Psalm 139:1-18;23-24
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and You know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
You, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and You lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Where can I flee from Your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, You are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there Your hand will guide me,
Your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to You;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to You.
13 For You created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in Your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are Your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with You.
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.
Psalm 139:1-18;23-24 GOD KNOWS US COMPLETELY
Springford Baptist Church: October 22, 2023.
What do we see when we are committed to looking carefully?
When we gaze into a mirror, there is quite a lot of detail that we can see isn’t there?
When we look back at our lives, we can see a pattern of God with us always and we can recognize the courage this truth gives us to face both the present and the future.
Today, we will turn our attention to looking in and admitting our true thoughts and motivations. God can make it possible to have a mirror that reveals our souls. What do you expect to see and to learn when you take time to look in, to consider your deepest thoughts and motivations? This is certainly something to be done carefully and prayerfully. In all our looking and examining, we want to be praying to discover what God wants us to see. However, it doesn’t end there. We will also need to pray that God will help us to take what we have discovered by looking in and to apply this understanding in the way that God intends.
David begins Psalm 139 with prayer, “You have searched me Lord and You know me.” (vs. 1) How does this recognition make you feel? Most of us have some thoughts and some things in our lives that are private. No one else knows about them, but obviously God who knows everything, will know everything about us. God does know us completely.
We could be anxious, even embarrassed about this or we could be comforted by this.
Think of it this way. Yes, God does know everything about us, every thought, every action and He still loves us. God’s love and acceptance of us is absolutely unconditional!
We can dare to look in and do a completely honest inventory of who we are knowing that God already knows and responds to us with everlasting love.
It is true that God knows us even better than we know ourselves. This means that in our looking in, we can turn to God for Him to reveal to us what we in our limited capacity may be unable or unwilling to see.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
You, Lord, know it completely.
Verses 2-4 provide examples of how well God knew David.
God knew every move he made. Sitting and rising are two opposites that represent all his actions.
God knew his thoughts from afar. God may seem far away, but He is close enough to know every thought all the time.
David’s daily activities are familiar to the Lord. The opposites of going out in the morning and lying down at night represent the whole day’s activities.
Nothing happens of which God is not aware.
vs. 4 imagine that even before a word is on David’s tongue, God knows it completely.
In other words, “You know everything I am going to say before I start the first sentence.
Isn’t that amazing?
God knowing absolutely everything about him was true for David and it is true for us!
vss. 5,6 What is David’s response to God knowing him so well? This is too much, too wonderful he says, “I can’t take it all in! When we are looking in, we are doing it with God nodding and smiling because anything that we discover, God is saying , “Yes, I already knew that.” God does know us completely.
It might be that we as human beings feel overwhelmed by this close knowledge that God has of us, but as David says there is nowhere we could escape:
“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens , You are there; if I make my bed in the depths You are there.” (vss. 7,8)
God is present everywhere and this is actually reassuring. There is nowhere we can go that God is not with us. There is no circumstance in any one of our lives that God doesn’t know about and accompany us through it!
vs. 9 “If I rise on the wings of the dawn , if I settle on the far side of the sea…” God is already there waiting. And God’s hand will guide and comfort him, just as God will do for us.
vss. 11-12 Darkness and light are the same to God because He is all seeing and all present. God is everywhere.
vss. 13-18 The thought that the darkness cannot conceal anyone from the Lord brings to David’s mind that God knew all about him when He created him in his mother’s womb.
vss. 14-17 (The Message Translation). The conclusion is that we are marvelously made by God:
“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.”
God has known us completely all along! Isn’t this remarkable? He knows every detail. What comes to us as unexpected is not unexpected to God.
Listen to verse 18:
“When I awake I am still with you.”
This gives us courage for the new day. No matter how hard yesterday may have been, we are still with God! God has not slipped away in the night.
In whatever way that our actions or thoughts may have disappointed God, God does not leave us and give up on us.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to awaken in the morning not knowing if God would be right there with me for the new day. But I don’t even have to wonder about that because God promises never to leave us!
The last 2 verses of this Psalm are a looking in experience that really captures the whole truth of things. Since God knows each one of us so completely, we can only really look in when we invite Him to be part of that. We can invite God to search us and know our hearts-our deepest longings. We can trust God to know our anxious thoughts-our deepest fears. None of this is hidden from God. When He is doing the searching and the revealing of what is really there inside us, there is no denying it.
And the outcome of looking in with God must be this:
vs. 24 “See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
This is a willingness for God to know us completely and to point out what there is in each of us that needs to change. Yes, it may make us uncomfortable to acknowledge it, but God brings it to our attention so that we can be set free from it.
As Christians, we have this tremendous capacity, with God’s help, to overcome sin in our lives! Things do not have to just continue on as same old, same old.
David prays, vs 24 “… and lead me in the way everlasting.”
/ “guide me on the road to eternal life.”
This is what our relationship with God through Jesus Christ compels us toward. Our final destination is eternal life and God is not waiting for heaven to transform us into the people we are called to be. God has business with each of us right now to lead us in the way He has for us.
Only a God like our God who already knows everything about us and everything that will happen to us can lead us in the way we should go. When God looks in us, what does He see? What does He see that needs to change? We can be led in the way everlasting. God wants to do this with us, but it can only happen as we surrender all to Him!
Will we look in and will we surrender all to our loving God who knows us completely?