Sunday 08 • 26 • 18

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, oh 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 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 the 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 from 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 am awake and I am still with you. 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. — Psalm 139

Man, I missed you guys. We missed you guys this summer. It's so good to be back. And I have to say our worship is better than any other church we went to. I'm not being mean. I'm just saying it was awesome this morning.

Before I jump into this sermon, I just want to express my gratitude, our gratitude as a family for this summer and this time of sabbatical—three months away from ministry, three months away from responsibilities here. I know I don't necessarily deserve a sabbatical anymore than anybody else. Many of you work really hard at your jobs and probably work harder than I do and were like, "When is my turn?" I know I've heard that. But I want to thank you.

I want to thank you for a break from preaching and leading and decision making and being on, just having to think about what's next. It was amazing. We spent time—took the oldest two boys backpacking in Utah for a week. We were back for June. In July, we went to Vermont for two weeks and stayed at a cabin on a lake with younger kids. And then Susan and I got away for two weeks to Quebec City, just the two of us. And then we're back here for August. It's been terrific. It's just been great. To have time where we're just present to each other and to the Lord, and there's no to do list. I'm available to my kids in ways that I'm never available. And Susan and I have time. It was really great.

I want to publicly also thank the elders and the staff for creating this gift of time. This is the first time I've ever been really away from this church, any church, and feel like I don't have to worry about anything. Like nobody's going to call me, and there's no "Hey, Jeff, you need to weigh in on this." It was really nice, and I'm really grateful for that.

And I want to thank you for honoring the request of our elders, like "Hey, don't text them. Don't call them." Some of you even bumped into me at the gym and were like, "Am I supposed to talk to you?" I just want to thank you for creating that space for us.

Returning to Ministry

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be trying to ease back into ministry and not jump feet first in the deep end of the pool, but wade into the pool. I'm going to ask you to give me a little grace period, knowing that I need to connect with elders and staff first and sort of get my bearings. I'm not going to be doing a lot of lunches, coffees, let's get together right now. So just give me a little space for that. Thanks for understanding that need for on ramp time. And you can pray for me in particular to apply some of the things that I learned this summer into everyday life.

One of my favorite things was bumping into people who had mentioned things going on at CTK, and they'd say something about it, and I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about." And I hope that continues.

One of the things that is going to change is my role in the church. One of my prayers is that I become less important at CTK. This summer, one of the great things is a lot of other leaders have stepped up and staff have stepped up. There are going to be things where you think "I should ask Jeff about this," where I'm going to be like, "I don't know."

I still don't know. Go talk to this staff person, this elder and find out and engage. That's a good thing. That's really healthy for the church. And I'm excited about that change.

Let me pray for us before we jump into God's Word. Father, we thank You for Your Word that is living and active. We pray that You would open Your Word now to our hearts and our hearts to Your Word. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.

Psalm 139: Being Known by God

Today's sermon is a little bit sermon and a little bit just sharing with you some of what God has done in me this summer. I picked Psalm 139, probably one of the best known of the Psalter because it's a psalm that resonates with a deeply human impulse and desire. We want to be known—not just casually known, but comprehensively known. We long for this. It's a very deep longing in our culture for a soul mate, for somebody who really gets me. This is why it's so popular. You can go on social media and take all kinds of quizzes: which Harry Potter character are you? Which Star Wars character? Even the rise in popularity right now of the Enneagram—we want to be known. We deeply want to be known.

And the good news of Psalm 139, the subtext of the whole thing, is this: God knows you comprehensively and still wants to be with you. That is obvious. Some of you have known that for years. Some of you have memorized this Psalm or parts of it. And yet that is so simple and so important that I just want to say it again: God knows you comprehensively, and He wants to be with you. He wants you to know Him in those ways. He wants to open Himself up to you.

Look at how David goes through this catalog. I'm going to walk through this psalm. Pick up your bulletin and look at some of these verses.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. — Psalm 139:2

There's no interior monologue with God. Remember that old movie starring Jim Carrey called Liar, Liar, where every interior thought that Jim Carrey had came out of his mouth? God knows us like that. There's no internal monologue that we have that God is not privy to.

You search out my path and my lying down. — Psalm 139:3

Bruce Waltke, an Old Testament scholar, says this is your public life—out on the path, out in public—and my lying down is your private life. Both are the same to God. He sees all of it.

Before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. — Psalm 139:4

He knows what you're going to say. He knows exactly. You want that person who can finish your sentences? God knows.

Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? — Psalm 139:7

And then listen to all these different places. He says:

If I ascend to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you're there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the outermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, your right hand shall hold me fast. — Psalm 139:8-10

Now, David is not talking here about heaven and hell. These are not moral categories. When he talks about Sheol, he's talking about down. And when he's talking about heaven, he's talking about up. He's charting out all the known points in an ancient Hebrew cosmogony—all the places he can think of in the universe. God's there. I can't get away from Him anywhere.

If I say the darkness shall cover me, the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you. The light is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. — Psalm 139:11-12

You know that 78% of all crimes are committed at night? But for God, day and night are the same. He sees in both.

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 were none of them. — Psalm 139:16

God saw our ultrasound, our forming. God knew the date of your birth. He knows the moles you have. He knows everything about you.

David goes to the very limits of everything he can imagine with regard to self-knowledge. We would put DNA on there. We would put things like God knows our cellular structure and our genetic coding. David says, I go down every one of those pathways, and who do I find at the end of the pathway? I find God at the end of every pathway. Everywhere I go, you are there. I can't imagine any place where you don't know, where you aren't.

In my mother's womb, yes. In the darkness, yes. My inner thoughts, yes. In my private moments, yes.

This summer on sabbatical, to be really transparent with you, I was really hoping for some lightning bolt mountaintop experience.

And I was waiting to come back like Moses from the mountain, like "I have been with the Lord," and come in and just be completely transformed by that. And God had a different plan for my sabbatical this summer. God's plan for this summer was taking me on a journey to get to know myself. Now that may sound really weird. You're like, "You're a pastor and you don't know yourself? Time to find another church."

And yet, can I just be really transparent? One of the weird things about being a pastor is sometimes I don't know where this role ends and I begin. I've been a pastor so long, sometimes as a professional Christian, I don't know who I am. And so this summer has been a real kind of pause for God to help me get to know me. That's come through meeting with a spiritual director, reading a lot of books, being married to a rock star counselor in training named Susan who asks great questions. I looked at the Enneagram this summer. It's been time in silence and solitude. It's been being away from ministry, and it's been really helpful for me.

But truth be told, that was part of the sabbatical I didn't always enjoy. I like canoeing. I love my hammock, fishing—all those things are great. But being alone or God showing me my internal motivations and attitudes and what drives me? No thanks. That's the part I didn't plan on. And it's really difficult for me—maybe you relate to this—to look in the mirror.

And yet this is what I found this summer: following all those pathways, God is at the end of all the pathways. God knows us. There's nothing that surprises Him. And so this is really the first observation from Psalm 139: knowledge of self brings us to knowledge of God. Learning about me, learning about what motivates what's on the inside, that can bring us to a knowledge of God.

I didn't come up with that. That's actually from the French theologian John Calvin. It's the introduction to his masterwork. In the first chapter there, he talks about this: knowing yourself should bring you to knowing God. That's in the Institutes. It should be the case that the more we know ourselves, the more we know the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

So can I encourage you in this? Like if you're at a place of going to counseling, and your counselor tells you things and you're like, "I'm paying you money and this is what you tell me?" Or a friend points out things and says, "You're really defensive about that. Did you notice that?" Or a spouse? Maybe you're using some tool like the Enneagram or like yesterday's Barnabas Center training. If you're using those things and it doesn't bring you to God, you're not doing it right. Because knowledge of self should take us to knowledge of God.

So let's see how this works in the Psalm. Because in this Psalm, we're going to see that there's a problem with that. There's a jerry-rigged way of dealing with that, and then there's a gospel space for that.

To Be Known Is Both Desire and Fear

Here's the downside. Here's the problem with being known. To be known is our greatest desire, and yet it's kind of scary. Frederic Buechner is an author that I really like, and in his book, Telling Secrets, he says this:

What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in all our full humanness, and yet that's often just what we fear more than anything else.

Can you feel that? And it's reflected here in verse one:

God, you have searched me and you know me.

That word "searched" is the word for weighing. In Hebrew language, when you say something is holy, it means it has the connotation of being heavy. It's kind of strange for us, but it means it has substance to it. So when God is holy, there's a sense of substance to Him. And the opposite of that, of being unholy, being a sinner, is dust—not having substance.

And so when he says, "God, you have searched me and you know me," it begs the question that all of us are afraid of: Am I a person who has any substance to me, or am I just dust?

