Search Me

Psalm 139

June 12, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

A lot of you know I go to Starbucks—let’s just call it “regularly.” And I order online a lot anymore because, if I’m going to be honest, I get aggravated when I end up in line behind someone who obviously doesn’t know what they’re doing. I know my order—grande chai tea latte, non-fat, no water. Hot. And when I get behind the person who is asking a lot of questions, I find my frustration level rising. And about that time, as I’m pulling out my phone to order through the app, I remember, “There was a time when you didn’t know what you were doing, either.”

A lot of people are like that with prayer. You come to church, and you hear people talk about prayer, you hear invitations to prayer meetings, you even hear me or Pastor Rick lead in a prayer, but the whole thing is just—well, it’s strange. It’s not natural. It’s hard—talking to someone you can’t see, who you’re told is all-powerful and can do anything but sometimes doesn’t. The whole thing can be very stressful. And then there’s the language. Are there certain words you’re supposed to use when you pray—God words? I’ve known people, and you’ve known them too, maybe you’ve even been them, who speak perfectly normal until they begin to pray and then out comes the King James language. “O Lord, thou hast blessed us in every imaginable way. Thou art the highest, the mightiest…” You know what I’m talking about. Sometimes we forget that not all of us are experts at prayer. Take a listen to this.

VIDEO: “Michael Jr on Prayer”

Have you ever felt like him? Maybe you feel like that now. So back at the beginning of the year, we focused for a few weeks on prayer, using what is commonly known as “The Wesley Prayer” to shape or give structure to how we interact with God. There are still copies of the bookmark with that prayer in the chapel, by the way, if you have lost yours or didn’t get one. I invited you to pray that prayer each day, and a few of you told me that it’s a hard prayer to pray. It is. I find it challenging, and I’ve prayed it off and on for many years. But following Jesus was never meant to be easy, or safe. It was meant to life-changing. So here at mid-year, it made sense (to me anyway) to do sort of a “prayer check-up,” and we’re going to do that by looking at some “dangerous prayers,” prayers from the Scriptures that challenge the way we usually approach the God of the universe.

I’ve got to admit it’s easy for me to slip into routine, predictable, even boring prayer. Some days I sort of picture God in heaven saying, “Oh, here comes Dennis again. I already know what he’s going to ask for; it’s the same stuff he asks for every day.” I pray and I wonder if anything is different, if my prayers mean anything. I read in the Scriptures how prayer motivated and moved people to conquer kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, escape death, and become powerful in battles (cf. Hebrews 11:32-38) and I wonder why my prayer life seems so…safe. For a lot of folks today, prayer is seen either as an afterthought or an action that is “not enough.” You’ve seen it just like I have, especially in the wake of the mass shootings that continue to take place—when you offer to pray for someone, the response is often, “Well, aren’t you going to do something?” Is it because our prayers have become so tame that people don’t believe prayer has any value any longer? That was not the perspective of the psalmist or of others in Scripture. They knew the importance of and the danger in prayer. What if prayer was considered “dangerous” again? Over the next three weeks we’re going to look at three “dangerous” prayers that can, I believe, not only strengthen our lives of prayer but even change the perception of prayer among God’s people and others. The three prayers are simple: Search Me, Break Me, and Send Me.

So we begin with the prayer that frames Psalm 139 that we read a few moments ago: “Search me, O God.” Today, when someone mentions doing a “search,” the assumption is that they’re looking for some sort of information online. Somewhere along the way, the company “Google” became a verb: we “google” something. What are you doing? “I’m googling it.” There have been many occasions in our LifeGroup where I or someone else has said something that seemed unbelievable, and immediately several phones come out to “google” it and see if it’s really true or not. Can you believe they would doubt my word? And then there’s the scourge of “predictive searching,” where Google (or whatever your search engine of choice is) tries to guess what you’re looking for. So you start to type in a word or phrase and suddenly, the computer is trying to complete your sentence, trying to guess what you’re about to type. It’s supposed to be helpful; I find it annoying and wrong more often than it’s right. But with God, the search is different. It’s not us searching him; it’s him searching (“googling”?) us.

The way this psalm is structured is interesting. In the beginning of the psalm, the psalmist is acknowledging something that has already happened: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me” (139:1). And what does God know about the psalmist? A lot of things are listed in those next few verses; I won’t attempt to list them all again. You heard them in the Scripture reading, but here’s just a few things.

• God knows the psalmist’s thoughts (139:2).
• God knows the words we’re going to say before we say them (139:4).
• God knew us before we were born, and he did the “knitting together” of who we are in our mother’s womb (139:13).
• God knows the length of our life (139:16).

I don’t know about you, but those facts alone inspire both worship and a little bit of fear. I might ruin your image of me, but my thoughts are not always things I want God to overhear. I’m willing to bet yours aren’t either. And yet God “perceives” all of them. The psalmist basically says “we are the continual object of [God’s] thoughts” (Williams, Communicator’s Commentary: Psalms 73-150, pg. 488). There’s never a moment when we are off his mind. That’s amazing to me. There is no limit to what God knows about you and me (cf. Russell, OneBook: The Psalms, Part III, pg. 81). And what’s even more amazing is that, in spite of him knowing us that well, he still chooses to love us.

