Soul Searching.

It’s been awhile, eh? Over the past few days I’ve really been praying Psalm 139:23-24, and I’m seeing it’s a lot more painful than I expected. Why? I am continually finding new pieces of my heart that need to be uprooted. I’m not talking pulling weeds, either. I’m tearing down a rainforest. This probably isn’t news for you because most of us already know this to be true of ourselves; our hearts naturally suck, right? We’re just born that way. I mean, Jeremiah 17:9 isn’t exactly anyone’s favorite Bible verse: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” That’s a hard text. Essentially it’s saying we hate God and love sin. Yikes. But that’s the beauty of the gospel of God’s grace. God takes our spitting in his face and selfish stealing of his glory and puts it on Christ’s back on the cross and we get off without a scratch. Justified. Our sin and the ensuing shame are no longer ours to bear because Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). Healed. Our rebellion has been redeemed! I guess you could say that’s pretty good news, huh?

Anyway, Psalm 139 says, “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.” David is pleading that the Lord would reveal his heart to him. Now, this is a scary thing. Why? Well... if David was anything like me, what God showed him wasn’t very pretty. I mean I’m seeing some hideous stuff. This isn’t high school Halloween party junk… this stuff is raw. I’m talking south Dallas coming out of me. This isn’t exactly what we want to put on display for the world to see, right? Confession is becoming more popular in my neck of the woods, but this is the stuff you don’t tell people because you’re afraid of what they’ll say or think. It’s like letting people see into our closets. We’re down to let people chill in our houses and play with our stuff, but only a select few get to see in our closets where we hide all our struggles, fears, and regrets. But I’m seeing into the shoebox that’s been hiding in the top corner of my closet. The worst areas of my heart are coming out, and it hurts. I hate seeing such disgusting areas of myself, and I’m sure David wasn’t too fond of his either. 

BUT, and this is a big but (please keep all jokes to a minimum, Sir Mix-A-Lot), BUT, David also knew an even more terrifying truth (but this one’s beautiful, too). Psalm 24:3-4 says, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully. He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.” The only people to ascend the hill, to receive blessing and righteousness, to see God (Mt. 5:8) are the pure in heart. Ultimately, these are the people who respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection, in repentance and faith and are transformed by the grace of God through the Spirit of God. That’s the whole “receiving blessing, righteousness, and salvation” thing. God removes hearts of stone and gives us new hearts and new spirits (Ezekiel 36). And this has radical implications. Our rebellion is still being redeemed. If I surrender to the supremacy of Christ, I lost the “liberty” to hide my secret sinful desires in the shoebox of my heart’s figurative closet. Everything comes out, and I should want it to! I moved out and the Holy Spirit moved in. My heart isn’t mine; it’s His. Completely. This home has a new owner and He gets to decorate and remodel however He sees fit. I’m just a vessel. In the words of Grant Skeldon, “God put precious gold in a trash can.”

Purity is a natural outworking of this new surrender. You cannot love God and sin; it just can’t happen, and THAT is the big BUT David knew. He longed to understand the “grievous ways” his heart was following so he could “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Mt. 3:8), and, instead, be led in “the way everlasting.” He just longed for God. He understood that nothing on earth would satisfy him. So he wanted to be cleansed. He wanted to want God. Loving God is the greatest commandment (Matt. 22:37) and the greatest satisfaction. He’s most glorified in us when we’re most satisfied in Him, right? Well how can we be making much of him, how can we love him, if we’re holding onto the grievous ways buried deep in the depths of our hearts? David knew that in order to love God he had to rip out the deep hurts, shame, regrets, fears, and passions that pulled him away from the Lover of his soul and not toward Him: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10).

Again, our rebellion is still being redeemed. We should be on a constant hunt to bring the areas of our hearts that pull us from God to extinction. Why? Because “the fear of the Lord is hatred of evil” (Proverbs 8:13). We are seeking to ascend the hill of the Lord or we are lifting our souls up to what is false. If we stop killing sin, sin starts killing us. Kevin Boyd said it well when he said, “Coasting is just stopping slowly.” There is no cruise control in following Jesus. Chase Christ relentlessly and kill sin constantly along the way.

But I think we forget we can’t do this on our own. Jeremiah DID say, “who can understand it?” I can’t know my heart. God knows my heart. Sometimes I find myself thinking rightly but my heart isn’t pursuing God. I’m noticing subtle self-seeking in my everyday tasks and the manipulation to have my cravings fulfilled. How? “Search me, O God, and know my heart … lead me in the way everlasting.” Verse 23 says thoughts, but it can also mean cares. David was saying, 

“Test the desires of my heart and if any of them aren’t ultimately rooted in You and a burning desire to (in our terms) conform to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29), then rip them out and replace them with the everlasting desires of Your heart. I want to want You, but I need You to make that happen.” 

Paul wrote to the Galatians that they were saved by the Spirit of God revealing their sin and Jesus’s glory to them. He then asked, “How in the world are you going to continue pursuing Christ by yourselves if you couldn’t even see, want, or submit to Him on your own?” (3:3, RRV: Ryan’s Remixed Version) 

And God’s been asking me the same thing.

“Ryan, how are you ever going to acknowledge the sinful pursuits of your heart if you aren’t allowing me to show them to you? You’re just going to follow them, crash and burn, and I’ll clean up your messes. Again. Because I love you enough to chase you down time after time after time.”

So I’ve been praying those verses. And even now I’m asking, “Why am I posting this? Is it because God’s been teaching me to love Him and I want to share that or because I want people to love me?” If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll finish somewhere close to the former and nowhere close the latter.. well, you know what I mean. I just want us to grow in our passion for God and our hatred of sin. My prayer for you is simply Paul’s for the Philippians (1:9-11):

“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

The desires of this world are waging war against our souls (1 Peter 2:11). Let’s flee from what’s false and flock toward the Author and Perfecter of our faith. I love you guys.

P.S. it’s summerrrrr!! neat.

HUGE shout out to Kevin Boyd for shedding some light on this for me Monday. Dude's a stud.