Psalm 139: Search My Heart
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
It's good to see you guys this morning. My name is Matt. I'm one of the pastors here. If you would, go ahead and grab a Bible. We are going to hop right in this morning, and I want you to go ahead and turn to Psalm 139. Psalm 139.
If you don't have a Bible, go ahead and grab one of the blue Bibles that we have that are tucked under some of the seats. It's going to be on page 300 in those. We're going to be looking at Psalm 139. As a worship leader, I love the Psalms. It's the Psalm book of the Bible, you guys. I'm obligated to actually love the book of Psalms.
But I do. I love the book of Psalms, and specifically Psalm 139. What we get in the Psalms is the entire range of human emotion. John Piper says that you can always find yourself in the Psalms, and I believe that. I believe that's true. Regardless of whatever you're going through in your life, whatever circumstance, you can always find yourself in the Psalms.
And so I'm excited to be teaching from one of my favorite passages today. So if you'll look, go ahead and look in your Bible. We don't always point this out. But if you look at the top, right underneath Psalm 139, it says, to the choir master, a Psalm of David. Okay, so it tells us that this is one of the Psalms of David. In fact, nearly half of the Psalms in the book of Psalms are David's.
And it's important for us to know that David wrote this and to think about his life because it colors how we're going to understand this Psalm, how we study it. But as we're getting started, I want you to go ahead and look. We're going to look at the first verse and the final two verses before we even start because they actually frame in what David is talking about in the Psalms. So you can look in your Bible or you can look up here on the screen. It says, Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me.
And then at the very end, David's praying and he says, Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. So David starts with saying to God, God, you have searched me and known me. You know everything about me. Nothing is hidden from you. And then he concludes by asking God to continue to search him, to know his heart, to know his thoughts, to show him his sins and to lead him on the right path.
Now there's a lot of things that we're going to look at in between this frame, but I think it's important to just highlight part of David's life before we hop in because of what he's talking about here. So this is the David that the Bible presents to us. He's the youngest of seven sons of his father. He's kind of the runt of the litter. He's the shepherd boy out tending the sheep, but God saw fit to anoint him to be the next king of Israel. This is the David that the Bible talks about who goes up against the giant Goliath with a sling and a stone and takes him down.
This is the David that wins the hearts of the people of Israel. In fact, the Bible describes David as a man after God's own heart. And while there's a lot of great things we can point out about David, sometimes we forget to talk about the darker side, that David wasn't perfect. And maybe you're not as familiar with this story, but there was a time when the Israelite army went out to war and David didn't go with them. He stayed back. And he's walking on the rooftop of the palace and he sees a beautiful woman bathing.
And he desires her. And so he brings her to his palace and he sleeps with her. Her name is Bathsheba and she becomes pregnant. And David's trying to figure out how to cover this thing up. So he sends for her husband, Uriah, who's one of his best soldiers, sends for him to bring him home so that maybe he'll go back to his house and sleep with Bathsheba and this thing will be all covered up and they'll never know it was his child.
But Uriah was so faithful, he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't leave the king's house. And so David sends Uriah back out into battle and tells the commander to pull back from him. And Uriah's killed. David was responsible for the murder of somebody else. And so it makes you wonder, as we look at this Psalm, as we looked at this framework we just created, that how can he pray this at the end?
How can he pray, continue to search me, continue to examine me and see my grievous ways in light of everything that he has done? And if I'm David, I don't want that. I don't. In fact, I don't want that. And I would bet for most of us, we don't want that either. The things that we've hidden, the skeletons in our closet, the things that we wish and hope that nobody ever finds out about us.
But it seems that David has discovered something better. What we're going to see is that in spite of everything that David has done, God still desires relationship with him. He gets the offer of redemption and forgiveness. And so that's what we're looking at this morning, how David can have such confidence in his relationship with God that no matter what he had done, he still saw it better that the Lord would know him deeply and intimately rather than keeping things hidden from the Lord. And that hopefully we'll actually leave here with that same kind of confidence, that same kind of confidence and vulnerability and freedom that we can have in our relationship with God.
Okay? So that's what we're looking at this morning. Why don't we pause and pray as we go further? God, what a bold prayer that you would search us and know us. And it's difficult for us to even comprehend how we could do that. And so we pray that you would speak from your word, that you would help us understand what David had come to know, what David had come to know, and that you would lead us in the way everlasting.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, so look at your Bibles. Let's hop into the text. Okay, verse 1. Oh, Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh, Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.
