Pursuit of His Glory
mmalanga | March 24, 2006“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! …Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts![1] And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting![2]”—Psalm 139.1, 23, 24 [ESV]
I have been considering a question I recently asked of a young man who had just returned from a mission trip to the southwestern U.S. “So,” I posed the question, “what did you learn about yourself from this experience?” Upon deeper reflection that is a perfectly inane question, and I am a blockhead for asking it!
A better question would have focused attention heavenward: what did you learn about God from this experience? I am not trying to sound “spiritual.” I am far too much a son of the earth for that. To ask what did you learn about yourself is to place the emphasis on the wrong subject. What did you learn about God, specifically, what did you learn about God’s passion for His glory is the proper question.
The older I grow in my walk with Christ the more I am convinced that, apart from God, I can learn nothing about myself. It is, after all, He who made me. He alone has the power to search me and know my heart. He alone can expose the grievous schemes that lurk in the musty darkness of my cheating heart. Jeremiah had it right when he said,
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
“I the LORD search the heart and test the mind,[3]
to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
Since only the LORD can search the heart and test the mind it is arrogance to assume that every experience I have is designed to help me learn more about me. What if every experience I have is intended to help me know more about God? What if life is all about learning about God’s passion for His glory? What if the things I need to learn, the really important things, start by answering the question: So, what did I learn about God from this experience?
Good heavens! The things I might learn—about God, that is. Could it be the more I learn about God’s passion for His glory the more I will learn about who I am, why I am here and, yes, why God made me the way I am? In a word—yes. That seems to be the point of Psalm 139.
Now I know the Bible well enough to know that God uses life experience to shape me so that I am “conformed to the image of His Son.”[4] However, this shaping is not ultimately for my sake. It is “in order that Jesus might be the firstborn among many brothers.”[5] The more I learn about God the more I learn that I cannot live without Him. The more my life is given to the pursuit of His glory the more I will ask Him to search me and know my heart; to try me and know my anxious thoughts; to see if there be any grievous way in me and to pray with all earnestness for Him to lead me in the way everlasting.
You think about that.
MM
