Practicing Wonder

Well, as I start off this morning, I just first want to thank everybody here for the many very sensitive and thoughtful birthday cards that I received when I turned 50 last week. I had no idea that there were so many meaningful cards about aging. And it tells me a lot about this church and our relationship because I got beautiful, beautiful cards like this one on the front. There's a vulture and the vulture is saying, "So you're 50. Hey, look on the bright side." And you open it up and it says, "Oh yeah, there is no bright side. There is a bright light, but you're going to want to stay away from that." So thank you. These all just touched my heart.

And here's another, I've got a pile of these. Here's another one. This one shows three old guys sitting together on a couch and one says, "I dare you to find a man with better blood sugar levels than me. I double dare you." And you open it up and it says, "Welcome to the weird bragging years." Turning 50. Some of you may have heard, might have heard, went to Hawaii for my birthday. My wife, Lori, sitting right here, surprised me with that, surprised me with that as a birthday present. Isn't that awesome? She is an awesome wife right there.

You might not have heard this. I've been kind of keeping it under wraps. But do not worry. I realize it would be an extremely bad form for me to rub that in. So I would never think of showing you pictures of the things that we saw and experienced while they're on the tropical isle of Maui. Or mention how all last week we were out there relaxing while you were not. I could not do that to you. That would just be wrong. But seriously, you have to know, we are so grateful. It was in many ways a once in a lifetime experience. It was such a gift. And we had one of the single most memorable experiences of our lives. Really, it was stunning.

And here is what happened. One morning at breakfast, we sat down and we said, "Hey, you know, we're studying Psalms at church, and so let's read some Psalms out loud to each other." And so we looked up some Psalms. We decided, "Let's look up some Psalms about the ocean." And you know, there's a lot of Psalms about the waves and about the sea and the creatures of the deep. And one of the Psalms that we opened up to was Psalm 104. In fact, there are the verses that are printed there in your notes, in your bulletins, if you want to grab that hand out that looks like this.

The verses we read that morning at breakfast are right in the box at the top of your notes. Psalm 104 looks at nature and just sings about the greatness of God. And then it starts off in verse 24 to talk about God's works in the ocean. It says, "How many are your works, O Lord? There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and the Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there." And we looked at each other and said, "Hey, let's go meet some of those living creatures large and small. Let's go snorkeling."

How many of you have ever been snorkeling in your lives? Good, most of you. So you understand the experience. Out we go into a little cove there. There is my wife, Lori, just kind of popping her head up. Isn't she cute? I know I didn't tell her that I was going to show this picture. I'm sure she's like, "Thank you. Of all the pictures on vacation, you had to show that one." But there she is kind of looking around for stuff to look at snorkeling. And here I am, I'm diving down, hoping to see some cool stuff. And I have to admit to you, I will just confess, in this moment, I was just feeling all James Bond. I really was.

How many of you have ever seen that James Bond movie, "Thunderball," where he goes scuba diving? That's like one of my favorites. And I was down there humming, pretending I was Sean Connery. "I'll spear any scuba diving spies." You know, I was all into this pretending. And then something happens to change all that. We start to hear something I have never heard before, except on the TV show "Flipper." It's this sound, something like that. That's the best I can do. I know that's gross. But what it is... Thank you. It's that flipper is where I got my expert training to recognize dolphin language, all these squeaks and whistles.

And I think to myself, "There's dolphins in the water here somewhere." But then it starts to get a little bit scary. Because I'm looking around for the dolphins, and all I can see is the deep blue all around me. And I start to hear not just one "Hahaha!" But I start to hear more of them. "Hahaha!" Two, three, four, then thirty, maybe forty, right? We start imagining there's dozens of these dolphins all around. Hearing wild animals at a zoo is one thing, but hearing them in the wild is another, especially when you can't see them.

And I started to think to myself, "What's going on? Maybe they're like evil dolphins out there. And they're going to ambush me, and it's getting louder and louder, and I still can't see them." I'm changing rapidly from Sean Connery as James Bond into Don Knotts as the incredible Mr. Limpet. Ever see that? "What's going on here?" And then suddenly they were upon us, wild dolphins plunging into the water right on top of us. And these are all pictures that I took with this, my twelve year old son's little tiny point and shoot camera. I had this in something like a Ziploc bag to keep it waterproof.