It is high. I cannot attain it. So he's talking about this God, this God who searches and knows, and he's trying to color that in and describe it. Verses 2 and 3, David says, when I sit down and when I rise up, he says, you know my path and my lying down, and you're acquainted with all my ways. He says, God sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good. But seriously, he knows everything about you. He knows when you're sleeping. He knows when your feet hit the floor. He knows what I do throughout the day. David crafts this song to show that there is no activity, no action that escapes what God sees.
He knows. He knows. Not only that, look at verse 3. It says here, you discern my thoughts. I'm sorry, verse 2. You discern my thoughts from afar.
Come on. Like, not only does he know our activities, he discerns our thoughts. He knows what you're thinking. Right now. And right now. And right now.
So the thing I thought when that person cut me off in traffic, God knows. The thing I was thinking when my co-worker asked me how I was doing, he knows. The thing I'm daydreaming about right now while Matt's talking, he knows. He knows. Not only that, look at verse 4. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh Lord, you know it all together.
So that's a crazy progression. He knows our actions. He knows our thoughts. And even before we formulate words, he knows it. I have two daughters, a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old. My 7-year-old is named Emmy.
And if you know Emmy, this story will make perfect sense to you. We like to cook. Like specifically, my girls love to cook pancakes. And so that's usually a group effort for us. When Emmy was really young, we had the griddle out. We had the bowl of pancake mix.
And we were doing the whole thing. And I walked across the kitchen to grab something. And I got to the other side of the kitchen with my back turned to her and said, don't touch that. And I turn. And her hand is over the griddle. And she's just looking at me like, are you a wizard?
Like, child, I know you. And I'm way smarter than you. Like, I knew what you were going to do. I know what you were going for. And that multiplied times infinity is God towards us. He knows you.
He created you. Verse 5 says, You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. You hem me in. Now, he's drawing from shepherding terms here. Okay, so it's a little bit lost on us. But this is, he's drawing from his experience.
Shepherds would be out in the fields with the sheep. And they would be tending them and keeping them together and making sure that they went on the right path, that they didn't fall off of a cliff, that they were able to find fresh water and fresh food. And then at night, they would try to kind of hem them into an area for protection. And then oftentimes, the shepherds would just lay in harm's way so that if a wolf or a predator was coming, they would know it. They would be first in line. It's a beautiful picture here.
You hem me in behind and before. And then you get to verse 6. And he just exclaims it. He says, Such knowledge is too wonderful and high for me. I can't grasp it. And I feel that.
I bet you do too. That's David's point. He's giving glory to God for his all-knowing power. We use big words for this sometimes like God's omniscience, which just means that he is all-knowing or his omnipotence, which means that he is all-powerful. God knows everything and he is all-powerful. And even though David can't fully comprehend it, and neither can we, he's still able to glory in it.
And there are two things I want to point out from these six verses and then we'll move on. The first one is this. This is terrifying, right? Like God knows your actions, your words, and your thoughts. For those of you who are into stranger things, this isn't like a Vecna scenario where God's going to use your thoughts and stuff to torture you. Like we're not all headed for a Chrissy wake up situation.
Okay? But it is terrifying that God knows everything about you. Hear that clearly. What David is saying here is that God knows everything about every person in this room without exception. And for most of us, even those of us who are Christians, that's terrifying. We don't want God to know everything.
If he did, we think things like, how could God love me? How could God accept me? There's no way he could use me. There's no way I could belong to his people and be loved. And as Christians, we know these things aren't true. Yet we convince ourselves all too often that they are.
We give in to the lies and the false beliefs instead of glorying in who God is and knowing that he's all powerful and all knowing. And I will say this. I think part of the reason we do this is because in our lives we've experienced people who have used knowledge of us to hurt us. Okay? You've been there before. You've told something to someone and they told everyone else.
You shared a struggle with someone and then they used that in your relationship to manipulate you. We've all been there. But that's not God. The God who sees you and knows everything about you is wholly other than that. And because that's true, the other part of this passage is that this ought to be incredibly comforting to us. That even though he knows all of our thoughts and words and actions, his posture towards us is that of a shepherd.
