Search me, O God, and know my heart;

Try me and know my anxious thoughts;

And see if there be any hurtful way in me,

And lead me in the everlasting way.

—Psalm 139:23-24

Facing My Resistance to Spiritual Surrender

I don’t know if any of you can resonate with this, but I’m not a particularly big fan of being wrong. This is especially true if someone is going to point out my wrongness and tell me to do things another way. So I’m pretty sure I shifted in my seat or looked away or made some other unconscious response that a poker player would call a tell when my small group leader said we were going to talk about sin yesterday.

He followed that statement with a question: “Have you ever given God permission to come clean sin out of your life?”

That question hit me square in the chest. For the past year or so, this is the exact thing God has been working on in my heart. For a while, God has been convicting me of my habit of outright ignoring His leading in my heart and mind by pretending I didn’t hear it.

I kid you not. I would do the spiritual equivalent of those dogs in viral videos: the ones caught doing something wrong who try to avoid trouble by looking away from their masters. As if not seeing the evidence of the wrongdoing would get rid of their guilt. That was (and sometimes still is) me.

Surrendering to God’s Will — And Not Just in the Comfortable Things

The kicker is that as a Christian, I consider myself to be surrendered to Christ. I call Him the Lord of my life. But when faced with that question, I was forced to consider the extent of my surrender.

Especially when I think about the tenuous ceasefire in Israel and the uncertainty of how genuine the surrender is, I have to admit (with a heaping helping of humble pie) that at times, my level of surrender to Christ is, at best, dubious. I say I want God to lead me. I say I want to follow that lead. But when I face a situation where He chooses to point out where I’m going astray, I’m not always as surrendered as I say I am.

Over time, I had let my definition of surrender soften until it only included the times when God led me toward the things that made me comfortable, and I think that’s where a lot of people in Western society have landed. So it’s time for a new definition.

A Psalm About Letting God Lead

Enter Psalm 139. It’s an interesting psalm. It starts with a celebration of God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and the goodness of how He relates to us. And then suddenly, David is praying that God would slay the wicked. He spends four verses talking about how much he hates God’s enemies before ending with the famous “search me and know me” verses.

In the past, I’ve really only paid attention to verse twenty-three: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts.” It’s clear there’s an invitation here, and I had always considered this verse to be the invitation. But if we look at the psalm as a whole, that doesn’t quite make sense.

The psalm begins by saying, “O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways” (verses 1-3). Given this opening and the fact that God is omniscient, it would be a rather weak invitation for David to just say, “Go ahead and do what You’ve already done, God.”

Letting God Take Control and Redefining Surrender

But if we keep looking, verse twenty-four goes a little deeper. In this verse, David not only acknowledges his own broken and fallen nature—“see if there be any hurtful way in me”—but we also see the true invitation and surrender—“lead me in the everlasting way.”

The word translated as lead is where we find the biblical definition of surrender. According to Bible Hub, this word “depicts purposeful, benevolent leadership. Whether moving an entire nation or one worshiper, it emphasizes that the path, the pace, and the destination are all set by the Lord.”

When David invites God to lead him, what he’s doing is opening the door for God to take complete control. No part of his heart is off limits. After all, God already knows what’s there. No path or calling is out of bounds. Who other than God would know what lies ahead in that direction?

This is what our surrender needs to look like. Nothing held back. Nothing off limits. Because it’s in this posture of surrender that we get to draw close to the God who knows it all and wants us anyway.