And immediately I whip it out and I just started snapping in all directions with this camera like, "That's going to ward them off or something." "Evil dolphins, back off! I've got a camera!" You know? And there's dolphins right under my feet. And so I'm snapping the picture. They're to my right, they're to my left, they're behind us, they're in front of us. There's literally dolphins everywhere circling and swimming around us. And although it started in, I'll admit, a little bit of fear, it ended up just in awe and amazement.

What a gift it was like. God just kind of went, "Hey, happy 50th birthday. Let me just stir in a little dolphin factor here." And when it was all over, Lori and I just kind of popped out of the water again and looked at each other. We were so amazed. I have to tell you, even just thinking about it now, we were in that moment on the verge of tears and laughter at the same time. And that is hard to do when you're snorkeling, you know? People have drowned that way.

But what made all this the most amazing thing was how it came literally, what, 15 or 20 minutes after we had read these verses about the creatures in the sea. There were no words. There was just awe and worship of God. Honestly, it was beyond what I could have hoped for while I was there. I had what I have heard people call, and you have heard people call, even irreligious people call moments like this, what, a religious experience. I just had a religious experience.

Have you ever had an experience like that? You don't have to be on vacation in Hawaii. You can feel that kind of awe. Maybe when you look at a sunset and you just go, "Wow, God is so awesome." When you look out here and you see a ship rolling on the ocean, or you look down and you suddenly are captivated by a flower's beauty. And yes, these are all Hawaii pictures too, but you get the point. You can have that experience anywhere. These moments when you suddenly sense something beautiful behind the beauty. Poetry just beneath the surface. The hugeness and the power and the majesty of God. You know what I'm talking about?

And in those moments, you feel so fragile and so small and so impressed. Well, about 3,000 years ago, somebody else felt something just like that. A young shepherd boy was taking care of his father's sheep, and he was probably distracted by all the things on his to-do list. Making sure the sheep were sheared at the right time, and making sure the pests were taken care of, and making sure that they were taken to the right pasture, maybe guarding against predators. And then night fell, and the sheep were all slumbering. And this shepherd looked up at the sky, and he saw the stars, and he had one of those moments where he just said, "Wow, God." And he was so impressed by what happened in that moment that he went and he wrote a song about it.

A song that we have to this day. We don't have the music anymore, but we have the lyrics. They're 3,000 year old words, but I think you'll be able to relate to them this morning. They're found in your Bible in Psalm 8. Would you turn there in your Bibles? If you didn't bring your Bible with you, you can just grab one of those brown TLC Bibles from the pew right in front of you and turn to page 386386. That's where Psalm 8 is, as we continue our series in the Psalms, which we call soul food.

You know, our goal in this series, I don't know if you've picked this up, but it's been to look at every kind of psalm in the Bible. Even the tough kinds. We've looked at laments. We've looked at what they call imprecatory psalms, where the psalmist says, "God, I just want you to take care of the wicked." We've looked at historical lesson psalms, like Mark did such a wonderful job with last weekend, but I have to tell you, the type of psalm we look at today, this is my favorite type. This type, the scholars call them the hymn psalms. They are just pure ecstasy, pure contemplation of God, pure worship.

And Psalm 8 is a great example of this kind of psalm. They were written so that pilgrims who were coming into the city of Jerusalem, on a pilgrimage into the temple or earlier the tabernacle, could get their minds focused on worship. You know, probably all of them had their minds on some kind of distracting thing, the stresses of daily life. But then they would sing these hymn psalms as they walked up to the Temple Mount, as they walked up Jerusalem, so that their minds would get switched and focused on the majesty of God and God's care for them.

And you can say that these remain in the Bible today to also remind you and me about practicing wonder and worship in our daily lives. Because you ever feel like this? You ever think, I'm not really like in a mode of major sin right now in my life. There's maybe not some great need in my life, but I feel just a little bit dry and disconnected from God. And I want to connect again. I want to feel that sense of wonder again. I want to remember what it's like to have one of those, in the best sense of the term, religious experiences. Well then, this psalm is for you today.

And again, you don't have to go on vacation to experience it. To renew your sense of wonder, just consider the four things that David talks about in the first four verses here of Psalm 8. Jot these down in your notes. First he talks about how God is unlimited by any boundary. God is unlimited by any boundary. That is what David is getting at when he starts out in verse 1. And I would love for us as a church to read this together. These were meant to be read together and sung together. And so let's read this out loud. Let me hear it. Here we go. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens.

