An Invitation to Know and Be Known
For Meditation
The lives that we live in the modern world are often shallow, divided and compartmentalized. So many of us are too busy to do any self reflection, or too scared to actually look below the surface to find what’s within us. Many of us live with repressed pain or ongoing character issues that we never really address. It’s just too hard. Our days are often constructed to avoid really looking below the surface, and we are satisfied with shallow biblical platitudes. But to follow Jesus and to live a truly good life means to embrace wholeness, integrity and truth in who we are. The ancient call to know ourselves is a call to bring our whole selves, everything that we really are, before God for his examination and healing and transformation, that we might live with integrity and wholeness.
Psalm 139 is an incredible demonstration of a person being willing to be completely seen and known by God. We’ll walk through the psalm together and consider how it is inviting us to by fully known by God, in all our beauty and brokenness. Some of the practices I’ll look at are Self-Examination, Confession and Forgiveness, and Spiritual Friendship and Accountability.
Psalm 139
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
19 If only you, God, would slay the wicked!
Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord,
and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
23 Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.