I always get a little nervous when David arcs up about how blameless and trustworthy he is. After all, we know the full story and while I think he’s a champ, he’s not Jesus. Only Jesus could lay claim to living a blameless live and being utterly trustworthy.
Yet the Bible refers to David as a man after God’s own heart so he certainly had a whole lot of good gear going on. No doubt.
In Psalm 26 he’s crying out to God once more. There’s a tip straight away as to the posture of one chasing after the heart of God: we take our stuff to him. Good, bad, bitter, indifferent, we drag it to the throne of the Father and make our petitions made known to Him.
What else does David do? He lays bare his soul before the Father and, in the light of his frailty, says: ‘examine my heart and my mind’.
The Psalmist’s cry to the Lord should cause us to pause in prayer and ask if this is the transparency that we truly want to have before God.
Often, we offer up to God the version of ourselves that we’re comfortable with him seeing. It’s the charade we often play with folk around us – showing them the bits we can tolerate being seen. While it sounds a little trite, someone once defined intimacy to me as ‘in to me, see’. I think it’s a brilliant picture of what’s going on with David right here. ‘God, look at my heart and my mind. Look deep inside. It’s all there for you to look at. Examine me.’
It’s pretty strange really. The one in whose image we’re created and who knows us better than we know ourselves wants us to allow Him to examine us. Something tells me that God-examination is more about what happens when we allow our hearts to be opened before him then what God gets to find out. When we allow God to examine us, we also open the door to being changed and transformed.
May it be the desire of every one of us to walk with integrity before God and allow him to see into us and allow him to continually regenerate and sanctify our hearts and our lives. Gidiup to that.
– Simon Elliott