Grapevine Ministries
Messages from the bible to uplift and encourage those that need a word from the Lord, to strengthen their faith. Ps Phillip Barker is an itinerant pastor in Perth, Western Australia.
Grapevine Ministries
Knowing God Personally At Christmas
What if the lead-up to Christmas became less about noise and more about being fully known? We open Psalm 139 and follow David’s very human path—victories, failures, conflict, and restoration—to meet a God who searches us, surrounds us, and still chooses us. This isn’t theory; it’s the kind of truth that steadies anxious minds, softens hard rooms, and gives ordinary days a sense of destiny.
We begin with God’s omniscience and the startling comfort that nothing in our lives is hidden. From public masks to private thoughts, God sees it all and does not look away. Then we move into God’s omnipresence, tracing David’s language across heights and depths, east and west, darkness and dawn. For anyone walking through spiritual fog or emotional heaviness, the promise of unbroken presence and the light of Christ offers courage for the next step. We slow down at the wonder of being fearfully and wonderfully made—formed with care, known before birth, valued beyond metrics and mistakes—because identity is the soil where purpose grows.
Holiness emerges not as harshness but as alignment with God’s heart. David’s strong words against wickedness lead to a braver prayer: Search me. We talk about moral clarity that refuses both vengeance and denial, inviting God to sift our anxious thoughts and lead us toward life. From there we turn to calling. Not all are sent to a pulpit, but all are sent somewhere—into families, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and creative spaces—to heal, serve, build, and bear good news. Purpose is discovered through surrendered hearts, honest prayer, and faithful action, not by chasing titles or trends.
As we near Christmas, we invite you to reframe the season around presence, love, and family. Let Psalm 139 remind you that you are fully known, never alone, and intentionally made. If this conversation helped you breathe a little easier, share it with a friend, subscribe for the next part of the series, and leave a review—what truth are you carrying into Christmas this year?
Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world - Welcome to Grapevine Ministries.
I always seem to find it challenging to um find the right way of speaking about our relationship with our Heavenly Father in connection with Christmas, which is undoubtedly the most important event on the Christian calendar. So I'm going to start and hopefully these will all link together over the next five or six weeks. So this one is The Divine Attributes of a Personal God. It's an intensely personal song that David wrote to his father in heaven. Even though this psalm was not intended to be a theological discourse of some kind, David did express God's divine attributes as he described his relationship with God. Now my podcast message today, and I pray this will help us all to understand more about the kind of personal relationship we can have with God. Now, David did not write theorologically about God. He wrote his psalm based on his personal experience and his personal relationship with God. David fought many battles and he won and lost a lot, both on and off the battlefield. David was a man who experienced tremendous success and tremendous failure, which God saw as sin. He was a man who enjoyed tremendous victories and tremendous losses. Now David, in the course of his lifetime, experienced conflict in his home and conflict in his own heart, and yet he looked back over the course of his life and wrote this Psalm 139. Now he wrote this from the perspective of his personal knowledge and understanding of God, as God had revealed himself throughout his lifetime. Now I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I mean, you can never hear enough of this, but David was a man after God's own heart. So with him, you know, just being as human as every one of us, we have good days and bad days, we have victories and we have failures. David, in the course of his lifetime, experienced conflict in many, many ways. So in saying that the perspectives of in relation to his personal understanding of who God is. So I want to look through the psalm, basically trying to look through the lens of David, as in how it is that God personally is all knowing in our lives, God is that God that is personally ever present in our lives, and how is it that God is all powerful personally in our lives? This is it that God is all holy in our lives as it concerns us. God is all knowing because he is fully knowing every person because he created us. So for those who are unfamiliar with the Psalm, let's take a closer look at this. We start off with obviously Psalm 139 1, and it says, O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. Now the Hebrew word for search means to mine or dig deep. As though digging for minerals in the earth, God is digging deep into David's heart. So let's put it this way God is familiar with every intimate detail of our lives, and nothing escapes his knowledge. He knows everything about us, he is intimately acquainted with us, and he is familiar with us in all our ways. Now that's a bit scary sometimes, but it's also a good thing. Hebrews four thirteen puts it this way Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Now it's interesting to note that the King James Version does not include the word me at the end of verse one. So it's making it really, really significant. We should read this verse with the