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You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. \u2026 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. (Psalm 139:1-2,23-24)

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Psalm 139 begins and ends in exactly the same way.\xa0 The psalm praises God in deeply personal and poetic ways for his infinite knowledge, presence, and power.\xa0 From that basis, the psalm asks God to do it again: \u201cO God who knows me, know me again\u2014here, now today.\xa0 O God who searches my heart and mind, search me again.\xa0 O God who is present everywhere and everywhen, lead me into your everlasting presence again today.\u201d

There is something incredibly comforting about this psalm.\xa0 We use it often in worship and devotions.\xa0 Many of us know parts of it by heart.\xa0 Perhaps we don\u2019t think often enough of how frighteningly intimate this psalm is, however.

That God should know every thought and deed of our entire lives\u2014that he should be present as witness in every secret room where we have ever given in to temptation\u2014is actually quite a frightful thought. \xa0This is the very thought that sent Adam and Eve off to hide in the bushes when they realized they were naked before the eyes of God and one another.\xa0 We fear being known so intimately.\xa0 It takes a great deal of trust built over a great deal of time to be willing to reveal and entrust ourselves\u2014warts and all\u2014so fully to another.\xa0 This is part of the wisdom that leads the Christian tradition to restrict the naked vulnerability of sex to the safely guarded commitment of marriage: in doing so we claim that intimate knowing of one\u2019s body, just like intimate knowing of one\u2019s self, ought only be offered in a setting of highest, deepest trust and commitment.\xa0

This is just that sort of relationship, and I\u2019d say an even deeper one, that psalm 139 describes.\xa0 In a marriage, it remains true that one never fully knows the other.\xa0 Who of us can truly plumb the depths of mystery and living reality that is another human being like ourselves?\xa0 We can\u2019t.\xa0 But God can, and does.\xa0 We are fully known by God.\xa0

The crazy step of faith that psalm 139 takes, is that it recognizes that God knows our true and authentic self more deeply than even we, ourselves ever will, and actually invites that knowing.\xa0 \u201cSearch 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.\u201d\xa0

Far from a cynical, deterministic, or fatalistic look at religion, the psalmist claims a place of agency and responsibility within the relationship with God.\xa0 Yes, God knows the psalmist anyway, but the psalmist has also come to know and to trust this God.\xa0 The psalmist is not merely a passive participant in a pre-determined world.\xa0 There is a relationship here: God created it that way.\xa0 And so the psalmist has a role in inviting that relationship: inviting God in to see and to know and even to speak into the psalmist\u2019s life in ways that lead into even deeper knowing of self and even deeper relationship with the everlasting God.\xa0

Our relationship with God is our first relationship of intimacy, our first experience of being seen, known, and yet loved all the same.\xa0 Will you continue to invite that relationship as psalm 139 does, so that you too can experience what it is to be seen and known, and yet loved and led into even deeper, trusting places of relationship? \xa0The grace, forgiveness, and peace of Christ assures us that we can.

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