10 Minute Tuesday - A Day Late

Faithful Chick had 10 Minute Tuesdays up yesterday and I thought about her verse all day. I just never got around to posting on it. So here I am... a day late.  But that's better than never :)

Psalm 139:1-4

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down; 

you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

First, let me say these verses have brought me great comfort at times and great distress at others. Comfort because I don't have to explain myself to God. When I feel like no one in the world understands me... I know He does, even better than I understand myself. I can just "be" in His presence and not have to use words to describe how I am feeling to Him. When I am too tired to even try to explain, I know He "gets it." He remembers things I have forgotten and has forgotten things I can't stop remembering. He knows things about me I don't know yet. And it all fits together in His perfect plan for me. 

It brings distress at times because I cannot hide. I cannot pretend. I cannot control how He sees me. That is scary. Don't we all want to control how others "see" us. We think "if they really knew everything about me... there's no way they would love me." But God (Aren't those great words - but God) But God sees everything and knows everything... and He loves us anyway.

I also love that "The Lord" in these verses is in all capital letters. This denotes the name Yahwey.  Look at what LORD in all caps means:

"The most common and the most important name for God in the Old Testament is a name that in our English versions never even gets translated. Whenever you see the word LORD in all capital letters, you know that the name Yahwey is behind it. The Jews came to regard this word with such reverence that they would never take it upon their lips, lest they inadvertently take the name in vain. So whenever they came to this name in their reading they pronounced the word "adonai" which means "my lord." The English versions have basically followed the same pattern. They translate the proper name Yahwey with the word LORD in all caps. This is not a very satisfactory thing to do, because the English word LORD does not communicate to our ears a proper name like John or Michael. But Yahwey is God's proper name in Hebrew. The importance of it can be seen in the sheer frequency of its use. It occurs 6828 times in the Old Testament. That's more than three times as often as the simple word for "God." What this shows is that God aims to be known not as a generic deity, but as a specific Person with a name that carries his unique character and mission."

(This information came from a message from John Piper in 1984 at Bethlehem Baptist Church.)

I'm no Bible scholar, but I think that when David uses the proper name for the LORD here, he is not only showing reverence, but that he knows His name. His proper name. He doesn't just know "of him" like I might know "of" some celebrity, but he KNOWS him - personally.

God knows us personally. Everything about us. He wants us to know Him personally too. We won't know everything about Him on this side of Heaven, but we can seek to know Him more each day. And one day, we will see Him as He is, face to face.

 

1 John 3:2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

He knows us... inside and out. It reminds me of this song.

My son Spencer has a phrase he often says when he is praying. It is "Lord we love you and you know that."  I think it is a great phrase. The Lord does know if we love Him or not. He knows how much we truly love him. He knows if we truly long to know Him more and to love Him more. And he promises that if we seek to know Him more... we will.

Proverbs 18:17  

I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.

Jeremiah 29:13  

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

Acts 26:17-27 

From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 

If God cares so much for us that He sent His son to die for us, and if He knows EVERYTHING about us, then shouldn't we seek to know Him more too?