With his sheep, he wants, even though we would rebel and try to run, God, his posture towards us is that of a shepherd. That's what verse 5 is talking about. It says, you hem me in behind and before. You keep me. God keeps us. And I'll be honest with you guys.
This is something that I pray on a regular basis. I pray this on a regular basis underneath my breath. God, you hem me in behind and before. You hem me in behind and before. I have a tough day parenting with the kids. You hem me in behind and before.
When I want to run to the fridge at 10 o'clock at night for some comfort, you hem me in behind and before. When we've got a difficult situation going on in our church, when we need wisdom and we don't know it, you hem me in behind and before. God's knowledge of us is both terrifying and comforting. So what do we do with that? What do we do with that? Look at verse 7.
It says, where shall I go from your spirit or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night. Even the darkness is not dark to you.
The night is bright as the day for darkness is as light with you. It's as if David tries to illustrate what all of us are prone to, right? Run. Like, run. He says, but where would I go? Where would I flee from your presence?
He says, if I go up to heaven, you're there. Which, obvious David, but I understand it's a progression. You've got to start somewhere. You're there. If I go down to Sheol, you are there. When we have Sheol in Scripture, it's just a poetic way of saying, it's a poetic name for the place of the dead.
He says, if I go up to heaven, you're there. If I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. He says, if I take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, you're there. He says, if I take flight in the morning, okay, the morning sun rises in the east. If I head towards the east or if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, the uttermost parts of the sea for them was the Mediterranean. If I go up, down, north, south, east, west, you're there.
Where can I flee from your presence? So where do I go? The dark. I'll hide in the dark. You guys, you guys ever play hide and go seek with some kids? All right?
Come around the corner. You know the kids behind the couch. So you go and look behind the couch and as soon as you make eye contact that with the kid, they go, I can see you. No, you can't. Well, now I can hear you too. Like I, but that's us.
That's us when it comes to the fact that we think that we can hide in the dark from God or that even in the midst of our darkness, God somehow is not there. So I love what verse 11 and 12 say. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day for darkness is as light with you. Guys, are you seeing what David's saying in these first 12 verses? That God is all-knowing.
He knows everything. Your words, thoughts, actions. He's all-powerful and He's all-present. There's no place that you can flee from His presence. And I do just want to take a second and highlight this here. If you've run to the dark or you feel like right now you are in the dark, God's there and it is not dark to Him.
It is not dark to Him. He's with you and He sees you. And we're going to talk more about that in a minute, but I just want you to know that. He sees you and He's with you. And as David continues on from here, what he's going to do now is give us an example of God seeing us, knowing us, and being with us in the darkness. That's why verse 13 begins with 4.
It's an illustration. It's an example of God being with us in the dark. Here's what it says. For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret. Intricately woven in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them. David gives us this beautiful picture of God being with us in the midst of darkness by describing a baby in its mother's womb.
And specifically he tells it from his perspective. He says, you formed my inward parts. You knit me together. I am wonderfully made. Extravagantly, miraculously, uniquely made. My frame wasn't hidden from you.
You wove every detail together. You formed my substance. And not only that, my days were written in your book even before I was born. Not only does David say that God was active in forming him in the womb, he says, even at that time God had established purpose for his steps and his life. David's saying that God was with him, forming him and shaping him in the womb. And that's the big picture of what David's driving at in this Psalm is that the God who knows and sees us is with us.
And that's amazing. Y'all, how good is this picture? The God of the universe fashions and forms each one of us. It's just beautiful. And in fact, it's not the only place in scripture that says this. I actually want to highlight a couple of others.
They're not going to be on the screen. I'm going to read them for us. It says, in Job 10, this is Job talking, he says, your hands fashioned and made me and now you have destroyed me altogether. Remember that you have made me like clay and will you return me to the dust? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews.
You have granted me life and steadfast love and your care has preserved my spirit. It's beautiful. He's picking up on the same kind of language that is used later by David. He says later in Job. Job says this. He says, if I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant when they brought a complaint against me, what then shall I do when God rises up?
When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him? Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb? He's saying, if God as creator comes to question me, what am I to say? He made me. He formed me.
