Focus 40: Day 15 - March 25, 2011

Seeking the Known about the Unknown

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. -Psalm 139:23 NIV

The psalmist ends his psalm with these words, but what he says before makes these words all the more remarkable. At the beginning of the psalm, the psalmist recognizes that God sees when he sits and rises, that God knows his thoughts, that God is familiar with all his ways. God even knows what he will do before he does it. The psalmist declares that God's knowledge is "wondrous," even miraculous.

The psalmist goes on to say that God is omnipresent. There is no where he can go to hide from God – not the highest heavens and or the deepest depths. Finally, the psalmist declares that he is "fearfully and wonderfully made." God knows his inner being greater than the psalmist knows himself.

After making all these declarations, the psalmist speaks to God and states that his zeal is for Him. He is not like the enemies of God who seek to destroy the righteous. It is at this point that the psalmist declares, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts." The psalmist was asking God to see if his words were true; that he was a zealous man. God did not need the psalmist's permission to know the innermost thoughts of the psalmist. God knew them already.

This psalm is a reminder that God knows us better than we know ourselves. God made us. God knows how we are wired. God knows what we want, what we think, what we do. He knows this even before we realize what we want, before we think, before we do anything.

It is not God who is distant from us. It is us who refuse to be intimate with God. We believe that we can hide from God. That what we think is personally ours. It takes courage to seek intimacy with God. When we ask God to search our most innermost thoughts and see if they pure and noble, we are asking God to reveal to us those secret thoughts and desires which are against Him. The risk is that God might find something we are ashamed of or feel guilty about.

The reality is that since God already knows the deepest parts of our hearts and minds, we ought to be honest about them with ourselves and acknowledge them before God. Allow God to test your thoughts. Allow the light to shine onto all sinful and shameful desires. Confront these desires; confess them, ask God to give you the desires of His heart. Don't shy away from intimacy with God. Instead cling to the one who created you.

Darren R. Covington, First Church of God, Greensburg, Indiana.