The Garbageman

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” —Psalm 139:23, 24, NIV.

This chapter began with the psalmist’s recognition that God knows everything there is to know about him. When he asks at the end of the psalm for God to plumb the depths and discover even more, the psalmist is not doubting all that he has said earlier. He is admitting that he doesn’t knows himself as well as God does. He wants God to show him those things that only God sees—the areas of the psalmist’s life that have defied not only public scrutiny, but the psalmist’s own.

We all have things in our lives that aren’t pleasing to God. Sometimes they are nameless and elusive, niggling in the backs of the our minds and hearts where we can’t quite put our fingers on them.

With that heart’s desire to have everything in us in submission to God, we ask Him to go digging in our garbage, not because He doesn’t know what’s there, but because we need to know what’s there so that we can give Him permission to take it to the curb.

This morning I answered the question I asked in a previous post. I wondered if what I filled my mind with before going to bed, would be what I first thought of when I woke up the next morning. Last night I meditated on Psalm 1 before I went to sleep. I reflected on how God protects me from stepping off His path by giving me rules to lives by, and how He makes my life fruitful as my life is overwhelmed by His Word. As I fought this morning to force myself to face the day, that assurance came back to me. He will protect my path today. He will make me fruitful today. And this morning I know He will reveal the garbage and take it to the curb for me.

Phillip Keller writes in Sea Edge: “All of our iniquities are carried away into the depths of the sea of God’s forgiveness—not only to be buried from view but also forgotten forever. Only God our Father could be so gracious. Only He could be so magnanimous. Only He could be so utterly astonishing.”