This is part 1 of a 6-part series. View the entire series here.
O LORD, You have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place Your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! – Psalm 139:1-6 NLT
It’s a terrifying thing to be known. To be truly known, not just known about.
Being known about is easy. You tell people where you went to school, what kind of pets you had growing up. You tell them your favorite TV shows, your favorite season of the year, your favorite food. You allow them to compile a mountain of relatively harmless facts about you. And if they disagree with your conviction that fall is better than summer? No harm, no foul, because that opinion isn’t really you, it’s just something about you.
There’s safety in moving through relationships this way. When we control the information about ourselves that we give away to people, we’re more easily able to control how they perceive us. We show the good because we want them to think we’re good. We avoid sharing the deep stuff, the ugly stuff, the stuff closest to our hearts, because if they don’t like it, that must mean they don’t like us.
We—very humanly, very understandably—don’t want to be hurt. That’s what it really boils down to.
A couple years ago, I confided something in my best friend of almost 20 years. To an outsider, this admission wouldn’t have seemed like anything major, but it was very personal to me, something that’s always felt so closely tied to who I am that it’s hard for me to talk about. She thanked me for telling her, and then she said, “You feel more real to me now.”
That struck me so hard. I’ve never forgotten it. I didn’t realize that by holding back even a little bit of what was in my heart, I was denying her the opportunity, as my closest and longest friend, to know me and to love all of me—not just the parts that felt safe to share.
I think sometimes we have a tendency to view God as that friend with whom we’ll share some of ourselves, but never all of ourselves. Never the ugly stuff. I don’t want to admit to this thing I struggle with or He probably won’t love me anymore. As ridiculous as it sounds, I’ve had that thought more times than I care to admit. I want so desperately to control the narrative. Show the good, hide the bad.
In other words, we want God to love us on our terms. That’s why when we read, “You have examined my heart and know everything about me,” it makes many of us squirm. Instead of being comforted by the fact that we’re fully known by the Creator of the universe, we find it almost…threatening.
But when we do that, we’re denying God’s power to redeem all the places in us that have been wounded by rejection. We’re denying Him the chance to prove that He’s never going to turn away.
Thank God that He loves us on His terms, not ours. Thank God that He saw every dark and shadowed corner of our hearts, and still thought we were not only worth loving, but worth dying for.
We may not be able to comprehend how we could be fully seen and fully known, and still be loved with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3). It’s what kept me from sharing one of the most vulnerable parts of myself with my best friend for so long, and it’s what continually causes me to project that same fear of rejection onto my good Father. Even David, the author of this psalm, admits that the depth of God’s knowledge of him, His benevolent presence in all of David’s comings and goings, is “too wonderful…too great to understand.”
Psalm 139 reminds us that we are examined by our great and glorious God, Maker of heaven and earth, and—despite ourselves—found loveable. Because He doesn’t see us as we were, He sees us as we are: a new creation in Christ. As I heard a pastor once say, “God looks at us and sees Jesus’s enoughness.”
And then? He places His hand of blessing gently on our heads. His knowing love never leaves, never wavers, and will last forever.
