Search My Heart
How desperate are you to know God? Are you willing to let Him shine His light on your heart to reveal any dark areas keeping you away from Him. Remember that where He is, there is no darkness, because His light illumines any darkness it encounters. In Psalms 139: 23-24 New American Standard Bible we read:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
In verse 1 of this Psalm David asked God to search HIM. But after recounting the marvelous way God knows him, formed him, stays with him, planned his days for him, he goes a little deeper and asks God to search not just him, but his HEART and his THOUGHTS. If you really know a person well, you know their heart and you can almost anticipate their thoughts. My husband and I have been married 35years. We’ve spent a lot of time together. I trust him, because I KNOW his heart. And we often say the same thing at the same time, because we almost know each other’s THOUGHTS. David invites God to know him that well. Of course, God already knows our hearts and our thoughts, but He gives us a choice to go deeper-do we welcome Him into the deep places in our hearts and thoughts?
David wants God to know his anxious thoughts. “Anxious” H8312 means “disquieting thoughts” and comes from a root word that means “ambivalence, divided in mind.” When our heart is divided, James 1:6-8 says we are double-minded, and we sway “like the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” We want God to show us if our heart is divided, so we can turn and instead be whole-hearted towards God.
And David must be very desperate to know God, because he even asks God to “try” or test him. That’s very brave! Asking God to test you is like playing with fire- because God tests with fire! And God allows fiery trials in our lives for a reason. In fact in Deuteronomy 8:2 New International Version explains that one of the reasons God tests us with trials is to reveal what is in our hearts as we see He did with Israel:
Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.
I remember one of my friends once told me that she was a really kind person until she had kids! She didn’t realize that she had some work to do in the area of being kind until her kindness was tested. And, yes, children will definitely test your kindness! In the same way, we often don’t know what is really in our heart until we are tested.
We need to keep our hearts open to God, as we ask Him, like the psalmist, to see if there is any hurtful way in us. Hurtful H6090 means “wicked, pain, sorrow, idol.” Hurtful or wicked ways only keep us apart from God. If we sincerely want Him to lead us in His everlasting way, then we have to ask Him to shine His light on the dark areas of our heart to reveal any idols we have there. If idols are taking up space in our hearts, then God can’t be in the same space at the same time. It’s one or the other. And we have to ask ourselves, which will it be?
So let’s run after God hard enough that we say
TEST MY HEART AND MY THOUGHTS, LORD, BECAUSE I WANT TO KNOW YOU MORE.
In His Love,
Suzanne
Mom Morsels 