And not only that, if I'm in a dispute with someone else, he made them too. In Jeremiah, beginning of Jeremiah, this is directly, this is the words of the Lord. 1 verses 4 and 5 says, now the word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. It's that same idea that David was talking about, that God knew him before he was in the womb.
He had predestined his steps. He had purpose for his life. He had been consecrated. And one of my favorites is once we get to the New Testament, the angel comes to Mary, says she's going to give birth to the Son of God. But Mary's aunt is pregnant at the same time.
And she goes to visit Elizabeth. And here's what Elizabeth says. She says, for behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. This child has personhood and is able to express joy. And the point that the Bible is trying to make clear in multiple places across multiple time periods is that life begins in the womb. And while David is using this as an illustration of God seeing and knowing and being with us in the dark, it's not just an illustration.
It's truth. It's a reality. And it's one that has taken center stage in our country over the last month or so. And so what we're going to do is we're going to press pause for a second. And we're going to take the next 10 to 12 minutes and talk about what is a current topic in our culture right now, which is life beginning at conception and the topic of abortion. And now, that's not the main point of this passage.
But it is most certainly a direct application and an ethic that is derived from this idea of a God who knows us and sees us and forms us. Okay? So we're going to press pause and talk about this as an application and then jump back into the text. Now, I realize that I have just polarized the room. I'm aware of that. Some of you just thought, yes, get them.
Roe fell a couple of weeks ago and it's time for us to plant our flag in the ground. Some of you just thought, if you say what I think you were about to say, I'm walking out of this building and I'm never coming back again. And some of us are just too disengaged from the conversation because you don't feel like it impacts you. And so I want to make a suggestion and a request this morning. Okay? Here's my suggestion.
Can we just press pause on all of our political arguments for a moment and realize that whatever you think about this, that this is an incredibly difficult and painful situation for a prospective mother and father to walk through. Can we be a people of compassion? Can we do that? Can you set your political leanings to the side for a second and just own that? This is incredibly painful and difficult. And out of that suggestion, I want to make a request.
Okay? If we set that aside, I want to make a request. Can we just take an honest look at what God says to us in His Word out of this passage? Can we just be honest about what it says? Because here's the deal. If we are, if we'll be honest, we can't read this passage and the others that I mentioned without agreeing what it says, that life begins in the womb.
That God is working, He's knitting us together and forming us in our mother's womb. That God predestines our steps from the womb. And to reject this is to reject the authority of Scripture. We must trust God and His Word here, which means that the overall thrust of the Bible is for life, which means that a rejection of life through abortion is sin. Period. In the majority of conversations that I have had with both believers and unbelievers on this topic, pretty much everyone, not everyone, but most of the people I have talked to show some level of discomfort with someone having an abortion just because they don't want the baby for elective reasons, just for no reason.
There's varying levels of discomfort with that, but often the conversation shifts towards the most painful and difficult kinds of situations for why someone might get an abortion. And I feel this tension. What about the 10-year-old who was raped by her father and is now pregnant? What about the 35-year-old mother who has health complications and might die giving birth? What if there's a serious fetal abnormality and the child might have incredible life complications? Guys, I can't imagine.
I cannot imagine having to wrestle with those deep questions. Those are incredibly difficult and painful circumstances. And I can tell you this, the initial response as the church, as the church comes in contact with these situations has got to be to love, to be present, to sit and to weep, to hear their story, to pray with them, to be someone who can listen. That's got to be the initial response. Got to be. But the reality of this conversation is that those exceptional types of abortions are just that.
They are exceptional. That the vast, they're in the vast minority of reasons why someone might would get an abortion. Now, I'm not a chart guy. I don't love statistics. Okay? But in my research on this topic, I care about it.
And so I wanted to read widely and soak things in. I came across some statistics that I thought were helpful for showing this. Okay? So in the state of Florida in 2020, in the state of Florida, they have to record a reason for every abortion. If someone goes to get an abortion, they record the reason. In the state of Florida in 2020, there were 74,868 abortions in one state in one year.
And so what we're going to do is I want to show you a chart that shows the reasons for those abortions and then it also gives you kind of a percentage of why the reason, okay, the percentage of the whole. Okay? So I just want to walk through this. Let's show the first one..01% were some kind of family incest situation. I, goodness, I can't, I can't even like fathom the difficulty of a situation like that. But you see the percentage.