To be known—this is what we both want and what we don't want. Our college InterVarsity leader, a guy named Roger, used to do this little thing talking about how we do this with God all the time. "Go away. Come here. Go away. No, come here." I'm like, "I want both. I'm not sure what I want."

You see this in the Psalm. Verse seven talks about God's presence—he talks about it being over here and over here and over here and over here. But I want you to think like a Hebrew about this, because he's not speaking about this like science class.

You know, in science class, they'll talk about a vacuum, and you introduce oxygen into the vacuum, and what happens? It fills up the space. It goes to all the corners. It spreads out inside. But God's presence isn't like that. It's not like an inert gas. In fact, the word for presence here is face. He's saying, God, Your face is looking at me right here. And Your face is looking at me right here. And Your face is looking at me right here. Where can I go to get away from Your presence? Your face.

I mean, picture Lord of the Rings, the giant eye. Right? This isn't a comforting thought. This is an "oh no" thought. Where can I get away from you? Isn't the face of God a threat to us as sinners? We're exposed. We're naked. We're like, oh, my. I don't want you to see. You remember The Truman Show? All my nineties references today. The Truman Show was a movie about a reality TV show about a man named Truman Burbank who grows up in what he thinks is a normal world, but it turns out it's all in a giant dome in Hollywood. Everybody he interacts with are actors. Everything in his life is on reality TV twenty-four-seven broadcast all the time around the world. So the producer of the show is trying to capture this ultimate everyman who we can get to know and experience his life as he experiences it. And yet what we see is a man who is utterly exposed. I mean, who wants to volunteer to be Truman Burbank? None of us. And yet the Psalm says we are on the Truman Show with God. He sees that much.

This is why verse six makes so much sense to me. When David says:

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; I cannot attain to it. — Psalm 139:6

Now, that word wonderful is like our word awesome. And I'm a child of the eighties, so awesome is permanently lodged in my vocabulary no matter how hard I'm trying to get rid of that word. But wonderful and awesome are not used in their old meanings. Those old meanings are not like the modern way we use them, which sound like meaningless words. Awesome is related to awful. Wonderful is related to wondrous. What they mean is there's something so big and overwhelming. When David says this, he's not saying, "Oh, it's a wonderful life." He's saying, "Oh my word. This is too much." That's why he says, "This is too much for me. I can't attain it. It's blowing my mind. This is blowing all the circuits."

See, imagine this. I got the biggest knife I could find from our house. Now, you know how to hand someone a knife the right way. Right? You give them the handle. You don't give them the blade. Let's imagine though, this is a really sharp knife, and you hand it to me the wrong way, and my only choice is to grab the blade. Now what happens? The reality of the blade, as sharp as it is, comes into the reality of my hand. And which one's more real in that moment? The blade, and I'm cut.

This is what it's like to get near the living God. This is why we're afraid because the reality of who God is in his holiness, in his perfection, and it's coming into reality with my life—it's a threat. It's dangerous to us. It cuts.

This is why it's so hard to look at self. One of the things I experienced over and over the summer is getting to know me, I'm like, ugh. And I'm probably the only person who feels that way about looking inside. But I would rather do pretty much anything. That's why having a sabbatical where I'm forced to sit still is really hard and really good, but like, ugh. Do you have that feeling of "I don't want to see what's inside"?

And the truth is we can't comprehensively know ourselves. This is why Proverbs tells us:

A person's heart are like deep waters. Only a person of understanding, like a counselor can help you draw that out. — Proverbs 20:5

Or Jeremiah tells us:

The heart is desperately wicked. Who can know it? — Jeremiah 17:9

There are parts of you that you can't even know. You can't even understand. But this is the deal: the more we get near God, to come near Him is threatening. It's threatening. So it's too awful. So what do we do about it?

The Fake Way and the Gospel Way

There's a fake way to deal with this, and there's a gospel way to deal with this. I want to think briefly about both of these. Listen, the first one we see in verse 11. David continues when he recognizes, "I'm on the Truman Show."

If only the darkness could hide me. — Psalm 139:11

I mean, do you feel that? Like, I would love it for it to be nighttime right now. I see me, and I wish I could turn off the lights. When we learn about God's all-seeing and all-knowing, human beings long for a covering.

And this goes back to our first story. If you turn to the first pages in the Bible, and it's funny, this was in our Barnabas Center teaching yesterday. When Adam and Eve sinned, they immediately hide. They immediately cover up. And a lot of people are like, "Oh, they were covering up because they didn't have any clothes on." That's not all of why they covered up. There's sin, guilt, but there's also shame. And so they do something very odd. They make clothes out of leaves, which I can't imagine were very comfortable or very effective. They go and they make these coverings for themselves to try to hide.

