Handing Over the Search

There is a particular tiredness that comes from doing two jobs at once, and it is worse when both of them are about you.

Picture a man sitting up at a lakeshore camp at four in the morning with the fire gone to embers. He is not there for the fishing. He came out because at home the questions get louder and here at least the water makes a noise.

The two jobs go like this.

The first job is being the man who did the thing. That one is heavy enough on its own. He carries it about, it comes up at odd hours, it is part of the furniture now.

The second job is being the investigator assigned to that man.

That is the one that has worn him out. He interviews himself. He goes back over what he said and why he said it, and then he goes back over why he said the reason he said, because a man who is investigating himself soon learns not to trust the first answer he gets. He looks for signs of real change and then examines whether he only looked for them so he could feel better. There is no floor to it. Every answer he produces becomes new evidence requiring examination.

Two years of that, and the case is no further on, and both the suspect and the officer are exhausted, and they are the same person.

I want to name the wound before the lift, because a lift that arrives too early does not hold. Somewhere you learned that you are not to be trusted about yourself. Perhaps somebody taught you that on purpose. Perhaps it was just a house where you had to justify things. And so you have appointed yourself to a permanent inquiry, and you have never once considered that the appointment was not made by God.

That is you at the embers.

You've been running an investigation that will never report, on a subject you cannot see clearly, using an instrument that is the subject. And you have called this being serious about yourself, and it has cost you a great deal of sleep.

David asks God to do the searching

Here is the psalm people quote, and I want you to notice who is holding the torch.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.Psalm 139:23-24

Search me, O God. He does not say: I will search myself and report to You. He hands the whole operation over. God searches, God knows, God tries, God sees, and then God leads. Five verbs and every one of them belongs to Him.

That is not laziness. It is the psalm of a man who has just spent twenty two verses saying that God already knows him better than he knows himself, and who draws the obvious conclusion: the searching should be done by the One who can actually see.

You are not the investigator here, and the appointment you have been serving under was never issued, and I am not lowering anything: Psalm 139:23 hands the searching to God in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring that to a man at a dead fire at four in the morning.

Now look at where the psalm ends, because that is the part your inquiry has never been able to produce. Lead me in the way everlasting. The searching is not an end in itself. It exists to open onto a road. Your two year investigation has produced no road, because an inquiry that never reports cannot recommend anything, and you have been stuck at the evidence stage since the first month.

You have a searching available that arrives at a road, which is more than yours has ever offered you, which is written into the last line of the psalm rather than into my sympathy for a tired man, with the Spirit of God able to end an inquiry that argument cannot close.

There is one more thing in the passage. See if there be any wicked way in me. He is not asking God to confirm his innocence and he is not asking to be spared. He is genuinely open to being shown something. And he asks for it in the safest posture there is: from underneath God's own knowledge of him rather than from his own suspicion of himself.

The difference between those two is the difference between a doctor's examination and a man pressing his own bruises in the dark.

This is His work rather than yours, and the handing over is not an evasion but the whole instruction, because Scripture makes every verb in it God's, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that out to a lakeshore.

The water, the mist and the light coming over it are all His handiwork, and none of them are running an inquiry into you. Neither is He.