Perhaps in the morning when you wake, the Lord will bring that phrase to mind, I wake and I'm still in your hand. Please open your Bibles now with me to Psalm 139. We'll consider together this Psalm this evening. As far as I recall, I first preached from this psalm at our daughter Maria's wedding four years ago, the first of next month. And in that, I was particularly considering for them how they can be imitators of God as dearly loved children in their marriage and how some of these attributes of God, which are communicable, that is, that God has some attributes that we can imitate to a degree, how they could follow those out. I was asked to preach at Presbytery a week ago, and this psalm was the psalm that was on my heart, and so I preached it there, and I asked the elders if it would be all right to preach it to you, because I think it's a useful psalm, and they agreed. And as we consider Psalm 139 this evening, I want to consider what it tells us about God in His relationship to us. Search Me can be kind of a smart aleck avoidance of reality response of someone who's hiding something, and they hope you don't find it out. And as we'll see from the psalm, that's pretty silly when considering hiding anything from God. Instead, I want to encourage you to delight in six ways that I want to draw from this psalm delight in the six ways in which God searches you. And so listen, as I read from God's word, Psalm 139. To the choir master, a Psalm of David. 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, O 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 the 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 will 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 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 for me, when as yet there were 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 awake, and I am still with You. Oh, that You would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from Me! They speak against You with malicious intent. Your enemies take Your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. 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. Having heard from God, let's seek Him together in prayer. Please join me in your hearts. O Lord, we do want You to teach us about Your searching us and Your knowing us. and we want to know You better even as we understand how well You know us. And so open our eyes to see You from Your Word and to delight in what we learn. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Again, my encouragement is to invite you to delight in at least six ways that this psalm reminds us, teaches us about how God searches you. The first of those is in verses 1-4, God sees you. God sees you. God is all-seeing and all-knowing. He's not just a sophisticated Santa Claus. And I say that, sure that none of you would think that. But there is a danger when we hear, He sees you when you're sleeping, He knows when you're awake, that we think, well, God's sort of like Santa Claus. No, not at all. God sees you intimately and knows everything about you. And only God knows everything about you. He knows what you say before you say it. He knows what you do before you do it. He knows what you look at before you see it. He knows what you think before you think it. Sometimes we read or we hear or maybe you've experienced someone's private photos or private conversations being made public. or you've heard about, or perhaps you've hit reply all to an email in which you said something with less than Christian virtue about someone in the all list. That kind of exposure of your inward thoughts, of your words that you didn't want to be exposed, certainly can be embarrassing. It can bring about trouble. It can get people fired. They even get people arrested depending on the nature of that hidden thing that was revealed. And maybe when you hear about that or you read about it, you think, well, my life's an open book. And our lives should be open books. You and I ought to live our lives willing for anyone to be able to hear or see what we think or say. And yet the reality is, as I think we would all know, and we would certainly all admit, is that there are things in your life, there are things in my life, that I don't want anyone else to know about. And yet God knows. God sees. There are things that if we could, we would hide even from God. Let me ask you children, when you're doing the wrong thing, Do you want your parents to be watching you? Do you invite them to come and see you disobeying? Now, they do see you often when you think maybe they're not looking. But we ought not to try to live that way before God. The reality is, there's no point in living that way before God. You can't hide from God. God sees you, so live openly before God's sight. But there's at least one additional aspect of the fact that God sees you And you've probably many had this experience where you feel like you're you're working hard to serve the Lord. And nobody notices. Now there's a danger if you're working hard serving the Lord so that people notice. Jesus says if they notice, you'll have your reward. The only reward you get is that they see your good works. But if you do good works in secret, so that only your Father who sees in secret sees them, then you have a greater reward from your Father who sees things in secret and rewards you openly. And so if you are laboring to serve the Lord with a pure heart and struggle with that feeling, does anybody realize what I'm doing? It's okay if they don't, because God sees you and God will reward you in due time. God sees you, so be careful and be encouraged. Secondly, from verses five through six, God encircles you. God encircles you. The SV, the word used there, hems you in. God, you hem me in. And it's an interesting word. It's often used in an aggressive sense. You besiege or even you assault. But it can often be used in a more neutral way as it is here in Psalm 139. The Christian Standard Bible translates it this way. You have encircled me. And I like that translation, and I like the idea that the psalmist expresses in that. This is wonderful. This knowledge is amazing. And I'm glad, God, that you encircle me, that you hem me in, if you will. The psalmist is not resisting God's hedge, God's encircling, but he's rejoicing in this. The reality is God is all around you. And God encircles you. He encircles you with His love. And He encircles you with His protection. And He encircles you with His direction. And sometimes that means that the things that you think you want to do, not sinful things, but the things that you want to do, God doesn't let you do them. And He has something else for you to do instead. We read in Acts 16 about how the church at Philippi was started. Paul and his companions, we're told, went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia. They'd been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word in Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. Passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. And during the night, Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, come over to Macedonia and help us. God was encircling Paul and his companions. He was hemming them in. He was not letting them go to Asia, not letting them go to Bithynia. And he did that. So when the call came to go to Philippi, God sent them, and God established a church there. He saved Lydia, opening her heart to the Gospel. He freed that girl from her demonic possession, and He saved that Philippian jailer. All of that because God had encircled them. and didn't let them do what they thought they wanted to do, but led them instead to do what God wanted them to do. God is all around us. God encircles us. God protects us and God directs us. My oldest sister had two sons who were born with a congenital disease, took both of their lives at about age 20. But as they lived their lives with the challenges and the difficulties that they had, one of the side effects of the disease that they had was that they would choke because they lost their gag reflex. They would put things in their mouths, as little children do, even as young men, because they didn't have that gag reflex. They didn't know that it would be a problem. So they had to be very cautious with their sons. They had to always be with them. Or they had a room in their house that was a safe room. It had half doors that the boys could see out, they could see in, they could see what was going on. Very little in the room in terms of toys or other things. Nothing that they could injure themselves with. They had to encircle them. They had to protect them. And God does that in a far greater way with you. God encircles you, so rejoice in God's protective care. Rejoice in God's boundaries. And if your husband or your wife or your parents or your elder or your friend is God's tool to hem you in, God's tool to encircle you and put His boundaries on you, rejoice. Rejoice and learn that God encircles you because He loves you. God sees you. God encircles you, and then from verses seven to 12, God attends you. God attends you. God is everywhere present, attending to you wherever you are or wherever you go, in heaven or in the grave. Sometimes I hear unbelievers say they'll be glad to go to hell so that they get away from God. they won't get away from God. They'll have His just wrath upon them for eternity. And the psalmist recognizes, if I go to heaven, if I go to the grave, you're there. If I go to the far east or the far west, if I'm in the dark or in the light, God is there. We have a picture that a friend that gave us when we were in Australia that had in it, verse 9, If I take the 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. He gave it to us when we were in Australia because it seemed like Australia was just about the uttermost parts of the sea. But our New Zealand friends wanted us to believe that it was New Zealand. But the reality is the farthest east that you can go is the tiny Republic of Kiribati. It's a tiny country of several atolls where the day first begins. And if you start there, and you go from the furthest east, west, as far as you can go around the globe, and perhaps the westernmost part is the far western edge of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Even there, God is with you. But of course, the psalmist is not teaching us about geography and time zones. He's teaching us about the comprehensiveness of the presence of God. And that is either a great comfort. Or a great terror. Even if you wanted to escape God, you can't. Some of you would know of former professor at the seminary, Denny Pruto. Denny just passed away this week. And he wrote a gospel tract and a book on evangelism with the title, You Cannot Escape from God. The bad news is you can't escape from God. But the good news is you don't have to. You don't have to because Jesus met the qualification for you and you can receive his righteousness. You can receive his salvation by faith. God attends to you wherever you are and wherever you go. He attends to you in the dark times, and He attends to you in the encouraging times. God attends you always and everywhere, so take comfort in His always and everywhere presence. The fourth point that I'd like to call you to be encouraged in, it's particularly in verse 17, but it's all the way through the psalm, and that is that God relates to you. God is a personal God. And the psalmist delights in God's personal relationship with him. I hope you notice as I was reading the psalm, or as we were singing through it, the you and the me relationship that is expressed from beginning to end. You see me, you know me, you encircle me, you love me, you care for me, you are with me always, and your very thoughts are precious to me. Christianity is sometimes spoken of as a personal relationship with God. And some people are a bit critical of that. And there can be a legitimate concern. A concern that somehow we try to diminish us and God to, God is just my buddy. Jesus is just my BFF. A concern that we might diminish the glory of God, that we might not magnify the greatness of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And Christianity is certainly far more than a personal relationship. God is God, and you and I are mere humans. But Christianity is not less than a personal relationship. In fact, you've probably had the experience. Perhaps you even can recount this time in your own life when you spoke about God in an abstract way. You had some awareness, some knowledge, even of the gospel. But you had no personal knowledge of God, no personal intimacy with God. God was just sort of a theory. He was someone out there, not someone who dwelt within you by a spirit. Christianity is a relationship between God and you and me. And it's a gracious relationship. It's a relationship because His mercy lasts forever, because His faithful love endures forever. And that relationship is entirely due to God stooping low to us. This relationship is summarized in the Bible in the language of covenant. Which we could summarize this way. God says you are mine. And I am yours. God says I love you. Because I love you. God relates to you personally. And knowing that, when things don't go the way you hoped they might go, you can be sure that it is still in God's personal relationship plan with you. Reading through the Gospel of John, as Nancy and I are reading through the New Testament together, He had to John 11 and we read now Jesus loved Martha, her sister and Lazarus. He'd heard that Lazarus of six. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And so he stayed and didn't go and heal him because he loved them. When things happen, it seems like, God, if you loved me, this wouldn't have happened. In fact, that's really the plea of Mary and Martha as Jesus does come after Lazarus is in the tomb. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Identical words from both of these sisters. And yet, because Jesus loved them, he stayed so that they would see his glory as he would raise their brother from the dead. And so understand that God relates to you, God loves you, and when things don't go the way you hoped they would go, it's not because God has turned His love away from you, but God is still working. He's working His love through the circumstances of your life. God relates to you as Father, as Son, as Holy Spirit, as Father, as Savior, as Shepherd, as Comforter. So relate back to God. Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. and all your mind. God relates to you. The fifth of these reasons that I call you to delight in God searching you is that God created you. Verses 13 to 16. God created you. God, of course, created everything out of nothing by His powerful Word and all in six days. And though He didn't technically create you out of nothing, He could have. God doesn't need anything to create anything. And this section of the psalm is full of creation language. He formed. He knitted together. He made. He works. He made. You were woven. You were formed. The beginning of life to the end of days. He created us all. He put us together in the secret place, and He ordained every day that would be yours before any of them came about. This week in family worship, I asked our grandkids. Nancy's kind of glad she doesn't have to answer all the questions when we have the grandkids to answer them. I said, how many days do you think you will live? And one of the grandkids said 150. And the other one said a million. Well, it's probably somewhere in between those. Only God knows. My dad, the day before yesterday, has so far lived 31,412 days. You can write that down and do the math later and see what birthday he celebrated on November 1st. God created you and ordained for you every day that He planned for you. So praise Him for how wonderfully He made you. and take care of the you that he made. Several years and several pounds ago, a friend in Australia, I should have calculated how many days he'd lived, a few less than my dad so far, but he gave me a book, Donuts and Temples. The subtitle was Be Nice to the Body God Gave You. I think he was giving it to me for a reason. God created you, so take care of the you that God created. But another aspect of God as your creator is he can do with you whatever he wants to do. He's the potter, and you're the clay. And so we read in the prophets, woe to the one who argues with his maker, one clay pot among many. This clay, say to the one forming it, what are you making? Does your work say he has no hands? Or another prophet, the word of the Lord came to me, house of Israel, can I not treat you as this potter treats his clay? This is the Lord's declaration, just like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, house of Israel. If God created you, God can do with you what He will. And you don't need to be afraid of that. You don't need to fear because he loves you and he will work good no matter what he brings you through. When you face hard times and we all face them, you can be sure that his grace is sufficient and that he who created you is at work even in these hard times. God created you. And then lastly, as we look at these last five or so verses, the attribute that I want to call you to, the thing that I want to remind you of, we read these verses and we're not sure entirely what to do with them. God, I hate Your enemies. God, slay Your enemies. I hate these enemies of Yours with a complete hatred. And then immediately after that, The psalmist says, search me, O God. And I think there's a connection there. There's a recognition that God is holy. And God's hatred is always a holy hatred. And God's anger is always a holy anger. And God's judgment is always a holy judgment. And His searching is always a holy searching. But yours and mine is not always holy. And so even as the psalmist is recognizing the vileness of the enemies of God who stand rebelling against God, he wants his own heart to be searched. He wants his own inner thoughts to be exposed. You and I are not completely holy, but you're called to be holy as your Father in heaven is holy. Left to yourselves, you're not always holy. Left to yourselves, you have wicked ways in you. And so see them and repent of them and ask forgiveness of God and of those you sin against. Left to yourselves, you don't always walk in the everlasting way. So see that and with the Lord's help, turn back to the everlasting way. Many of you are familiar with 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. All Scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. And I've often thought of those four actions of the Word of God this way. We're not told exactly in the text that that's what Paul had in mind, what God had in mind, but I don't think it's in any way strained from the sense of those words. That teaching helps you walk in the everlasting way. Rebuking tells you when you've gotten off the everlasting way. And correcting helps you get back on the everlasting way. And training in righteousness helps you continue to walk in that everlasting way. The reality is if we looked at our lives in the measure of God's everlasting way and the path we take, There would be some circles where we've gotten off, and then in the mercy of God, back on. And then we get back off again, and in the mercy of God, we get back on. The psalmist says, Lord, lead me. Lead me in the everlasting way. You see, the reality is that you and I are called to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy. We're called to have pure thoughts. We're called to have pure words. We're called to walk in God's everlasting way. And so we ask God to help us to do that. We ask God to help us be holy as he is holy. Search me. sometimes said sarcastically or in a deceitful way, but God is searching you. God is searching me. And so let me encourage you to delight in these six ways and more in which God is searching you and ask Him to continue to be seeing and encircling and attending and relating and creating and holy. And if you've got those six words, you've got search. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Pray with me that God would make it so. Father in heaven, we, your children, want to say, search me, O God. And yet at times we want to hide. At times we don't want your searching knowledge to know our inmost thoughts. And when we don't want to, God, make us want to. When we aren't holy, Lord, make us holy. When we're discouraged, remind us that you're attending to our every day of life. When we're struggling, remind us of your loving care for us. And God, continue to search us, continue to make us holy, making us more and more like our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we pray.