understanding that God has searched us and he knows. God knows when we are at leisure and when we at work. See, God knows all of our thoughts. And Psalm 139 2 says, You perceive my thoughts from afar. I feel a need to ensure that we all feel encouraged and also concerned about guarding our thought life. God knows about our public life and our private life. In Psalm 139 3 it says this you discern my going out, that's our public life, and my laying down, which is our private life. You are familiar with all my ways. Job thirty one four puts it this way Does he not see my ways and count my every step? See, God knows what we are going to say before we say it. If you think that I'm being a bit malicious in my breakdown today, it's because as we approach one of the most important events in the Christmas calendar, I think it is important to be reminded just how important you are to him. See, this is us looking at it from a different perspective, like it's one-on-one. You know, he's all about us. Now let's keep going. Psalm 139 4. Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, O Lord. And 1 Corinthians 13 12 puts it this way Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. See, God knows everything about us, He knows what we've done, He knows every place we've gone, He knows every idea that and every thought that we've had, He knows every word we formulated before it even rolled off our tongues, and yet He still loves us. Because to be quite honest, a lot of the stuff that comes out of our mouth is not the sort of things that God really wants to hear. This is why, in part, I'm convinced that David wrote that, you know, such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. This transcends any human relationship. No other person on the planet knows us like God knows us. God knows us better than we even know ourselves, and I think that's very important to remind ourselves of sometime. Now, we'll miss a couple of verses. Let's jump down to Psalm 139 6, and it says, Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. And Psalm 139 7 through to 12 talks all about the omnipresence of God. Now, we understand that God is ever present, so he is always with every person. Now, if we put it into context, all eight billion of us, and you're you thought Sander was good. Well, because he only gives presents to the good ones, not the bad ones. That's a joke, people, okay? Um, yeah, but God knows every single one of us. Let's read on. Let's go to Psalm 139 seven to eight. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. The Hebrew word for depth is shoal, which is ancient word for hell. So in other words, he's telling you it doesn't matter whether you go up or go down, he knows everything there is a no about you. Psalm 139 through to ten says this if I rise on the wings of the dawn, that's the easterly side, if I settle on the far side of the sea, which is in the west, everywhere we go, God will never forsake or abandon us. God is there when we experience times of spiritual darkness, and he is the one who can bring us out. Because when he's talking about up and down, it's basically he's saying north and south. So here we see that he's covering us everywhere we go, north, south, east, or west. He is aware of what we're doing and where we're going. Now we look at John 8 12. This is what it says here. When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. See, God is there when we experience times of emotional darkness, and he is the one who can bring us out of that darkness. Psalm hundred and seven ten to fourteen says this some sat in the darkness and the depth glooms. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He brought them out of the darkness and the deepest gloom and broke away their chains. Psalm one hundred and thirty nine thirteen to eighteen, the omnipresence of God, God is always powerful and he has always wonderfully created every single one of us. And Psalm one hundred thirty nine thirteen to fourteen says this for you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderfully, I know that full well. Jeremy one five says this before I was formed in your womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart. It's unfortunately that a lot of people don't know this or believe this. Every human life matters to God both inside and outside the womb. God has knowledge of us even before we're conceived. Listen, friends, you can't read Psalm 139 without understanding that every human life matters to God, both inside and outside the womb. God cherishes human life. If he knows our unformed body even before we are conceived, and if he knit us together in our mother's womb, then he has created us with purpose and intention and value. Now that should put a lot of things to bed as far as people that are um you know pro-abortion and uh all sorts of different aspects of that, and I'm not going to get on my soapbox about this, but just look at how meticulously God is aware of you and your situation with everything, and that's why we need to understand about how we are wonderfully created. The human life is an expression of his divine power. Life. Your life is not an accident, and life is certainly not a blob of tissue in a mother's womb. On the authority of Psalm 139 alone, I can declare to you that God is pro-life, and so should every other Christian be also. Because Psalm 139 through to 24, it speaks about the omnirighteousness of God. Now you've got him omnipresent, and now you've got him omnirighteous. God is all holy and he is constantly working for every person. We think of hate and love as opposite extremes, but in biblical terms they were not