That’s because “God has made us, and He knows how we work” (Williams 485). He “shaped [us] first inside, then out;” he knows us inside and out (139:13, 15 in Peterson, The Message Bible, pg. 1081). And while God doesn’t need our invitation to “search” us, he still chooses to give us the choice. He chooses to stand back until we invite him in (cf. Goldingay, Psalm for Everyone—Part 2, pg. 200). So, at the end of the psalm, the singer invites God again to search him. “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (139:23-24). Why does he give God this invitation if he has already been “searched”? It’s because the psalmist wants to keep the lines of communication open. He’s praying that God would reveal anything that might be standing in the way of their relationship.

Because here’s the thing: we don’t know our own hearts. Or maybe a better way to say it is this: we don’t own up to what is actually in our hearts. We read or pray a psalm like this and we think: no big deal. God knows what’s in my heart. Well, I’m basically a good person, so there’s nothing for me to worry about. We buy the lie of our basic goodness. But the Bible won’t play that game. Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, says we ought to know better. He wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9). So when we tell ourselves that we’re basically good, we’re deceiving ourselves. That’s what Jeremiah says. I’ve said I learned more about original sin and the brokenness of humanity by watching my children when they were very young than I ever learned in theology class. No one has to teach us to be selfish when we are little. We’re naturals! For that matter, we don’t really have to be taught when we are older, either, but we do get better at masking it. Or consider lying; no one teaches us how to do it. But we pick up the practice somewhere along the way so that we can look good, so that we don’t hurt someone’s feelings, so that we feel better about the choices we make. Pastor Craig Groeschel describes our way of thinking this way: “I’m not materialistic; I just like nice things. I’m not a gossip; I’m just telling them so they can pray. I don’t have a problem; this is just my one thing I do to cope” (Dangerous Prayers, pg. 34). That’s what Jeremiah was saying: “The heart is deceitful above all things.”

The Bible says humanity is fallen. We’re not who we should be. Paul, quoting another psalm, put it this way: “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10; cf. Psalm 14:1). A little bit further along in the same letter, he says the same thing in a little different way: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). That reality is what makes this prayer a dangerous prayer. “Search me, O God,” and I sort of picture God saying, “Really? Are you sure? Is that actually what you want? Because you might find out some things you don’t like about yourself.” “This prayer has the potential to convict you. To correct you. To redirect your life. To change the way you see yourself. To change how others see you” (Groeschel 32). This prayer isn’t about asking God for things. It’s about asking God to reveal things in you. It’s dangerous, but it is essential if we are truly going to know God personally.

I’ve been listening to an audiobook written by a former police detective, talking about how they uncover and understand evidence, and one of the things I’ve realized is that when they are searching for evidence at a crime scene, they are determined to uncover absolutely everything they can. In the moment, it might not mean anything, but who knows what piece of evidence will be the key to unlocking the crime? That’s the kind of deep, intensive search the psalmist is asking God to undertake, an intensive search, so what sorts of things might this prayer, this search uncover in our lives?

The first thing the psalmist asks God to reveal is his “anxious thoughts” (139:23). Search me, O God, and show me my fears. I don’t think the psalmist is talking about the things we most often think of as fears, like the fear of mice or the fear of small spaces. Those are surface fears, but this prayer is asking for the revelation of deeper fears, the things that keep you awake at night, the anxious thoughts that keep your brain running long after your body is worn out. Said another way: what are the things you are trying to control, the fears that keep you from fully trusting God? For a lot of new parents, it becomes fears about their children and all the awful things the world can do to them. Ernest Hemingway put it well: “When you have a child, the world has a hostage.” Or maybe it’s aging concerns. What happens if I get sick? What happens if I’m left alone? What happens if I can no longer support myself? And on and on the questions go. Our world has a whole raft of fearful things that keep people awake. Terrorism, bioterrorism, never-ending war, gas prices, everything prices, whether there will be too much month at the end of our money, or just generalized anxiety about the future of everything. Pick a fear. There are plenty of things to keep us awake at night. When we pray “search me,” we’re asking God to reveal the places where we’re clinging to things that terrify us rather than handing them over to a God who is big enough to handle it.

