Search me, O 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.
Psalm 139:23-24
Here in Psalm 139, we witness David making himself completely vulnerable before God. His prayer reflects a heart eager to know God and to be refined by Him.
Do you and I wear masks when we pray? Do we offer up platitudes, posturing before God as we suppress our real thoughts, motivations, and struggles?
Of course, we’re not hiding anything from our omniscient heavenly Father … He knows it all anyway!
Yet we play that game.
Sometimes we avoid God altogether until we “get our act together.” Shame keeps us in hiding — not unlike Adam and Eve hiding out in the Garden! The same enemy wants us deceive us. Satan would have us believe we need to clean ourselves up before coming before our holy God.
But we miss the whole point of the Gospel when we try to fix what is broken on our own. We need Him to do it for us. We cannot orchestrate our salvation and we are equally helpless when it comes to our sanctification.
Are you ready to pray a gutsy prayer? To give up on being “polite” before God? Are you ready to cease the safe, surface-only, stale, boring, cold, rehearsed prayers?
Let’s get gritty! Let’s get real! Let’s decide to be open, honest, and vulnerable as we lay out our proverbial dirty laundry before God. Those sorts of prayers will reflect a heart longing for God to do a mighty work — a heart willing to have God search and test and examine, and then lead us “in the way everlasting.”
O Lord, forgive me for floundering on my own when your help is near. Search me today. Search me now. Show me where I need a course correction. Draw me to Yourself. Refine me. Conform my thoughts to Your thoughts, my ways to Your ways. Make me more like You. I echo David’s prayer from way back then for my life now: Search me, test me, and lead me!
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