Now, these words may seem pretty familiar to you, but don't let their familiarity rob them of the awesome meaning. What does this really mean? I want you to kind of put your thinking caps on here and remember the cultural context of the times, the history that these Hebrew Psalms were written during. Back then, when people talked about gods like these Sumerian idols, they thought of gods as being very limited. Really, the gods of those days were really just super powered human beings. They fought among each other and with humans. They bickered. They could be defeated. They're reading their mythologies. It sounds sort of like a super powered soap opera, like Marvel Comics or something.

And their gods had limits. Like these gods, there was a god of the ocean. There was a god of the underworld. There was a god of heaven. There was a god over each large family. There was a god of war. There was a god of love. And that was the only area that they ruled over. There were gods that ruled over just the ocean. And the Sumerian gods really just ruled over Samaria. When you went to Egypt, you had to deal with the Egyptian gods who ruled over Egypt. That was the conception of gods. Then along comes Yahweh. That is what this word "Lord" means when you see it in all caps in your English translations. L-O-R-D in all caps. That always stands for the Hebrew word "Yahweh." What is that?

Way back in Exodus, God tells Moses this name. When he speaks to Moses from the burning bush, he says, "I am Yahweh." Which is a form of the Hebrew verb "to be." It just means "I am." "I just am." "I am that I am." Eternally existent. And then this Yahweh goes on to teach Moses and the Israelites something that people in their day had forgotten. And people in our day sometimes forget too. And it's this. God is not like humans. At all. God is not just a super powered human. God has no boundaries. God is God of Egypt and Samaria and the Israelites and the land and the ocean and the heavens and everything beyond every one of those boundaries. Yahweh is just God over everything.

And this is what David is getting blown away by when he says the name of the Lord is majestic in all the earth. Do you see? That's the emphasis here. Which we can sometimes miss. He's saying he's not limited to a country or to the ocean or even to the underworld or heaven. Your glory is above even the heavens. That's the emphasis. Even they can't hem him in. The point is that God is measureless beyond limits. And by the way, do you think that we need this reminder today? Sometimes it seems like religious history is the story of people trying to put God in a box, right? We need to be reminded God is unlimited.

And yet, point two, God is known even by little children. God is known by little children. David observes something. He says this is so amazing. This limitless, boundaryless God who is not like human beings is a God of revelation. In other words, this awesome God chooses to reveal himself not just to the wise sages alone, but even to the hearts of small children. That's what he means in verse two. From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise because of your enemies to silence the foe and the avenger from the lips of children.

Some of you know that one of my favorite little books is called Children's Letters to God, where they have actual letters to God, photographs of them in these books. There's a couple of volumes of this out now. And once a year, maybe a couple of times a year, I kind of break out some new ones from that book that I just love, like these. "Dear God, my name is Robert. I want a baby brother. My mother said to ask my father. My father said to ask you, 'Do you think you can do it? Good luck, Robert.'" I'd love to know what happened here with this story. I love this one. "Dear God, how do you feel about people who don't believe in you?" Someone else wants to know. A friend, Neil. I love that.

But I love the way these kids just have a sense of wonder. Most of the letters are like this. "Dear God, are you as big as the whole sky and as strong as the whole world?" That's a good thing. Very much. Dean. I love that. That's the first verse of Psalm 8 right there. And I love this next one because you can just feel this little girl just kind of getting her mind blown as she's writing this out. "Oh Lord, thank you for giving me my dad and mother and their children and dog and fish. Thank you for giving us the nice world to live in and eyes to see it and what we eat and brains to think. Thank you for everything. Love, Maxine." That could be a Psalm right there.

Can you be that thankful? The faith of a child. It's no wonder that Jesus held up a little child in front of his disciples as they were jostling for position. And he said, "Wait a second. Time out. Unless you have the faith of a little child, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven." Why did he have to say that? Why does God have to ordain praise from the lips of infants? You know why? Because we adults get numb to the wonder, right? We get numb to the wonder swimming just beneath the surface of life.