The next one, rape. Not only had they dealt with that such a difficult circumstance, but now they're pregnant. The next one, okay,.20% is that the mother's life is in danger. Okay? The mother's life is, this could be fatal for the mother. But even if you, as you look at this, we're at, we're at.36% and then you add in fetal abnormality.
Now it doesn't say that this is a life-threatening fetal abnormality, but there's some type of abnormality in the baby. And you can see these are, these are small Numbers and if you look at the, just the total here, 1.34%. And guys, these are exceptionally difficult. Reasons, they are. They're hard to wrestle with. Kind of going on in the statistics, we kind of jump out of that into, you know, we're moving away from these exceptions.
1.48% Were for physical health. Non-life-threatening physical health. And it doesn't even tell us like how, how much physical health was at play here. And then the next one is psychological health, mental health. 1.88%. If you add that up, you get to 3.36%.
And again, we can just kind of agree that these are outside of those first exceptions that we kind of looked at that are really, really exceptional situations. We've got two more categories. 20.4% for social reasons or for economic reasons. And if you're good at math, you know that the final category is 74.9% for no reason. they were elective, which brings the total to 95.3%. If you add in the physical health reasons or the psychological health reasons and broaden that category, it gets you to over 97% of those abortions. That means that 72,500 of those over that number were done for those reasons, for reasons outside of those.
How did we get here? How did we get to a place in our country where we can terminate life for elective reasons? And we can all agree that this is a complex issue, but one thing is crystal clear is that our culture has separated sex from its original God ordained design. God designed sex to be enjoyed within a marriage for the purpose of enjoyment and procreation. And our culture has hijacked this definition and said that sex is for your enjoyment and that conception of life is a consequence rather than a gift. But that's not the ethic of the Bible.
God is for life. That's what scripture says over and over again. In my preparation for this message, I felt led to reach out to my Old Testament professor from seminary. Her name is Dr. Ingrid Pharaoh and she is a brilliant woman. She's a Greek scholar and a Hebrew scholar and I just reached out to her and I said, here's what I'm teaching, here's the Psalm I'm looking at, can we talk about it?
And she gave me an hour of her time. And we just had a Zoom call where we wrestled with what this says and she agrees. She agrees with what we're talking about here. In fact, she's an expert on the book of Genesis and she pointed this out and I thought it was helpful for us. That God is the giver of life. He's the creator of life and he gives the gift of life to his creation.
To Adam and Eve and he looks at Adam and Eve and he says, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over life. And he tells them, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because in the day that you do it, you will die. He says, choose life. And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit and sin enters the world and death enters the world. And you know what the first thing that happens is in Genesis 4 after sin has entered the world? Murder.
Cain kills his brother and God has judgment on it. Incredibly painful and the difficult truth that we've got to face this morning is that a rejection of life in favor of death is sin. It is the taking of life. It breaks one of the original Ten Commandments. And regardless of the situation or circumstance, however tragic and difficult, it is outside of God's design. And I know that it's devastating.
Our church family is not untouched by this pain. sin. We have walked with mothers who have had an abortion. We have walked with fathers who have encouraged their significant other to go get an abortion. Maybe you've encouraged someone to have an abortion or you helped fund it or you took them to the clinic. But God's answer from his word is that it's sin and God has judgment for us.
He has judgment for it. But we've got to remember who's writing this Psalm. David. The same David who says that God sees us and knows us. The same David who said that God formed him and knitted him in the womb is also the same David who slept with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered. David was a murderer.
And David's response is where hope can be offered to everyone in this room. What David had done was deceitful and heinous and wicked. But remember David serves the God who knows and sees. And God sends Nathan to confront David and David responds in complete humility and brokenness and confesses his sin. He owns it. He doesn't hide it in the dark anymore.
He doesn't justify his actions. He just says I have sinned against the Lord. And you know what happens next in the very next verse? Nathan says the Lord has put away your sin. Like how beautiful is that? David was a murderer.
We should expect judgment and condemnation and maybe even God to strike David dead but he doesn't. The God who knows and sees offers David grace and forgiveness when he confesses his sin and seeks him for mercy. And that's the reality for every person in this room. That's one of the things you've got to walk away with. If you've had an abortion, if you were pressured into it or supported someone, if you're considered, God sees you. He knows you and God is with you.
