Good morning,
- -lead me along the path of everlasting life.
There are some verses that the Lord keeps taking me back to even though I am very familiar with what they say. One of these special verses is in Psalm 139 verses 23 and 24. I keep discovering that what God is telling us has many different facets and we will see different truths at different times as we grow or as we are facing some new challenge. I know that God knows who I am and that he knows the condition of my heart, but there are times that I fall back on the Accusers translation of what God is telling us here. I grew up in a church setting where guilt and fear were the main emotions that were used to keep people walking in the straight and narrow way followed by the “Righteous Believers.” The Bible was usually used to point out our sins and to then insist that we repent of our sinful behavior. We discovered that the Accuser would keep track of our sinful behavior and then, to protect ourselves, we learned to use the fear of failing as a motive that was supposed to keep us living an ever more perfect (holy) life. It is true that God’s Holy Spirit does convict us of sin, and we are clearly told to repent when we realize that we have sinned.
The first problem with this legalistic approach is that the Accuser is the one we are trying to keep at bay The second problem is that we are kept focused on ourselves and not on following our Good Shepherd. When the God who loves us searches our hearts and sees our fear driven thoughts, he is not our accuser. Our God is our lover. Our Good Shepherd, God’s Word and God’s Holy Spirit all combine to identify a sin or a confused idea so that we can turn to God for the right response to this habit or way of protecting ourselves. God’s way of leading us through life is not based on just looking back or just looking at ourselves. Seeing and confessing our sins is necessary. But what God longs for is for us to look at him to know the right way to react or act, and then learn to rely on his Holy Spirit to fill and use us in a way that makes a wonderful adventure out of getting things right. We are all still living in human bodies with all the weaknesses of our sin nature, but when we are alerted by our Lover that we need to be aware of an area of sin and respond by turning to the Holy Spirit for his strength. Then we will become a child of God who increasingly enjoys the freedom of God at work in our lives. Dear Lord, please lead us to your loving path that will keep us on your course for our eternal life.
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