When's the last time you looked at a little baby like Adrian talked about? How he said, "I looked at my little daughter's face and he said there were no words." When's the last time you looked at a little baby and instead of going, "Oh, I hope they don't sit next to me on the airplane," you know? I thought, "What a wonder conception and birth and life itself is." When's the last time you commuted here and you thought to yourself how the redwood trees right here in Aptos at Nicene Marks and all around town will outlive you by centuries? And you just went, "Wow. God's creation is just amazing." When's the last time like David you stopped and looked at the night sky and went, "God, you're awesome." Honestly, I think a lot of people lose their faith not just because they come to some crossroads where they decide, "Now I don't believe this anymore."

I think it's because they let wonder leak out of their lives like a slow leak in a balloon, until it's just empty. But David here in Psalm 8 says, "Now remember the wonder. God is majestic and yet that majestic God speaks to, reveals himself to little kids." And when it comes to seeing wonder all around us, this psalm just keeps getting better because next David says, "Consider how, number three, God effortlessly created everything." Effortlessly created everything. That's point three. David says in verse three, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place." Now stop right there and I want us to do what David did. Let's consider, let's think of what David thinks of here. The heavens, the moon, the stars and here's a channel for us to do it that's a little bit unusual.

There's an astronaut named Doug Wheelock. This is Doug. And when he was just recently up in the International Space Station, Doug Wheelock had 68,000 Twitter followers. 68,000 people followed him on Twitter because he would take these amazing photographs. He's an amateur photographer and it wasn't part of his job, but he had his camera with him and he just kind of stopped some pictures once in a while. When he had free time and then he would post these pictures in real time from the space station. He would post them on Twitter, shots like this. This is the Greek Isles at night. Isn't that beautiful? And here's another picture of the Nile Delta. He's got a blog where you can look at some of these pictures. And what I love is how he writes in his posts things like, "I am looking at a miracle." He's an astronaut. He's a scientist and he hasn't allowed the wonder to leak out of his life.

Now, if you feel like looking at the Earth like this helps to put your life in perspective, let's go even further than this. Let's take a mental trip and leave the Earth and go to where Doug points his camera in this next picture. Go past the moon to the sun like author Steven Mosley says. The 25,000 mile circumference of the Earth is an immensity that is hard to grasp mentally. But then you approach the sun which is one million miles across. I want you to look at this. This is a picture that Doug took. That is the silhouette of the space shuttle from the space station. And of course the sun is still millions and millions of miles in back of that.

Somebody wants to look at this. I want you to look at something. I brought something in my little snack bag here. And I think I'm going to show you this. I brought an orange. And somebody told me one time that if the sun were the size of an orange, then the Earth would be the size of, I asked one of our junior hires in between time between worship to go out to our playground and get some sand. So I could put a speck or two of sand on my finger. If the sun were the size of an orange, the Earth would be the size of a speck of sand. Now that really helps to put things in perspective.

And yet our sun, they say, is only a medium sized star. Some stars are so big they can hold 500 million suns the size of ours. If the sun were the size of an orange, these other stars would be the size of H.P. Pavilion, the shark tank over in San Jose. And guess what? There are 200 billion stars like this swirling in the Milky Way galaxy. And the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies. Isn't that amazing? By the way, who would like an orange? Anybody? Would you like one? Here you go. It is stunning when you think about this in perspective.

And yet back in this psalm, David says, "Let this blow your mind." All of that is the work of God's fingers. When I read that and stay with me here, this reminds me of Rosie Greer. Does anybody here raise your hands? Remember Rosie Greer, the football player? Good. A lot, about 50% of you. I'm among friends here. Huge, powerful football player, defensive player. He's now a minister, which is good to know because he's on our team. I mean, when you look at this, that is a good thing. But Rosie Greer became famous when he was a football player, not just for his play on the field. He became famous for his hobby. Does anybody remember what his hobby was? What was it? That's right. It was needlepoint.

This massive player, they would interview him after the game, and he'd be sitting there in the locker room doing needlepoint. Can you believe that? In fact, he even published a book. This is the cover, "Rosie Greer's Needlepoint for Men." This is an actual book. You can still get it on Amazon. I just looked it up this week. I love that look, though, on his face on the cover, like, "Yeah, needlepoint. You want to make something of it? You know, I love that." With all of his might, he's working on this dainty handicraft. And that is something like the picture that I see David painting in this verse. With all of God's might, all that we see, that's needlepoint to God.

