Sermon Notes

1-6 God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to You; even from a distance, You know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and You’re there, then up ahead and You’re there, too—Your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in! 7-12 Is there any place I can go to avoid Your Spirit? to be out of Your sight? If I climb to the sky, You’re there! If I go underground, You’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—You’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to You; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to You.

This lesson is topical and theological. David contemplates the magnitude of God and what we should do in response.
As the body of Christ, we must make the effort to pursue spiritual excellence in regard to our growing relationship to Christ and our continued service to community through discipleship.

Psalm 139 is divided evenly divided into four paragraphs of six verses each. In each paragraph the psalmist faces a question about himself in relationship to God. Our printed lesson covers the first two paragraphs:
• Verses 1-6: “How well does God know me?”
• Verses 7-12: “How Near is God to me?”
• Verses 13-18: “How do we know that what God knows about us is true?”
• Verses 19-24: “How do I respond to God’s immeasurable omni-science?”

1-6 God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to You; even from a distance, You know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and You’re there, then up ahead and You’re there, too—Your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in!
The Hebrew word for “searched” is the word, “to dig.” Literally, the psalmist is saying is, “O Lord, You dig into me! Therefore, You know me.” To dig is to investigate; it is to invest time and energy; it is to seek to know every detail. Though it is an anthropomorphism, the psalmist is expressing how much God cares about us—He desires to know all that there is to know about us.
The Psalmist relates how God understands our conscious and unconscious lives, our passive and active intentions. Moreover, the Psalmist says that God understands our subconscious lives—that level of life from which our thoughts arise. He understands them even before they get to the surface.
The Psalmist adds that God is aware of our habits and choices. He speaks of an intimacy that God has with us that we cannot have with anyone else. He is simply overwhelmed by the fact that God knows him better than he knows himself, better than anyone else knows him.
God knows us in the subconscious, unexplorable parts of our lives, as well as in the conscious. What a wonderful revelation this is of God’s understanding of each individual human being. In this day of depersonalization, we need to remember that though science tells us how vast the universe is, and thus how great is the power of God, it takes God’s self-revelation to tell us how important we are to God and how well God knows us.
7-12 Is there any place I can go to avoid Your Spirit? to be out of Your sight? If I climb to the sky, You’re there! If I go underground, You’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—You’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to You; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to You.
This Psalmist has gained an understanding about God. He knows that God knows everything. Based on this newfound understanding the Psalmist starts this section with a rhetorical question, expecting a negative answer. His conclusion, before the question, is: “I am glad to always be in God’s presence.”
The author then sets up four suppositions, none of which does he expect to be possible of accomplishment in his earthly existence. The author is demonstrating, by using opposites, that Yahweh is omnipresent. The use of opposites is a Hebrew idiom that, when used, meant everything in that category.
This, in short, denotes the security the Psalmist finds in the hands of God. He is comforted by the fact that God has scooped him up into His gracious hands. The Psalmist knows that if God is everything and everywhere, then God is more infinite than the earth and even the universe. God can see the light of our darkness. The darkness is human turmoil while the light is divine. God sees through all distress and trouble and surrounds us with His love. Total surrender is the answer to the darkness. Surrendering to the God of “light” who sees in the dark.

So much of our living is about the pursuit of excellence. We pursue excellence economically, academically, socially and personally. We devote a great deal of our time, talent, energy and money to it because we see excellence in those areas as something that’s essential to our personal fulfillment.
We make great sacrifices for our careers. Many of us sacrifice family relationships and personal comfort for the sake of a successful career. We join clubs and civic groups, not because we believe in their cause, but because we believe it will help us to network with the right people; because we believe that it will help us in the future. And we do these things gladly because, when it comes to our careers, we believe in excellence.
Not only do we make this pursuit for ourselves, but we pursue excellence for our children. Many spend college tuition type money to send our children to elementary and secondary school. We expose our children to camps and plays, different cultures and clubs, because we want them to have every opportunity possible. For many, college is not an option, but an expectation, and for many of us, state college isn’t good enough; we try to send them to the finest and most expensive schools in the country.
But when it comes to spiritual matters, when it comes to disciple-ship and our personal commitment to Christ, suddenly we become less interested in excellence. Many of us only make the minimum contribution, the minimum commitment, with the minimum effort. No longer are we concerned with good, but we’re only interested in what’s “good enough”; no longer do we think about first class, but we’re willing to settle for 3rd class, and we make excuses to justify our change in attitude. Not only do we think in terms of “good enough”, but we urge others to think that way also.
But the desire for excellence in spiritual matters is more important than it is for other aspects of our lives. We serve an excellent God, who has gifted us with an excellent Savior, who provided us with an excellent salvation and empowered us with the excellence of the Holy Spirit—who makes all things possible for those who trust and seek to operate in Him. But when we respond to His excellence with an attitude of mediocrity, apathy and disinterest, we’re showing how little we appreciate the God we claim to love and serve. The same attitude of excellence we have when it comes to the transient things of this life should be even more apparent when it comes to discipleship.
Mediocrity in our discipleship carries with it the consequence of ineffectiveness. The worst thing that can be said about any local congregation is that it’s ineffective. And the way to avoid that label is to make a serious commitment to achieve excellence in our relationship with Christ like we do in other areas of our lives.