Pastor Mark Cordes

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He’s Always There – or – Thou, God, Seest Me

In the name of Christ our Life, my dear Christian friends:

I once received a postcard which read,

Dear Clergy,

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day present a crisis of faith for many couples who find themselves unable to have children. Presently one in five couples in this county are infertile – which means that your congregants are indeed touched by this national health problem.

Many of these couples go to their place of worship as a natural source of solace, only to find its family-focused services as the most painful place to be. . .

. . .please care enough to mention these couples during your sermon on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – in order to validate their grief.

Personally, I appreciate such reminders because it has been quite some time since my wife and I experienced the pain of infertility. But our God, the living LORD of heaven and earth, does more than “validate grief.” He was there to listen in the tabernacle when childless Hannah poured out her heart asking for a son. God was there to give her Samuel. The LORD was there for aged Sarah to give her and father Abraham a son named Issac, the ancestor of our Savior. The forerunner of our Savior, John the Baptist, was God’s gift to infertile Elizabeth and Zechariah. God was there. HE’S ALWAYS THERE. He sees when we sit and when we rise. He perceives our thoughts from afar. Before a word is on our tongues, He knows it completely. HE’S ALWAYS THERE with His hand upon us to give us hope and comfort in our grief.

HE’S ALWAYS THERE for single parents trying to be both mother and father at the same time. She may feel like a gerbil on a treadmill, running faster and faster, but getting nowhere. Yet wherever her duties take her, God is there – in the heights of heaven or the depths of the earth, rising on the wings of the dawn or settling on the far side of the sea – God is there as the Comforter of the forsaken and distressed. HE’S ALWAYS THERE to guide her and uphold her, to hold her close with His strong right arm. God is her husband.

HE’S ALWAYS THERE for the father who has no wife to answer the multitude of questions about what to do with the little one. Though he may feel like hiding in the darkness of his doubts and fears, God is there to open the shades and pour in the sunshine of His love and understanding. God will be the wisdom of the wife for the man who has none.

A woman once remarked, “You know, I really did not believe there was a God until I held my baby in my arms. Then I believed.” Who can ever exhaust the wonder of this miracle of life that inside the mother God keeps adding cell to cell until a baby is stretching and yawning and hiccuping and playing basketball in the middle of the night? And all of us can say with David, “I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

The more science studies the embryo, the more complicated we see it is. What was once thought of as a simple cell, is now known to be a complex weaving of information strands called DNA. Maybe David did not realize this when he wrote Psalm 139 back around 1000 B.C., but the Holy Spirit who breathed these words certainly knew. God was there as the Weaver who knit each of us together in our mother’s womb so that we can say, “My frame (bone structure) was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. “

God was there because HE’S ALWAYS THERE with His divine plan for every baby: “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” What the abortionist news media insist on calling a “fetus,” God calls a person for whom His thoughts are precious, too vast to be grasped, outnumbering the grains of sand. HE’S ALWAYS THERE watching and caring whether the little one is waking or sleeping in the safest place God designed.

Do you know how God feels about those who invade that sanctuary with scalpels, who pickle the baby inside his mother, then suck it out with a vacuum cleaner, count the pieces and say they are “successful”? Listen: “If only you would slay the wicked, 0 God! Away from me you bloodthirsty men!” Unbelievers blow the dust off their Bibles and try to back their positions with God’s Word. But believers pray, “They speak of you with evil intent your adversaries misuse your name.” Some Christians are uncomfortable saying, “I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.” But God hates and loves sinners at the same time. As His image is restored in us by faith in Jesus, we also hate the baby killers and pray to God to give them what they deserve. At the same time, we love them and pray earnestly for their repentance, so that they will not get what they deserve. We keep praying the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done,” asking God to “break and defeat every evil plan and purpose of the devil, the world and our sinful flesh, which try to prevent us from keeping God’s name holy and letting his kingdom come. “ God wants His kingdom to come to babies through baptism. He wants babies born and reborn, not aborted.

Shine the light of God’s Word on the arguments of the pro-choice crowd. “A woman has a right to make her own reproductive choices”? God says her body is not her own. God made her; she is His. Roe vs. Wade says that a mother can abort the baby without the father’s consent, but if she wants to keep the baby the father must provide support. But God’s law says the baby belongs to neither parent. The baby belongs to God. If God wants to give His creation hands and feet and normal intelligence, these are gifts of God. If God wants to withhold certain blessings, who can argue with Him? If God puts His gift of life inside a rape victim, there is at least one guilty party who should be punished, but it’s not the baby. The government has the God-given right to punish the guilty with death, but not to punish innocent babies. “ADOPTION NOT ABORTION” is more than a pro-life slogan. It is God’s will.

HE’S ALWAYS THERE. And He sees how many of us have stood with the pro-choice to murder mob either by our support or by our complacency and unwillingness to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, “ to “defend the rights of the poor and needy”(Proverbs 31:8f) as God commands. THOU, GOD, SEEST ME if I am one who has told my girlfriend or my wife to get an abortion. THOU, GOD, SEEST ME if I have had one.

There is no place to hide from God – in heaven or hell, He is everywhere. The devil and his pro-choice army won’t help a woman with her guilt. But God is there, HE’S ALWAYS THERE, for the present as our Savior and Redeemer. Whatever we have done, let’s not try to hide from God like Adam and Eve. Let’s not try to bury the sin in our hearts. Throw open the door and say with David who also experienced guilt and shame (2 Samuel II, 12; Psalm 32, 51): “Search me, 0 God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. “

There is only one place for the infertile couple, one place for the single parent, one place for the mother with a baby inside, one place for the mother with a family – the same place for the abortionist and for those who look back with guilt. Fear looks back. Worry looks around. Faith looks up at the cross of Jesus where God shed His blood for the forgiveness of all our sins including murder. HE’S ALWAYS THERE in grace and mercy. So let us be there this Mother&Rsquo;s Day, at the foot of the cross, for THOU, GOD, SEEST ME. Amen.

[Reprinted with permission by Pastor Mark Cordes]