I love the way that Hebrew scholar Ron Allen translates this phrase. He says, "The universe was fingerplay for God." God is that amazing. Again, do we need to hear this today or what? I think there'd be a lot less anxiety-driven prayer and a whole lot more, "Wow, it's going to be okay prayer if we had this picture of God." But the best is yet to come because David just keeps going from one mind-blowing thing to another. Number one, God exists without boundaries. Number two, yet he's self-revealing God. He reveals himself to even kids. Number three, he effortlessly created everything. And then the most mind-blowing thing of all is that that God cares for me. Yet God, number four, cares for me.

And this blows David's mind so much he cannot figure out why this is. Verse four, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of man, that you care for him?" Ever feel like that? That is a really good question. You ever look up at the sun, moon, and stars and you wonder, "Why should God care about me?" I mean, seriously. I want to show you a picture. Does anybody know what this is? Anybody know? It's a famous photograph which has a name. What is it? Somebody said it. The photograph is called, that's right, the pale blue dot. Famous photograph, it was taken in 1990 by the spacecraft Voyager 1. This is the Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. That speck.

This is the furthest away we have ever taken a picture of the planet Earth. How about that? I want you to listen to what the scientist Carl Sagan had to say about this. He said, "Look at that. That's you. That's me. That's us. That's here. That's home. That's now." On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being, whoever was, lived their lives. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, every hopeful child, every writer, every inventor, every explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

There is just this shrinking feeling that comes over us when we start to realize we're not as strong, we're not as big as we sometimes think we are. We are not the center of the universe. And you know what? That is a good place to be actually. That is a worshipful place to be. That shrinking feeling before the immensity of creation and God. And yet, David says, not only has God thought of humans, he says God actually gave humans a job. He gave us an honor. Verse 5, "You made him, man, humans, a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor." What is our honor? Well, our honor is that God gives us a job. "You made him ruler over the works of your hands. You put everything under his feet, all flocks and herds and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the sea."

Now, don't misunderstand these verses. This is not a license to abuse the planet. These verses really just harken back to what God said to humans way back in Genesis that we're caretakers of this planet. I want you to think of this. That little pale blue dot that we live on is so far the only single spot in the huge universe known to harbor life. And we are the stewards. We're the guardians. We're the caretakers. I know somebody who is a caretaker of a beautiful house up at Tahoe. I mean a mansion right on the lake, incredible house over on the east side. He stayed there to watch over it, kind of like Tom Selleck watching over Robin Masters house in Magnum P.I. You remember that? I'm seeing Hawaiian connections everywhere, believe me.

But anyway, my friend would never run that place into the ground. Why? He doesn't own that mansion. And the owners are coming back every summer for a couple of weeks to check out their mansion. So he's going to do a good job. Well, the exact same thing with you and me and the earth. It's not ours. We're trustees. And the owner's coming back. But the part of this psalm that most of us struggle with, I think at some point in our lives, is this verse 4. And I think some people maybe even step away from imagining they can have a personal relationship with God because of this feeling. Ever feel like this? Hey, who am I that God should listen to my prayers? And they kind of move into a little bit of agnosticism, like, I'm not an atheist, but if there is a God seriously, he's got a whole universe to run. Why should he listen to my prayers?

Follow me here. It's interesting that David never answers this question in Psalm 8. He just leaves it hanging. Like, yeah, who am I? Because David doesn't ever know why God is mindful of him. He just knows God is. He knows he sensed the love of God in his heart. And so he just shakes his head at the wonder of it all. Like, who am I? I don't know. It's incredible, but God is mindful of me. But maybe, if you're honest, let's be honest here at church, maybe as you've been reading this psalm, you're not so sure. Maybe you've been struck by a sense of, yeah, why would an all-powerful God think of somebody who's alive for, like, 80 years on this piece of dust suspended in a sunbeam?

Well, this question, Christians believe, was answered a thousand years later by Jesus Christ. You see, I want you to really follow me here. The Bible says that God is not only perfect in power, but he is perfect in love. Do you get that? As powerful as God had to be to create all of that, he is just as infinitely loving. He just, just as much as he pours out power, he pours out love. And so loving specs on a moat of dust hanging in a sunbeam would not only be easy for an infinite God. It's what he does. He cannot stop. He is love. And it follows that he would want to make a way for us to connect to him so that we can know his love. And that is, in fact, exactly what he did.