And what's fascinating, though, is when God finds them, God calls them, says, "Where are you?" And they say, Adam says, "I was naked, and so I hid." What he's saying is, not only I was naked, but I'm still experiencing, even though I'm wearing leaves, a sense of shame, a sense that I need to be covered. And this is sort of what David's saying here. I wish there was some darkness that could hide me from you.

We still do this. We do this all the time. We dress up our insides. We hide. These are not always bad, horrible things. Church, we talk a lot about idolatry, but I want to think about like, they're just things that we do. Some of them we've learned from our families. Our family, we don't have emotions. Those are not helpful, right? Some of you grew up in families with very specific things. A little extra baggage to take with you as you leave the house, right? But it's not just from our families. We're really good. We're super creative at coming up with ways to defy and deny and deflect what we see on the inside.

This is one of the things that's hard for me. I can testify that one of the things that God has done in me this summer is show me ways that I am really great at coping with what's on the inside without going to Jesus with it. And so I found things like, I like to be busy for God because being busy for God is easier for me than being present with God. Or I love to plan for the future because planning for the future, I can at least have some control over. But being present? Man, that's hard. Or filling my time with people, because I don't do silence and solitude. There's nobody to impress. There's nothing to do. Those are just a couple of Christian examples. But all of us have ways that we have rigged our hearts to run without God being close to us, without being near Him.

So look, if let's say you go to counseling, the counselor tells you things you don't want to hear or you take a personality quiz like the Enneagram or you go to our training like you did yesterday and you hear about relating styles and you're like, "Yuck." What do you do with that? Well, here's what I find we do with that. We have one of three things. We either use it as a hall pass, or we use it as a verdict, or we use it as a gift. What do I mean by that?

Well, hall pass. You remember high school, you get the hall pass to be able to leave class and go to the bathroom and stay a couple extra minutes. And what I find is sometimes when we get information about ourselves that we don't like to see, we're like, "Well, I guess that's who I am. Don't expect much from me. I'm never going to change. Like, I'm a Type eight. I don't do gentle. I'm an introvert. I don't do people, right?" We use that as an excuse to like, "Well, I guess I'm off the hook for this one." But God doesn't let us off the hook with things like loving our neighbors, loving one another, growing in Him, learning more about repentance and faith.

Sometimes we use that like a verdict. And we're just so beaten down like, "Man, I just got insight about myself and I feel terrible. Sort of stuck." But that also can be a gift. See, one of the things that I've noticed that God does in my life is He doesn't go, "Voila." He shows me a little bit at a time because I can't handle seeing all of what's on the inside. He's very kind and gentle with sinners. And He shows us new areas, new opportunities for us to draw near Him.

And here's the question: how are you going to receive that? How do you receive knowledge about you? Is it an opportunity? Is it a hall pass? Is it a verdict?

But see, this is not where David ends. This is not David doesn't just end at insight. Oh, I guess that's just me. Look what he does here. Rather, at the end of all this catalog that he does in this Psalm about all the ways God knows Him, even the ways that's threatening, there's a turn. Look at this, verses seventeen and eighteen. Pull out your bulletin. What does he say here?

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God. How vast is the sum of them. — Psalm 139:17-18

Or look at verses twenty-three and twenty-four.

Search me, O God, and know me. Look, you know me. I want you to know me more. — Psalm 139:23-24

What happens?

Well, let me remind you. This is truly awesome, right? We run from this kind of exposure. But look what David does here. He turns. There's a turn. And I want you to remember who's writing this psalm. This is not David the perfect guy. Yes, he's called, at one point, a man after God's own heart, but he's also a man who would have appeared on the Me Too list. This is a man who took another man's wife and had him killed. This is not the perfect guy. And yet, this is the same man who wrote a psalm where he's like, Lord, you know me, I want you to know me more. I mean, something is going on here. How can he say that?

I can't say how David got there. But in the Holy Spirit's inspiration of Scripture, I can tell you how we get there. And it's through just what you've been doing all summer, finding Jesus in the Psalms. Look at the ways we see Jesus in this Psalm.

