Where Shall I Go From Your Spirit? Psalm 139 (Pentecost)
Notes
Transcript
Handout
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.
Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!
They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
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!
INTRODUCTION:
Today is a day known in the church calendar as Pentecost.
It is a day when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church. God sent Him to guide us, help us and make His home in us forever.
That is incredible! The Holy Spirit of the living God makes His home in you, believer.
But often times we do not “feel Him,” or “experience Him,” with the joy He promises us in His Word, and I believe that Psalm 139 helps us to understand why that is.
We want the benefits of His nearness, without the vulnerability of our need.
The New York Times recently published an article that said,
'If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.'
I don’t know about you, but I can highly relate to that. I want to be loved, but I don’t necessarily want to be known.
I actually want to be in control of what version of me it is that you know.
I can be charming and witty and funny and kind. And I want you to know that guy. I want that to be the person that I am displaying for you at all times.
But I can also be insecure and needy and defensive and rude. And I want to hide that person as much as I can.
Whether it’s a desire for control, a fear of rejection, social anxiety or perfectionism, we can all be operating out of this impostor syndrome, this fear of being found out.
But the side of us that wants to be loved for who we are, can never actually be felt or experienced unless we allow ourselves to be known warts and all.
And God knows.
Whether we want Him to or not.
God knows.
CHUNK#1
O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Let’s talk briefly about the attributes of God.
God has communicable attributes and incommunicable attributes.
Communicable attributes are those that are also seen in us. Like love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, etc.
Incommunicable attributes are those that are only true of God. Like His eternality, holiness, ability to create ex nihilo or something out of nothing with a word of His mouth. These are not things we can do.
This Psalm is speaking of some of God’s incommunicable attributes.
God is omniscient, that is, “all-knowing.”
He knows everything.
That’s what David is saying here.
And in His omniscience, His all knowingness, He knows you.
The Word says He has searched you, not like He is attempting to figure you out, but like He is intimately acquainted with the most secret corners of your being.
And that is this whole idea of biblical knowing. It is knowing someone intimately and deeply. Not just intellectually, at a surface level.
In fact, Jesus calls out the ones who only claim to know God intellectually and shows them that they don’t know God with their hearts.
To be known biblically is to be laid bare, completely exposed. And everything that is hidden will be revealed. Which can sound frightening, because we all have things we want to hide. But we were created naked and unashamed. And sin has caused us to want to cover ourselves and hide.
But being fully known by God should not be a source of fear, but rather a foundation for freedom.
And the first step to being fully known by God, is expressing our need for God.
We will never accept His love, until we have first expressed our need, and that is hard.
Humans do not like to appear needy.
We’ll help those in need, but we will rarely admit our own. Because we are afraid that this will cause people to leave us. How can anyone love us once they know how needy we are? Which creates in us an unhealthy codependence and performance based identity.
If I continue to perform in such a way that you find valuable, you won’t leave me. We live like we are a part of the TV show survivor where someone could vote us off at any time.
And this is an emotionally unhealthy place to be.
We all need someone who knows us warts and all and still desires us apart from our performance.
And that is just what God does.
Look at
CHUNK #2
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
He knows what we are going to do before we do it. He knows what we are going to say before we say it, which is incredible because sometimes I don’t know what I’m about to say.
We are hemmed in or encircled or surrounded by His knowledge of us.
God knows His children intimately.
We cannot hide from Him. We cannot flee from Him. Which is made clear in the next verses.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
And here is where we begin to see that the way we feel and experience the Holy Spirit at work in our lives can actually be hindered by us attempting to flee from His presence.
We just mentioned an incommunicable attribute of God, His omniscience, which means He is all knowing.
But this speaks of another incommunicable attribute, that He is omnipresent, which means He is everywhere at all times.
We cannot escape Him, no matter where we go, but we can ignore Him and act like He is not there.
This happens as we refuse to be known. We hide things from God, we avoid speaking to God, and we run away from God, thinking that somehow He won’t know and He won’t see.
But He is omniscient. All knowing.
And omnipresent. All encompassing.
Yet we hide and we run anyway. This is how sinister sin can be.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
Like children that go into our room, and pull the covers over our head. We think our father cannot see us and that we are safe because He cannot see us.