God so loved that little world that he came to it, that he said, "As one and only son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life." And by the way, that is the hopeful, positive message that we're going to share this Easter. I just want to put in a little plug here. Please, these little cards and the little wallet-sized invitation cards, you can pick up, grab them by the handfuls, post these on bulletin boards and stuff around town, because I've been privileged to be a part of the team that's putting together elements for the Easter service. And I just have to tell you, a sneak preview, I have literally come to tears just as we've described what's going to happen on Easter.

And I know that the message of God's love is going to be so powerful there that you're going to really want to make sure your relatives and friends hear it. So don't let this opportunity go by. Be evangelists for that precious moment in time in a couple of weeks here on Easter Sunday mornings so that people know about it and that they hear this message that an all-powerful God is also all-loving. You know, I was thinking about Easter and Good Friday and everything leading up to that. And one of my favorite moments is how the night before he's crucified, Jesus has dinner, you remember, for his disciples, and he looks them in the eye and he says, "I want you to know something. I no longer call you servants. I call you friends. And I'm going to give my life for you because I love you."

Now, that's amazing that an all-powerful Creator God comes to this little speck and he looks at us little things compared to him little bacteria or something. And he says, "I call you friends. I love you because he's a God of love." You ask, "Who am I that God should care for me?" Well, according to the Bible, the answer is, "I am beloved of God." I don't want you to just say this out loud when they say, "I am beloved." "I am beloved." Say it louder like you mean it. "I am beloved." Now, some of you might still be struggling with it. You're not me. I can see why an all-powerful God would come to visit some saints, you know, and maybe take their souls to heaven or something. But I've made so many mistakes. I have a bad past. Maybe you're thinking, "I have an addiction to clean up. I've rejected God my whole life. I've been rebellious. Who am I that the God who created the heavens should be mindful of me? Who am I?"

Well, let me close with a story. I was reading this week, of all people, about the famous philosopher Nietzsche. As a kid, Friedrich Nietzsche was very involved in church. In fact, he won awards for Bible memory. And then, at the age of 18, he rejected the faith of his deeply religious family, especially his mother, who was very devout. And he despised his childhood Christianity as, quote, "the religion of the weak." He talked about how what was important was the will to power. He wrote the famous book, Man and Superman, about how he and his followers were the new supermen. They were beyond mere earthbound notions of good and evil. They were, he said, "the new gods." In fact, Nietzsche actually predicted that in the future, history would no longer be divided into before Christ and after Christ, but before Nietzsche and after Nietzsche. Didn't quite work out that way.

His mind began to break down. His health deteriorated. He began to go blind. His so-called friends put him in an insane asylum. And it was at that dark hour that his Christian mother reentered his life. She'd heard about what had happened, and she looked and looked for him, and finally found him, and claimed him, and took him back home. His rejection of Christianity, which severely rattled her, I mean, he rejected her, really, and everything she loved. But she took him into her arms and devoted the rest of her life to his care. And people who visited would sometimes see her rocking to sleep the broken body of this man who had claimed to be a superman.

And there he was, and she was rocking him to sleep as if he was just a little baby. Who was he that she should be mindful of him? He didn't do anything to make himself lovable. This kind of love just cannot be explained by logic. But she went and found him and brought him home because he was her beloved child. The love of God for you, he comes to find you and claim you, and he calls your name, and he calls you his friend and his child, his beloved son, his beloved daughter. He longs to hold you, embrace you with his love, because you are his beloved. And he is perfect in power and perfect in love if a finitely loving human mother can love like that. Can you understand how an infinitely loving, powerful God could love you like that?

See, this is the big picture of Psalm 8, to really restore a sense of wonder. Be in awe of God. Yeah, look at the night sky or the dolphin swimming or the waves pumping or the face of a baby and be blown away by his creative power. But then really believe that that God, he loves me. Would you agree with me that God's power is amazing, but his love is even more amazing? And as he wraps up the Psalm, David has moved to end with the same phrase that he started out with. He comes full circle in verse 9. Only now he's thinking not of God's majesty, but of God's intimacy. He says, "Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth." Because in a Psalm full of wonders, that, God's infinite love for you, that is the greatest wonder of all. And let's thank God for that right now. Would you pray with me?

Oh, Lord, our Lord, we thank you so much for your love. And I really pray that all of us in these moments would just have that experience of worship that comes from the contrast of seeing your creative, huge power. And yet to think that that God chooses to call me friend and come and save me, who am I? May we be in awe of that today and surrender to your love as you come to find us and hold us and welcome us home. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.