05/31/2026
Grace and mercy to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear Friends in Christ,
God is thinking about you! What do you spend your day thinking about? I am willing to bet, even if you spend a lot of your time in prayers, devotions, reading Scripture, you are not spending nearly the time that God spends thinking about you. In our Psalm for today, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (v.4). God is thinking about us all the time and quite possibly that makes us uncomfortable.
We might be thinking that God is out to get us or that He has a bone to pick with us. We could be asking why things do not go as planned in our lives. We might at times even be convinced that God is more akin to an angry general than a loving Father. That God is like Santa, knowing when we have been bad or good, and punishing us accordingly. When we examine ourselves according to the law, we all have very long lists of things for which we are ashamed.
We could be thinking that God is disappointed in us, our lives may not be what we dreamed it would be. Maybe we think that God is not so much punishing us, but just is not bothering to spend much time to help us. We might think that God has better Christians to concern Himself with. God sees the lust, covetousness, shame, and ingratitude in our hearts. The blessings that we have missed out on are not His fault, but ours. We don’t blame God for our problems and for not caring. We might even envision God as a distant God, who is only intimately involved in the lives of the really outstanding believers, and that God may be thinking about how little we matter to him and his greater plan. Quite possibly we ask ourselves why wouldn’t God be thinking about us, we are worth thinking about! Everyone tells us so, we could be great at school, a hard worker, faithful husband or wife. We pay our taxes, pray for missions. We are outstanding Christians and are the Lord’s best allies! Maybe we don’t have the courage to say that out loud, but we are all self-righteous deep down, proven by the fact that we get mad at God when things do not go our way, plus all our other sinful and prideful attitudes.
We sure think a lot about ourselves, don’t we? At different times and to various degrees during our lives of faith, we obsess over our metaphysical and existential questions about who we are and what God thinks about us, instead of thinking about God and others. That shows us our deep egoism, even when cloaked by our self-pity, despair, or humility. As unregenerate sinners, we are spiritually hardwired to turn inward upon ourselves for meaning, hope, and purpose. This is a because of the Old Adam, that the New Adam is compelled to resist. We look inside ourselves for the ultimate word and final authority, the message and feelings of our hearts and emotions. But these arise from a non-Christian interpretation of life experiences instead of from the external Word of God.
We set ourselves us a god, taking the place of the real God, making the same error as Adam and Eve did in the garden, the same error as our enemy Satan. Even the most pious among us will slip away from meditating upon God in selfless adoration to thinking that such Christian devotion merits points with God, upon which His treatment of us is contingent. We creatures effectively behave as if we are God’s judge, observing our Creator through a microscope, as opposed to the other way around.
Contrast this with God, who directs his attention outside of himself, such as in creating the world, and not even doing it for his sake but for ours. The psalm here and elsewhere emphasizes the intimate description of the great care he took in designing creation and concerning himself with all of the details, for us and including us. From verse three, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.” God cares about all the details in your life, as his very fingers active in forming your heart and soul.
The ultimate act of creation is the sending of Christ, the King of creation, for us. The divine Creator is greater than all of us put together, yet he, without any hesitation took on human flesh, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the virgin Mary. The psalmist asks the very profound question as to why God would bother with any of this, to be associated with us in his state of humiliation, even unto death on the cross for our sake. But here is the answer to that question. The real reason God is thinking about you is that he loves you and is crazy about you. The Almighty Triune Lord has been thinking about you, both as He created the world and as He visited it, out of love for us.
God does have a bone to pick, but one that Christ, who is “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.” (Gen 2:23), settled by his atoning sacrifice. Forgiving our sins cost him his life on the cross. When the Father sent his only-begotten Son to earth, he became lower than the angels, not by nature but by status, through his state of humiliation. Because he who knew no sin became sin on the cross, the Father and Holy Spirit abandoned him for a moment, one of the most profound and greatest wonders of history, and an experience more bitterly painful for God than any bodily torture imaginable. He did it all for us, to put us on God’s mind for eternity and in a happy way.