You are not outside of his grasp or his love. Even after what David had done, God didn't leave him or forsake him. When David was confronted with his sin, he went running into the arms of God for forgiveness and that's what's offered to you. Go read Psalm 51. It is David's confession specifically over this. And it's forever memorialized in Scripture to help lead us back to God.
Brother, sister, you are not outside of the reach and the love of God. Just run to God and confess and accept his forgiveness. Receive his love. And lastly, God, listen, I know this has been long, but I wanted to cover it well. One last thing before we jump back into the text. We desperately need this last thing.
Christians have to recover and embody what it means to be pro-life in all of its forms. The church in America as a whole, on the whole, has been overwhelmingly unhelpful and unkind to people who are in this situation. And the reality is, when you close your heart to someone in judgment, you no longer have capacity for grace and mercy in the mission of God to offer people hope. And that's what we're called to do. That means, first of all, for mothers and fathers who would choose to say no to abortion, we have to be willing to step in. They don't know how to raise their children.
Christians have to say yes to adoption. Christians have to say yes to fostering and helping the support system for abandoned children. Yes to supporting people financially who are pursuing adoptions. Yes to volunteering and supporting organizations that work with mothers and fathers who need to know what their other options are besides abortion. Yes to being the people that walk with single moms and single dads as they deal with mental and emotional and the socioeconomic toll of raising children. Yes to walking alongside families that have children with special needs and the difficulty of that venture.
Yes to being a place of refuge and help for those that have been abused and neglected and left. What we just saw in this Psalm is that God is the God who is with people in the darkness. That God's presence is with those in the pit of hell and if God is there, that's where his people are supposed to be. Supposed to go into the darkness to love and to help people. Let's not be a people who are just against abortion.
Let's be a people who are for life and all of what that means. Now there's, listen, there's more that could be said about this and if you want to talk about it, we're here. Your pastors are here to talk about it. But again, this application comes directly out of what David is saying. It's exactly about a God who knows and sees us. So we're going to shift back into the text because it sits within that framework.
God knows everything about you. Your actions, your thoughts, your words, you can't flee from his presence. And once again, David just has a praise break here. He just erupts in praise again of this God. He says, verse 17, how precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake and I am still with you. It's just too much for David at this point. He just erupts in praise. It's like he gets praising and like he passes out. And then he's like, oh, I woke up and I'm still with you. Sweet, it wasn't a dream.
Like he's just overwhelmed with who God is. And then continuing on in verse 19, it takes an interesting twist here. Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God. What on earth? Like we were, I thought we were in a praise break. I thought we were taking a praise lap, David.
Why? Why are we? Oh, men of blood, depart from me. They speak against you with malicious intent. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
Do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. Like what on earth, David? All right.
A couple of things I want to point out here. First of all, this is raw emotion. And the Psalms give us raw emotion, which is actually really, really good news for us. Okay? Because the Psalms give us permission to take all of who we are and all of what we're feeling and thinking to the Lord and letting him sort it out. Okay?
God doesn't want the canned version of you. He wants it all. So you can take it to him. Just take it to him. And the truth is, the other thing is, if you actually see God the way David does, that he's all-knowing and all- powerful and always present, he's holy and good, then it's not a far step to want that God to exercise justice. Right?
That we actually want God to do something about wickedness. And specifically David. David was the king of the people of God. And God at times would use his people to be the instrument of his justice in the world. But we, like we actually want this.
We want God to be just. Right? We want him to deal with wickedness and sin. Just as long as it doesn't, it's not us. You know? But we want, we want someone to hold Russia responsible for what they're doing in the Ukraine.
We wanted someone to be held responsible at 9-11. Okay? We want someone to be held responsible for sex trafficking. Right? And so as David has this big picture of who God is, he just, he lays his petition before this God who is all-powerful and all-knowing and can do anything. It makes sense.
Even if it catches us off guard. And then we're right back where we started. Verses 23 and 24. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.
The reason that David can actually pray this is because he found refuge in the God he described in this Psalm. As painful as it was for him, David recognized that God knows everything about him. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And David knows there's no place he can flee from God's presence. And in spite of everything David has done, God still wants to be in relationship with him. That's because the relationship that David had with God was not based primarily on who David was or what David had done.
