By Pastor Phil Morgan, Senior Pastor, First Assembly of God Church, Brookfield
“He fashions their hearts individually.” Psalm 33:15
It’s the same every time I go to the bank. The teller looks at my half-filled in deposit slip and gives me that look. “You still don’t know your account number?”
Why do I feel guilty? How many numbers am I supposed to memorize? There’s my social security number, driver’s license number, passport number, my family’s phone numbers, and on and on it goes. Every government department and every utility company I deal with knows me by a number. I’m not a person … I’m a statistic.
What a blessed relief to know that it’s not so with God. It’s quite stunning really to think that the lady at the post office only knows me as a postbox number, but the most important Entity in the universe, the most powerful and beautiful Being in all existence, the One around Whom everything else revolves, knows my name. Even more than my name, He knows every detail about me. The number of hairs on my head (stop laughing!) He knows my every thought even as it is being formed within me; every memory that I struggle to recall.
Psalm 33 says that God deals with each of us as individuals, not merely as unidentified parts of the big human race. This was driven home to me by a sequence of experiences that I had some years ago. My wife and I took our kids to visit the Cadbury chocolate factory. Not exactly like Willy Wonka’s – no chocolate river – but pretty cool anyway.
I will never forget witnessing their “quality control.” Workers watched thousands of chocolates pass them on a conveyor belt, looking for any flaw in the product or its wrapper. Whenever they spotted one it was pulled out. And disposed of.
My wife and I, consummate chocaholics, were almost in tears. “It may not be perfect, but it will taste just as good. Give it to us!”
You see, Cadbury is in the business of mass production.
With that image still vivid in my mind, I was visiting my friend, George, who owned an antique store. George was not in the business of mass production. He was a craftsman. He made his living by purchasing unique pieces of old furniture and then lovingly, painstakingly restoring them to their original glory. “He fashions their hearts individually.” God is not in the business of mass production either. The Bible describes Him as the Craftsman, not the corporation.
And He calls all of us, His people, to minister to one another with His heart. The Church should long for the transformation of many, but we must never think of ourselves in the business of mass production. Every individual we are privileged to meet is a personal project of God.