We think He only wants to condemn us and punish us.
Yet that is not at all how He approached Adam and Eve as they ran and hid from Him.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
What a good father. He went looking for Adam. He is on mission for us. To seek and to save the lost, and that mission began as soon as sin entered the garden. God is asking Adam a series of questions, not because He doesn’t already know the answer. But to gently teach Adam that God the father is the only person in the world he can never hide from. And the more he tries to hide, the more he forsakes the love and the rest that only the Father can give.
You see, sin makes us run away from God to find rest.
To our boats. Our swimming pools. Our cars. Our vacations. Our jobs. Our marriages. Our money. But none of them will bring us rest.
Only God will.
The only way that we can experience real rest is to continually come back to God.
In Him we can be fully known and fully loved, regardless of our performance or our past.
He has come to seek and to save the lost, REST IN THAT!
You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.
Saint Augustine of Hippo
So the only way we can receive the truth of God’s love is to continually confess the truth of God’s sovereignty.
He knows all. He sees all. And He welcomes all to rest in that. Not run from that.
But Adam continues to run, as so many do. He hides from the father, by covering his nakedness. Now he is no longer laid bare and exposed, so he begins deflecting his shame and his sin onto his wife, and defending his identity through pretending and performing.
The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Deflecting and defending. Pretending and performing. When we hide ourselves from Him and begin deflecting our shame and our guilt on to others we turn our backs on His love and His rest.
And this vertically broken relationship is the cause for every other horizontally broken relationship in our lives.
We are told by Jesus that the greatest commandments are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourself.
If we cannot love God, we cannot love our neighbor. No matter how hard we pretend or perform.
And David, our psalmist knows this all too well.
He knows the damage of running and hiding from the only one you cannot run and hide from.
And that is what he is so consistently doing in this Psalm and in so many others.
Running back to God and laying himself bare.
He is remembering who God is.
And he is remembering who he is as a result.
And he is continually reminding his heart of those truths. Or meditating on those truths.
Remember that meditation is not this act of emptying your mind, but filling your mind with the knowledge of God, until that fills your heart.
It is not detachment from the world. But attachment to the Lord, through His revealed Word.
The greatest commandment is to love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. You are not just a mind, Christian, but a heart and a soul.
You don’t just need to know God with your mind, but to love Him with all your heart and soul.
How do you do that?
Be naked and unashamed before Him. Lay yourself bare, warts and all.
Remember who He is, and who you are as a result.
We see this beautifully in
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.
Oh, how He knows you, Christian.
He knows your beginning.
He knows your end.
He has knit you together in your mother’s womb.
Mind, body, heart and soul.
He knows your name. Your thoughts, your worries, your weaknesses, and the number of hairs on your head.
And He didn’t just leave us here all by ourselves, with all of our faults to figure this out on our own.
The Word became flesh to remind us.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, (REMEMBER WHO HE IS) and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand (AND REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE AS A RESULT). I and the Father are one.”
Jesus says He knows us, by how we hear His voice and follow Him.
But in order to hear Him and follow Him, we have to first be willing to be known by Him.
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!
But we cannot hide ourselves from Him, and then claim to know Him. He says in
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
If we never allow ourselves to be fully known, we will never experience the fullness of joy He has promised us, for fear of being found out. We will only know Him intellectually and at a surface level. But He knows us, whether we want Him to or not.
This is why David is reminding us that there is nowhere we can hide from Him. He knows us intimately, and that can be scary. Because people that know our mess can expose our mess in order to hurt us.
But remember who this God is.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
This is a God who wants you to know the great lengths that He has gone for you. He exposed Himself and laid himself bare in Christ Jesus, so that we could approach Him with no fear, and be fully known in His presence. He did this at infinite cost to Himself. What a good father.
He is not a God that will use your brokenness to break you even more, but rather, He is a God who desires to make you whole through His own broken body. What a beautiful father we have.
Do you know Him?
Have you allowed yourself to be fully known by Him?
WOULD YOU BOW YOUR HEADS AND PRAY WITH ME?
The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble.
And those who know your name put their trust in you,
for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.
