In thousands of classrooms all over the world teachers are indoctrinating naive and impressionable students with the notion that they are an accident, the result of millions of years of random anomalies and lucky deformities, or that what they do with their lives is just a matter of preference and there is no divine designer who created them. But the Bible tells us that God designed us with a purpose in mind. Psalm 139:14 says we have been 'fearfully and wonderfully made.' It is only in recent years, with advances in science, that we are beginning to understand just how true those words are. Your body is a mind-blowing feat of engineering '” an unbelievably complex design. Did you know that your body employs the aid of more than two hundred muscles just to take a single step?

Consider the human eye, the design of which is so elegant and complex scientists still don't fully understand how it works. It moves on average one hundred thousand separate times in a single day; conducts its own maintenance work while we sleep; has automatic aim, focus, and aperture adjustment; provides colour, stereoscopic 3-D images; and can function from almost total darkness to bright light automatically. It can discern more than sixteen million colour hues, including seven hundred shades of grey. In fact, Charles Darwin himself said, 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.'

Your skin can contain in one square centimetre: 3,000 sensory cells, 12 heat sensors, 200 pain sensors, 700 sweat glands, 1 yard of blood vessels, 3 million cells, and 4 yards of nerves that send messages to our brains at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. Your brain weighs only about 3 pounds yet contains 12 billion cells, each of which is connected to 10,000 other brain cells, making 120 trillion connections. It generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all of the world's telephones put together yet uses less energy than a refrigerator light.

The DNA molecules in your body contain the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe. Their code is so unbelievably complex that if you printed out all of your body's DNA chemical 'letters' in books, it is estimated that it would create enough books to fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!

Of course, I could go on and on and on citing the wonders of gravity and magnetism that science still cannot fully explain, the flawless rhythm of the solar system, the perfect balance of nitrogen and oxygen in earth's atmosphere that makes life possible, the amazing order in nature that forms a self-supporting system of life, reproduction, and waste disposal. But is any of this necessary? What more evidence do we need that our world has been created with intelligence and purpose than the beauty, order, and design we see around us and within us?

No person who has ever been created is an accident, a fluke of nature, the hapless by-product of the union of a man and a woman, or the result of millions of years of unguided mishaps. Every person who has ever been born is a unique creation, an intentional work of art crafted by the hand of the master artist.

God told Jeremiah, 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations' (Jer. 1:5, nkjv). God both knew and crafted a destiny for Jeremiah the prophet even before his birth. John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit and called to be the forerunner of Jesus even before he was born (Luke 1:15). Samson was called to be a great deliverer before he was conceived in his mother's womb (Judg.13:4-5).

Isaiah 46:10 says God declares 'the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done' (nkjv). Romans 4:17 says that God 'quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.' Psalm 139:15-16 says, 'You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day' (The Message).

God called Jeremiah a 'prophet' before he was born. God called John a 'forerunner' before he was born. God called Samson a 'deliverer' before he was born. And this is why, even though God found a trembling, perspiring coward in the winepress, He called Gideon 'a mighty man of fearless courage.' God saw inside Gideon the potential He had created in him before he was born. While Gideon was still in his mother's womb, God called him a mighty man of valour, and God never gave up on that dream for Gideon's life.

Someone once told me, 'I don't believe in God.' I said, 'That's unfortunate, because God believes in you.' Before you were even born, before God began to fashion and form you, before He began to knit you together in your mother's womb, He had a dream for you and a plan for your life. He had a holy calling for you to fulfil. Paul told Timothy that it was God 'who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began' (2 Tim. 1:9).

Gideon was full of imperfections, he was not esteemed highly in the eyes of other people, and he was a downright looser in his own eyes. But God looked at Gideon just as Michelangelo looked at that rejected piece of marble. In Gideon God could see beauty where everyone else saw only defects. My friend, you might have been written off by everyone else. You might think your life is far too flawed to ever be something beautiful. But our God is the master artist! He sees 'an angel' in the rock of your life, and He wants to set it free. Throughout your life, no matter where you go or what you do, whenever God looks at you, He sees inside of you the potential He placed within you, and He is always calling to that potential as He called Lazarus out of the grave, 'Come out!' God wants to take your life from the junkyard of the devil and turn it into a masterpiece, a trophy of His amazing grace and mercy.