I know of what I speak, because fear and anxiety have often burrowed deep into my unsearched heart. A few years ago, our family was going through a difficult time that I can only describe now as an attack from the enemy. There were a lot of things happening all at once, and I would often sit at home and worry if I was going to be able to take of my family, if we would have a place to live in the long term, wondering if even God had turned his back on us. There were Sundays the anxiety got so bad I could barely walk out onto the platform to lead worship. When I think about it, I can still feel that feeling. So many things came all at once that it was overwhelming. And the worst of the worst happened on my birthday. I wanted to crawl in a hole and disappear. But that night, some wonderful friends came and insisted that we all go out to dinner. That was the last thing I wanted to do, but it was really hard to say no to these friends. So we went out. And that evening, God reminded me that just as we still had people who loved us, we also still had him who would never stop loving us. Are you going to trust me, or are you going to live your life driven by fear? Paul told his young protege Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment” (2 Timothy 1:7, CSB). Search me, O God, and reveal my anxious thoughts so that I can be reminded how much I need you and how deeply I can trust you. God will reveal our fears when we ask him to “search us.”

But it gets worse because he will reveal our sins. The psalmist dares to pray, “See if there is any offensive way in me” (139:24). Another way to translate that is, “See if there is any idolatrous way in me.” Remember a few months ago when we talked about the other gods we are tempted to worship? This prayer asks God to root out things we worship instead of him, things that break our relationship with him. None of us like to be told we are wrong, or that what we have done is sinful. We somehow rationalize ourselves into believing that whatever we do must be automatically okay with God. We seem to be able to convince ourselves of most anything, especially if we get enough “likes” on social media.

I think of King David, whose life we are going to study more in-depth this fall, but there’s the famous story of his indiscretion with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11. Most of us probably remember the story. David should be off with his army but instead he’s hanging out on the rooftop of his palace when he spies a woman bathing nearby. A married woman. A woman married to a man who is off fighting in David’s army. But she is beautiful so he invites her or orders her to the palace and spends the night with her. Lo and behold, she becomes pregnant, so David engages in this elaborate scheme first to trick her husband into sleeping with her and when that fails, he sends the man back to the front lines with his own death sentence in his pocket. Once the husband is dead, David marries Bathsheba and thinks that’s that. He’s gotten away with it, no one will be the wiser, and besides, he reasons, he hasn’t done anything that any other king hasn’t done. But. There’s a “but” to the story. 21 Samuel 11 famously ends this way: “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord” (v. 27). Maybe no one in the kingdom knew. Maybe if they did know they didn’t think much about it. He’s the king, he can do what he wants. But God thinks otherwise.

I think about how we flaunt our sin on social media and in the public square these days, and the ways we give our approval to things that displease the Lord. There has to be a better way, to be able to love people without approving of those things that displease the Lord. In the story of David, God never disowned David even when he sins. In fact, he sends Nathan the prophet to point out David’s sin exactly because he does still love David. If he didn’t, he would just walk away from David, but he doesn’t. He loves him enough to correct him. He loves him enough to remove the “offensive way” in David. And God loves us that much as well. “Lord, show me if there is any offensive way in me.” That’s a prayer that asks God to love us enough to lead us to a better life. The mindset today is that if you love someone you will let them do whatever they want. That’s the only culturally-approved way of loving someone. But when my kids were little, the loving thing to do was to keep them from touching the hot stove with their hands. The loving thing was to keep them from riding their bikes into traffic. The loving thing was to discipline them when they did something wrong, to intervene when they are in danger of hurting themselves, just like God does for David, just like God longs to do for us. Otherwise, we’re settling for a “counterfeit reality” (Groeschel 48) instead of the real that God offers us. What are we rationalizing? God sees through it; we can’t fool him. So when we pray, “Search me,” we invite him to “see if there is any offensive way in me” (139:24).

That, then, will steer us toward the third part of this “search me” prayer. The psalmist puts it this way: “Lead me in the way everlasting” (139:24). This is a prayer about the future, asking God to direct our steps from here on out into the life he has prepared for us. I think a lot of times when we hear “life everlasting,” we just think of eternity, of heaven, of floating on clouds and strumming harps in eternal bliss. But “life everlasting” begins here and now. “Life everlasting” is describing the kind of life God has for us when we choose to walk in his way, when we choose to trust that he knows what is best, when we turn over our fears and our sins to him and allow him to order our steps. It’s God’s presence in our day-to-day lives. Here’s how one author describes it: “Wherever you are weak, his strength is there. Wherever you are hurting, his comfort is available. When you are tempted, his grace will give you a way out” (Groeschel 58). This is a God-soaked life, to steal a phrase from another author. This is a life of dependence on Christ, a life where we invite him to search us and to clear out all the junk so that he can live in us now and with us for eternity.

So that’s our dangerous prayer for this week: “Search me.” I know on the surface, it seems pretty innocuous, but once we really consider what it is we are praying, I hope you can begin to see the ways a prayer like this opens us up to change, to God working and doing in our lives what he wants to do. With each of these three “dangerous” prayers, I want to encourage you—or challenge you—to pray them every day during the coming week. And by “praying” I mean actually praying it, not just saying the words and rushing off to something else (which is my default position, so I’m really talking to myself here). Pray it, sit with it, and give time for God to break through our normal defenses. It is dangerous, though. It just might change your life. So let’s start this morning. Will you pray this week’s prayer with me as we turn our hearts toward God this morning?

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting (139:23-24).