” “unfinished form,” or “raw, unworked material”), and it is used only here in the entire Old Testament, which gives it a rare and striking specificity. David was saying that even when he was nothing but raw, unshaped material, even before a single recognisable feature had formed, God’s eyes were already on him, and the days of his life were already written in a book, which means that the trajectory of his existence, the purpose he would fulfil, the value he would add to the world, was not something he would need to discover by accident or earn through effort. It was already recorded, already known, already held in the mind of a God who saw the finished masterpiece while the raw material was still without shape.
This connects directly to Day 2, where we explored Paul’s word poiēma and the idea that your good works were prepared beforehand for you to walk in, but David’s language adds a dimension that Paul’s does not, because David takes us back even further, past the prepared good works and past the crafted identity and all the way back to the raw, unformed, embryonic beginning, and he tells us that even there, at the very earliest and most vulnerable stage of your existence, you were already seen, already known, and already written into a story that the God who knitted you together had no intention of leaving unfinished.
The thought to carry into this seventh morning, and into the week that lies ahead, is one that the voice in your head will try to argue with, but I want you to hear it anyway and hold it close enough that it gets past the familiar objections and settles into the place where your deepest convictions live: you are not who they said you were, and you are not who that voice has been telling you that you are. You are who God says you are, and what God says about you is spoken in the language of awe, of worship, of astonishment at the sheer quality of His own craftsmanship, and that verdict was settled before you drew your first breath, in a hidden place where no human opinion could touch it, by a Maker whose work has never once been revised, recalled, or found to be less than extraordinary.
Declaration
There is no voice in my head, no opinion from my past, and no verdict spoken over me by anyone who did not make me that carries more weight than the word of the God who knitted me together before I was born. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and these are not words of comfort but words of awe, because the craftsmanship that went into my making is the same quality of work that produces reverent trembling whenever it is truly seen. My worth is not under review, because the One who assessed it does not change His mind, and what He recorded about me before I had form is the same thing that is true about me right now, on this seventh morning of this new year. I am seen, I am known, I am written into a story that has no missing pages, and the God whose eyes watched over my unformed substance is the same God whose eyes rest on me today with the same attentiveness, the same delight, and the same unshakeable certainty that what He made is exactly what He intended.
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