necessarily meant as opposites, but were sometimes used as comparative statements. So when David wrote about hating the wicked, what he was really writing about was comparative to the holiness of God, he was not expressing personal vengeance, he was expressing a moral repundance, right? He was writing about the wickedness of the world and how it was morally repugnant to him, to our heavenly father. Even Jesus used the word hate in Luke 14 26. Now, Jesus didn't mean that you should disdain from the people that you love or the people that are in your own life. He used the the word hate in a biblical uh ancient sense, meaning that we need to love Jesus more than anyone else. But least you think that David was making a profane statement about his own righteousness, he actually asked God to search his own heart for wickedness. Luke 14, 26 says this. Well, he puts it this way, actually, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brother, his sister, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciples. It's look, it's a bit harsh, but what it really means is he, God, wants to be first, and above all everything else, for everyone else, he wants to be first and foremost in your life in any way, shape, or form. And see, like so hate is a form of sin. So if you're in sin, he wants you out of sin. And so he's not saying from a worldly perspective to hate your family, it's just the way that it's written. He's basically saying, Hey, if you want to serve me, you put me first and foremost in everything you say and everything you do. Psalm hundred and thirty-nine, twenty-three to twenty-four says this Search me, O God, and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any offensive you know, in other words, any wickedness weigh in me and lead me in the way everlasting. So if you look at those scriptures, it's very clear here that God is saying, Listen, I'm omnipresent, he's I'm omnirighteousness, and I want to make sure that you, the person that I knew before you were actually formed in your mother's womb, there was already a plan and a purpose for you, a godly plan and purpose for you. Now, unfortunately, a very small percentage of people get to understand their call and what it is that God wants from them. And look, to be quite honest, it doesn't automatically mean that everybody is um part of the fivefold ministry, right? It doesn't mean that you're just called to be a servant in the house, it doesn't mean that um you're supposed to be an evangelist, you know, going all over the world, bringing people to the Lord, praying for the sick, you know, the list goes on and on and on. What it is, it's saying that God has a plan and a purpose for you, and that could be that he's gifted you with entrepreneurial skills, and so he wants you in the corporate world, right? He could want you, you know, working or donating your time uh to a charitable cause. The point that I'm trying to make here is that do not think that what the world says about you is true, and I mean, I'll give you an example. You've probably heard this said of you or said about you or said to someone that you know. Um, it it could be say this, listen, you're never going to amount to anything, so why are you going to all this effort to try and be academically astute or whatever? You know, everybody. Luke 4, 18 and 19 puts it this way: the spirit of the Lord is upon you because He's anointed you to preach the gospel, to heal the brokenhearted, to set those that are in captivity free, and to declare the acceptable year of the Lord. You can be involved in all of that or just part of that, and the only way you are going to know the call on your life is to first and foremost give your heart to Jesus. Secondly, you need to spend time in prayer and ask him to show you, you know, what the call is on your life, and a lot of people think, oh, I gotta stop work and I've got to go to Bible college and I've got to do this, and then I've got to go over to Africa and start building houses for you know people that don't have them, or there's so many different aspects of your Christian lifestyle that you can actually operate in or be effective in parts thereof. But the main thing is, and this is what I want to reiterate, because we I'm gonna lead up to Christmas a little bit different this year, and that's what I try to do all the time. So I'm being led by the Holy Spirit as we move through the next you know four weeks and um and get through Christmas and the new year, but the most important thing I want to get through to you right here and right now is know that you are important, you know, you are important in whatever you choose to do and whatever you are involved in. It could be that you're just a stay-at-home mum, and that's what God's called you to do. It could be that you are called into the five-fold ministry and do what I'm doing, or plant your own church. There are so many different aspects and so many different areas in which you can serve God, and it starts with understanding the true purpose behind Christmas. Forget about all the hype and Black Friday and you know, Christmas sales, and getting the right present and all this sort of stuff. It all gets down to one primary thing that a lot of people overlook. And God is all about family, God is all about love, God is all about sharing that love that is shed abroad in your heart, and sometimes Christmas can be the worst place to be in and around your own family members, but other times it could be the perfect place to be. All right. We'll talk to you more about this as we get closer and closer to celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior. Amen.
