There are two of us who team teach a ladies Bible study class each Sunday morning. Trish and I simply rotate the teaching schedule between us, each completing a lesson on one or two Sundays. Trish took us to Psalm 139 as a backdrop for a discussion of the strongholds in our lives that can challenge both our commitment and our faith – strongholds that can bring us to what we presume is total personal failure. We read through familiar verses. O Lord, you ... know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it ... I can never get away from your presence! ... I cannot hide from you. Trish asked us a compelling question. Are we comfortable with the fact that God knows all about us?

I don’t have to imagine being very uncomfortable with God’s all-knowing presence in my life. Discomfort is a mild word for the fear that could grip me when thoughts of God’s omniscience taunted my mind and my heart. The fear would quickly turn to an anxiety that recoiled with the foreboding sense of His displeasure and an outburst of His scourging discipline. There was much I had repeatedly asked God’s forgiveness for, but I had not grasped the reality of that forgiveness. And so, I lived in the shadow of His presumed anger. Coming to a place that I fully accepted what God had already done for me out of His lovingkindness that longed to draw me to Himself, my understanding of His omniscience also began to change.

 

Today as I think about the all-knowing God who has fully forgiven both the atrocious and the seemingly mundane in my life, I delight in His omniscience. I know that His omniscience is wrapped in the purity of His father-love. I do know that I have not yet reached "perfection" in my behaviors and attitudes, and sometimes I am slow to acknowledge those imperfections. When I do that, my Father-God cares enough about me that He does not want me to be bound by the relentlessness of even "petty" sins. Because of His love, His Spirit will interact with my own spirit, bringing conviction and appropriate responses. BUT– not only does God know my sinful wanderings so that He confronts my willfulness, He also knows the desires of my heart that long to please Him, the prolonged striving that reaches for His best over and over again, even when that striving is frustrated by my own humanness or by the lack of affirmation from others. He knows and accepts the faithfulness of my heart that pulsates with my love for Him. In light of these truths, I am encouraged with God’s words to Samuel when he sought the king that would replace Saul. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.