Examine
Need to review the Day 4 Challenge? King
Total time needed to complete today’s challenges:
10 min for video and reading +
50 min of challenges
Welcome to Day 5: Search Me, Oh God!
Psalms 139 begins…
O Lord, You have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You understand my thought from afar.
3 You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
… and ends with…
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
24 And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Have you stopped to ask the Lord what He sees – or only brought to Him what you see?
No Hiding
I encourage you to read the entirety of Psalms 139 in your physical Bible (go ahead, turn some real pages).
If you don’t have one, here’s the digital reading.
The reality is that too often we conduct the search ourselves.
One thing you’ll learn about Broken Free is that sometimes it makes the most sense to make a practical illustration to drive home a spiritual point. So, here to goes: can you open your mouth, say Ahhhhh! and see down your own throat to diagnose what’s causing the pain in your throat? Can you give yourself an x-ray while standing still? Can you properly examine a mole on your back? Just as you are unable to search your bodily cavities on your own effort without assistance, so too are you unable to fully examine your spirit man without assistance.
We need The Helper to perform a search of our heart and soul.
When it’s up to us, we ask questions to ourselves like: “When did I last mess up?” or “Is there anything I need to apologize about?” It is an “i” question asked by the King Of I: you!
In this 10:10 segment, I want your focus to be on asking the Lord to search you and to examine your heart and mind and reveal things He sees. While we tend to focus on the obvious things and ways that we have failed ourselves, or someone else, it is the Lord’s desire to reveal what He sees so we can become men and women who learn to repent because of the ‘sinfulness of our sin’ rather than the ‘consequences of our sin.’
As you spend this 10-minute segment in prayer, take notes of things that are revealed to you. Small things. Big things. Random things. Write it down.
It is His Love for His glory that exposes your heart – that He might then cleanse and renew things that once lay in darkness, and expose them to the light where things are freed.
- B – be still
- R – repent
- O – open
- K – king
- E – examine
