Search us God

Psalm 139:23-24 (NIV)
23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

The psalmist asks God to examine him for anything that might offend God. The psalmist desires to be right with God even to the point of being tested by God. The psalmist is anxious for he has seen what his adversaries are trying to do and his greatest desire is for God to lead him in the right direction.

 

 

Imagine you’re out for a hike on a beautiful spring day and you come to a creek. But there’s something wrong with this picture. You notice that someone has dumped trash into the stream—an ugly sight. Judging by some of the empty soda cans, the trash has been there awhile. And there is an ugly film on top of the water. You can’t just leave the scene as you found it, because it would bother your conscience. So you stoop down and begin gathering the trash.

It actually takes several hours before you can begin to see a difference; it’s amazing how much junk is there. You sit back, rest for a moment, and realize you’ll have to keep returning each day until the site is truly clean. But when you come back the next day, it’s as if your work has been undone.

In fact there’s more trash than before. Somehow the garbage bred overnight. You think about the unlikelihood of someone coming to this very spot to dump their garbage in the few hours while you were away, and you realize that something smells fishy—so to speak. So you begin to follow the creek upstream.

Sure enough, you come to a garbage dump that has been there for years. It’s emptying into the passing creek. Your cleaning job only opened up a gap for more stuff to settle. You could go and clean every day …. If you want your creek to be clean, that means going directly to the source and dealing with what’s there. [Condensed from Kyle Idleman, Gods at War (Zondervan, 2013)]

The psalmist above asked God to examine him and to pinpoint the offense things in his life. He asked God to go right to the source, his heart, and examine it. Then if there was something there that needed to change he asked God to lead him towards that change. I believe we all need to ask God to search us for what can change in our lives for the good and live out the response God gives us.