Jesus in the Psalm

You see, Jesus, who on the cross lost the face of God. And what do I mean by that? Well, Jesus on the cross, as He's dying, He cries out in a loud voice:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And in that moment, the Father turns his face away from his Son. Jesus is rejected. He loses the face, the presence of God the Father. Why? So that you and I, for whom the face of God is scary, we suddenly find that transformed for us into invitation, and delight, and God who loves to know you and look at you, not in a searching way, but in a loving way.

Second, we see this: Jesus the one who was unclothed so you could be clothed. Sometimes when you see depictions of Jesus on the cross, you see this picture of Jesus, and it looks like he's wearing a diaper. Seen those? Don't you believe it. Don't you believe it. We know from the accounts in the gospels that the soldiers, when Jesus was dying, they were gambling for his underwear. They were gambling for his underwear, which means that Jesus was wearing nothing on the cross. He was shamed to death. He was unclothed. And you know that feeling of like, wow, God looking at me makes me feel naked. Jesus was shamed and made naked so that you are forever clothed in His righteousness. God looks at you as one who is dressed in Him. He delights in you.

Third, Jesus is the one who gets the darkness, so you get the light. Remember the account in the Gospels of Jesus' death. It tells us there's a strange happening during the afternoon. Picture a total eclipse. It says the land got really dark. The darkness falls. So even as the darkness falls on him, the light of God pours into your life, and is a light that's not to expose you, but to bring you warmth and healing and wholeness.

And finally, Jesus who was pierced. Remember my illustration of the knife. We know at the cross, the soldier took a sword, a spear, and punched it into his side, and blood and water flowed out. And we know that Jesus was pierced so that what is handed to you is access to God, not what cuts, but what gives life.

Look, if you know Jesus, and this is whether you've known Jesus for a long time, whether you're fresh in here or you've never been to a church before, one of the things I want you to hear is there is more. And when God shows up, He gives access in a way for you to draw near to Him, not just once, over and over again. Because remember, he knows you comprehensively, and he wants to be with you. So God gives us gospel moments all the time. He gives us gospel moments all the time to find him not as judge but as lover, not as father but daddy, but daddy.

This is why David says here this strange line about God's thoughts in verse 17. Remember earlier in the Psalm, he talks about his thoughts. His thoughts are laid bare before God, and that's kind of frightening. But then look what he says here:

Precious to me are your thoughts, O God.

Again, a weak word in English. We think of like a little person as precious or precious moments. This is not that kind of precious. This is like precious metals, like of ultimate value. How valuable to me, God, are your thoughts of me that you have so provided for me in this way, this kind of comfort.

You know, when my children were little, we would hear this refrain at the park, in the backyard, and at the pool. And some of you remember this from being a little kid. Some of you may know this because you have little kids. But I remember hearing, like sometimes in the middle of the night hearing, "Look at me, daddy. Look at me." Remember that one? And kids are like, "Look at me riding my bike. Look at me jumping off the diving board. Look at me wearing my new shoes. Look at me." And it's this word of incredible intimacy. What is a child saying? How precious to me are your thoughts, daddy? Look at me. See, that's the cry of a soul who has learned the kind of access we're given to God. That we come to Him on the safe end, that His light that pours into our life is an opportunity for us to know Him better.

All the places where we're tempted to run away, all the places where I'm like, "Yuck, on the inside"—I don't want to hear it—those are not threats. Those are opportunities to know Him.

The Gospel Space

Let me say this in closing. Some of you are in the business world and have learned you'll probably be familiar with this kind of weird business speak that's out these days. There's a new kind of business speak that uses the word "space" to describe a position. You can go to seminars on someone who's stepping into the leadership space. It's ridiculous, right? We used to call that the CEO, the boss. They're occupying a leadership space.

But I think that's helpful language for Psalm 139, because the psalmist here, David, invites us to step into the Gospel space. It's a space where his language invites us to know and be known.

This is why David does this weird Judo move from the first verse to verse 23. In the first verse, he says:

You've searched me and you know me.

But in the end, what is he saying?

You know me. Know me more. I want more of your look. I want more of your face. I want more of your knowing of me. Search me and know me.

This would be my prayer for us as a church: there's more. A lot of us have been Christians a long time, and we fall into patterns like, "This is what it's going to be. This is how I do my Christian thing. I guess this is as good as it gets." But here's my invitation for you: there is so much more.

Can you pray the prayer of David as he says these words? I'm going to say this three times, and I want you to hear it.

Lord, you know me. Know me more. Lord, you know me. Know me more. Lord, you know me. Know me more.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.