Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Test me and know my anxious thoughts! See if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
If we have known God in Christ by the Spirit, we will not try to “hide” any aspect of our life from Him…rather, we will desire the searching light of His Spirit to pierce into the deepest, most confusing, ugliest, and most difficult places of our life. Why? Because we know that, in Christ, the Searchlight of God is one of merciless mercy….. “Merciless” because it will allow no sin that it discovers to survive…. “Mercy” because those sins that it discovers have already been counted to and crushed in Christ.
It is madness, and anti-Gospel, to attempt to keep any area of our existence from the Lord….instead, knowing that our sinful self has already—in totality—be crucified with Christ, we eagerly and hopefully invite the Lord to search us, to know us, to see us, to disclose and uproot every wicked way in us. Whatever perversion or brokenness or deep-seated sin is discovered in us has been and will be dealt with in the work of Christ; our purity before the Lord is not found in an absence of “grievous ways” in us, but in the perfect righteousness of Christ counted to us by virtue of our union to Him….
We are not like the man who is afraid to look under his house because he doesn’t want to know what sort of infestation might be growing there…..Rather we are a bit like the man who has a friend in the exterminator business who can deal with ANY infestation, and so we are eager for every issue to be exposed so that, by our friend, it might be resolved. The Christian is bold by grace to ask the Lord to search us, know us, see us, and—in Christ—to lead us in the way everlasting.
