Good morning,
Any time we take a tour of the real person living inside us, we need to be very careful about who is guiding us on the tour. When our tour guide is also our angelic accuser, Satan, everything he shows us will be from his eternal commitment to lie us into defeat. He uses fear and pain and confusion to get us to see ourselves as failures or as self made people who don’t need any kind of scary accusations to get us to depend on some heavy handed “God” character who will ruin everything for us. Another common tour guide offering us constant input is our culture, that is what “everyone else” is doing around us. In almost every culture in the world today, people who read and believe and follow the God of the Bible are really scary people indeed. The world does it’s best to convince us that any person with common sense knows that living by those narrow rules for living is going to lead to a twisted mind and a dangerous attitude toward people who are just doing what comes naturally.
Thankfully. there is one very reliable tour guide. However, there is one problem when it comes to getting a genuine tour. The only persons who are given the tour have to be genuine children of the King and have a willing attitude to follow their Guide when the tour gets into the challenging parts of their hearts. When the Psalmist wrote Psalm 139 he was excited about how much God knew about him and how much he loved him even with all the information he had collected about his life. What made this writer so special was the attitude he had toward the God who knew so much about him. His anxiety wasn’t that he was going to get caught. His concern was that he hadn’t been willing to find out what things were keeping him from being closer and more useful to his Lover. He longed for his Lover to show him what was wrong with what he was thinking or doing that was keeping them from having a closer relationship. He knew that his Lover would never treat him with contempt. He longed to take the path of life that would produce eternal goodness towards those around him as well as a deeper relationship between the two of them. He wasn’t running away from his Lover, he was longing to run into his arms. Dear Lord, as we go through these troubling times, will you please help us to focus on getting closer to you and not spend our lives running from the fears that try to flood our minds and hearts into defeat.
Psalms 139: 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
Roy Wisner
