Inviting Examination
Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; Psalm 139:23
Anxious Thoughts – My greatest battles come from wrestling with my thoughts. My greatest victories come when I let God provide His thoughts and simply obey Him.
It’s not easy. In fact, letting God uncover my inner anxious thoughts is downright frightening. David knew what had to be done. Probe my sar’appiym, a word used only twice in the Bible, here and in Psalm 94:19. It means, “mental anxieties.”
Most of us really don’t want God to test us in order to uncover anxieties. We take a politically-correct posture toward the King of the Universe. “I won’t bother you if you won’t bother me.” Sure, we have struggles and concerns. We would like divine help when we ask for it. But it’s terrifying to imagine that we want God to deliberately bring trials into our lives in order that our secret anxieties might be pulled to the surface. It’s all we can do to keep them shut in the closets of our minds. Why would we ever ask God to open those doors?
Fear festers and fragments. God knows this. Therefore, He wants to lead us out of the dark, away from the smell of those rotting thoughts that keep us from experiencing the harmony and joy of living. But God waits for us to ask. Unless I ask the doctor for healing, his efforts will be in vain. He can prescribe all sorts of cures, but I will refuse to follow them. I need to get sick enough to realize that without help I cannot take care of this problem myself. Sometimes it takes a lot of misery before I get to that point. Does that mean that the doctor wasn’t willing to heal me long before I reached my point of collapse? Not at all! He was ready all the time. I wasn’t.
I wasn’t ready because I did not want to deal with the illness. I wanted it to go away all by itself. I wanted not to be sick. That’s different than “I want to be well.” Only a person who acknowledges that he is already sick can wish to be well. But most of us want to never be sick in the first place. So, we don’t want to take the exam to find the cause of the pain. The last thing we want is God probing the festering recesses of our minds. If He does, we will have to face up to the truth and that might really hurt. Better a chronic discomfort than an excruciating moment of agony. Or so we think.
And all the time, we wonder why life isn’t joyful, peaceful, graceful. We wonder why our days are not a song of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord of Creation. We wonder why we trudge the path instead of skipping in the fields.
We must ask for the exam before the healing can begin. “Lord, try me in order to uncover the wounds. I need the doctor’s care.”
