His Eye is On The Sparrow

I was having a not-so-good start this morning. You ever have one of those days?
God's word began speaking to me, gently convicting me as it well should.


My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Psalm 73:26


The Lord gave me that word because I was feeling discouraged, and I was emailing to a friend who was also feeling discouraged. In my head rang loudly with the words all my friends DREAD:

"That reminds me of a song!"

They don't call me the Human Jukebox for nothing, peoples.




Here's the song:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?
When Jesus is my portion
My constant friend is He:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.


Then I started thinking about what God says about those little birds....

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"

and

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—
a place near your altar, O LORD Almighty, my King and my God.


These little birds, some of the most forgotten and underestimated creatures in the land matter to God.



You matter to God.

I matter to God.




It doesn't matter if
you are unorganized
you are addicted
you are exhausted
you feel unloved
you are overweight
you are grieving
you feel ugly
if you can't seem to control your emotions
you had an abortion
you didn't finish high school
you don't know how you are going to pay the bills
you are paralyzed by fear
& finally
even if He doesn't matter to you...



You matter to God.



I was reading about sparrows and come to find out, some of the nesting colonies may have many hundreds of thousands of birds. With that many in a group, it might be hard for a scientist to tell two of them apart or especially to know if one was sick.


It's not too hard for God. Because we matter to Him. He wants to be our portion-meaning, He wants to be our inheritance...what we find most valuable in this life so brief. He wants a relationship with Him to be the One Thing that sustains us through anything.

If He cares when this little bird, relatively useless to man except to entertain with song, falls to the ground and takes notice when one dies, HOW MUCH MORE does our Heavenly Father care for us?



I pray that because of this simple truth, our song will be sung to Jesus
because He is our portion,
because we take joy in His love,
because His sacrifice has won us our freedom.

We don't sing because our lives are perfect. We sing because we know that He notices that they aren't. We don't sing because He has made every problem go away. We sing because He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. We sing not always because we are happy, but because He is with us in our moments of trouble.




I sing because His eye is on the sparrow
&
I know He watches me.






In light of that, I challenge you to notice someone around you who needs encouragment and look for ways to share love with them today.