But it was based off of who God was and what God had done. You see, God had promised David that there would never cease to be one of his sons on the throne of Israel forever. And that's exactly what happened. That from his line would come the Messiah. David had Solomon by way of Bathsheba. And then hundreds of years later, Jesus was born.
Son of Adam. Son of David. Jesus came so that we might have life. He lived the perfect sinless life on our behalf. Jesus died on the cross to pay for anything and everything we've ever done. And then he rose from the grave so that we might have life everlasting with him forever.
And that's the good news that's offered to you today. Just like David was offered forgiveness in light of everything that he had done, the same offer is given to you. Our relationship with God, hear me, is not based off of what we have done or who we are. It's based off of who God is and what Jesus has done for you. So it doesn't matter what you've done.
David was a liar, an adulterer, and a murderer. What about you? What about you? What are the things that you've done, the things that you've thought, and the things that you've said that you think keep you from God? What are the things that you have hidden in the dark that think disqualify you from a relationship with God? There's no thing that could have just come to your mind that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
The offer of mercy and forgiveness is for you today no matter what you've done. God sees you and knows you and you can't hide it from him. David tried. He tried to hide it, but God loved him so much that he sent Nathan to confront him so that the relationship could be restored. God was pursuing for the relationship to be restored. And that same offer is given to you in Jesus today.
So there's a couple just little points of application as we close up here. How do we apply this? First, we do exactly what this Psalm does at the end. We pray and ask God to search us and to examine us. We actually want that. We want God to point out our mess.
And the truth is, guys, we can't see it sometimes. I challenge you, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and just pray, God, reveal anything to me that is hidden from you or hidden from me. Anything that I'm trying to hide from you, point out any sin and just write down whatever God brings to your mind. And then pray and ask God for forgiveness and receive it. Maybe you go to people in your group and you ask them, we've got blind spots. Ask the people in your group, they'll point out your sin.
They may have a better grasp on it than you do. But we can do that. And when they point it out, don't be defensive, confess it, ask for forgiveness. Second point is that we ask the Lord to lead us in the way everlasting. Just like David does. To lead you on the right path, to hem you in, behind and before, to lead you on the path of everlasting life, to keep you.
In fact, it may be that you have to put feet to the prayers that you just prayed asking for the Lord to reveal it, that He might help you to be obedient. And if you're in the room this morning and you're not a Christian, I want you to understand something. God knows and sees everything and there actually is judgment for sin. But His desire is that you might run to Him and accept His love and His grace and His forgiveness. Your steps are exactly the same as what I said above. Ask God to show you your sin and confess it and accept His love and forgiveness and then walk in it.
You don't leave terrified. You've been offered something better. We all have. Kelly and Isaac are going to come back up and we're going to take communion. Communion is the tangible reminder of what Jesus did so that we can actually receive the grace and forgiveness that I'm talking about. That Jesus' body was broken and His blood was shed so that no matter what we've done, we can receive forgiveness.
And so if you aren't a Christian, I beg you to see God for who He is. He knows you. He knows your words and your thoughts and your actions and you can't hide it from Him. He chose. He chose to make a way for you to be in relationship with Him. So that's what we're asking you to do is to consider.
Consider that. Confess it before the Lord. And the truth is if you do that, then come. Come take communion for the first time and celebrate what Jesus has done for you. But if you're not ready to do that, we want you to sit and consider the weight of what we've talked about this morning.
And if you're a Christian, I want you to sit and ask the Lord to expose any grievous ways in us to lead us in the way everlasting, to quit hiding, to bring it into the light. Maybe there's something in your past that is haunting you. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. He offers you grace and forgiveness. Accept it.
And then when you're ready, come and take communion. Come and celebrate what Jesus has done for you. Let's pray. God, you know us and you see us and you're with us. And in spite of everything that we've done, you desire for us to be in relationship with you. And you have made a way for that to be possible.
So all across the room right now, Lord, I pray that you would go to work on our hearts, that we would confess our sins before you, we would confess our fears before you and bring it into the light so that you might forgive us. And we can walk in freedom, Lord. We're not chained by our past. We're not chained by the things that we've done. Lord, we can be free in Jesus. And it's in his name we pray.
Amen. I'm just going to play for a minute. I want to ask you to just pray and to consider all around the room.