Psalm 8 ponders how strange it is that our majestic, self-sufficient God would be concerned about little old you. After all, he made the whole of creation for us to enjoy, knowing full well that we would mess it up! He then took the required steps to redeem us from that failure. Saving us insignificant rebellious bunch of sinners may be even a greater mystery than the understanding of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate this day and articulate in our Creeds. Though we all still bear the consequences of our sins through the various sufferings and trials that we endure in life, in God’s mind we are held as his beloved children, and he remains obsessed with our personal welfare. We will someday know this to be true when we enter heaven, but for now we live by faith.
Our value in God’s eyes surpasses any disappointment we have caused him. We are his children and the crown of his creation. God was eager to create the world in a week so that he could get to the best part: making you and me and giving it all to us! God thinks about us because he created us. Like an artist who paints a masterpiece to hang in his own house as a private collection to enjoy, we don’t just pass by his thoughts like an occasional memory; rather, we are always on his mind. Perhaps we could even say that he created us in order to think about us. The Holy Trinity, whom we honor today, went through the trouble to save us, knowing ahead of time the whole outlandish cost. That is how much he values each one of us, as we are wonderfully and beautifully made by him and for him.
God thinks about us because we are in Christ. God thinks about us because God thinks about Christ, who is obviously worth thinking about. Because we have been put in Christ through Holy Baptism, God treats us as if we are Christ. What the psalmist says about Christ, God says about us; “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands, you have put all things under his feet.” (vv. 4-6). When we pray, it is as if Christ is making the appeal for himself. When the Father looks at us, he sees his perfectly good and holy Son. We have authority to trample all evil under our feet as if they were Christ’s feet.
This mystery is radical, but radically good! We in America have become so accustomed to thinking of God familiarly, and with such an arrogant high view of self, that we have a hard time seeing how incredible the incarnation is. In contrast, the Jews were uncomfortable even uttering the name of God since it was too holy. And yet this immortal God became flesh and incorporated all of us into his flesh and blood, his Body, the church, via our saving new birth of Holy Baptism, when he inscribed us with his holy and precious name. Every time you remember your baptism or take to heart the words of the pastor’s absolution, the finger of God retraces that name on our heart and head, purifying our thoughts, words, and deeds. “Do this in remembrance of me” offers a chance to remember that God has not forgotten us but is really present here for you, one of the reasons we now light the altar candles at every service, and is in, with, and under bread and wine for our forgiveness. We are always on his mind, not as a memory but as an ever-present reality.
Just as God thinks of others, so we, in him, do the same. Our Gospel announces the mandate of the church to “go….and make disciples of all nations” in the name of the Holy Trinity (Mt 28:19). The season of Pentecost accentuates this, and the Mother of God exemplifies in her message to Elizabeth and her magnificent song of praise, The Magnificat, the wonder-working power of the Gospel for others. So, God thinks about us not only because of our value to him but also for our value to his mission. Psalm 8 prophesied that “out of the mouth of babes and infants” the Gospel would be preached (v. 2). We are those babes. Although appearing weak and powerless, in Christ we are strong and mighty, proclaiming the works of God to everyone in our life so they can also become his children. God turns us from thinking of ourselves to thinking about others, just as he has done for us.
God is thinking about us all the time! God is obsessed with us, like a parent over their kids. When Christians get married, they already start planning their families. They spend a lot of time thinking about the future. But those happy thoughts do not compare to the joy of their hopes when the dreams materialize. Well, God could not wait to create the world and even die for the world! This is the joy of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate today. And when Mary visited Elizabeth, the Holy Trinity’s excitement materialized in celebrating the incarnation, the fulfillment of history, of his promise, all out of love for us. Amen.[1]
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
[1] Based on Sermon of Rev. Dr. Harold Ristau, Mount Hope Lutheran Church, Casper, Wyoming.
