Fully Known
god knows who you are when you don’t.
Psalm 139:1-3 — O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
When you’re unsure of who you are, what your purpose is, where to plant your feet, or what direction to take, God knows. He knows you fully & deeply. Seek to know Him fully & deeply in return as you grapple with the questions of your life. When faced with confusion, seek stability in a sure thing - Jesus Christ. When you grow weary of searching yourself, let God search you & know you. When the decision-fatigue overwhelms your mind & emotions, go to the Author who has it all written down. Go to the Writer of your life & meet Him in His Word, the Bible.
Are you hesitant to get real with God? My prayers used to be attempts at stuffing my emotions to present a facade to God. I made God small by thinking I could pretend in His presence, by thinking He wouldn’t see past it all. At the time, I believed I was finding my joy in the Lord by denying my true emotions. If God was really my everything, how could I be so sad? I had to pretend. Denying my true emotions in prayer only led to frustration & deeper sadness. I felt incongruent & inauthentic. My faith would falter when the facade became too difficult to maintain. I’d become less interested in prayer & reading my Bible. My emotions dictated whether or not I’d spend time with God.
Looking back, the distance I’d create indicated a hesitation for God to fully know me. Could I really trust Him with the true me? Would I dishonor God by telling Him how I really felt? The question I perhaps should have been asking is this: Am I dishonoring God by trying to maintain a lie? What I’ve learned is that God wants to have a deep, intimate relationship with me. That kind of relationship requires honesty. We honor God through our honesty. Honesty rests on truth. The truth is that God is good, even when life isn’t. God loves me, even when I fail. God has a plan for me, even when I can’t see it. God forgives me, even if I haven’t forgiven myself. When we accept the truth about God, we then speak the truth about our feelings & emotions from a place of surrender. This honors Him.
God, You are good. I am sad & disappointed that my relationship didn’t work out. I feel lonely & I want to be married right now but I trust that You have good plans for my life.
God, You are my healer & my deliverer. My heart is so heavy & full of worry. What am I going to do? I know You are guiding me even though the path is unclear.
God created each of us with emotions. He’s not surprised when you & I express them.
A practice that I’ve found healing is crying in God’s presence. My tears aren’t in vain when they are directed toward heaven. He turns mourning to dancing. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted - by the God of all comfort. I tell God that I’m sad, that I’m lonely, that I’m disappointed. And then I bring to mind all the things that He is to me - a Father, companion, listener, healer, comforter, author, redeemer, & more.
Jesus modeled this for us in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus named His emotions - sorrow & distress (Matthew 26:38) & allowed these feelings to lead Him into prayer. In His anguish - an authentic feeling of desperation & agony - Jesus asked that the calling of crucifixion pass from Him. Paired with His request was submission - not as I will, but as You will (Matthew 26:39). He honored God in His yielded humanity, in His obedience to the cup that God presented Him. But even as He submitted, He communicated His true heart - the pain, anxiety, & distress. If the Son of God felt these things, how much more do we? In Jesus, we have permission to open up to God.
I believe that the key to honoring God is placing our emotions under the perfection of God’s will, remembering who He is in every circumstance, & finding our hope in Him. We build authentic intimacy with God when we acknowledge the very real emotions in our lives & trust Him to make something out of the brokenness. God is so good & so faithful & He wants you to know that in a true way. When we allow God to show up in our distress, we go to greater depths with Him. We receive a testimony that glorifies God & deepens our trust in Him.
In the garden, Jesus shared His distress in prayer with the Father & then submitted His will. Authentic emotion & true submission in the garden made a way for us to one day spend eternity in an everlasting garden of never-ending life in God’s presence. Can we live in light of the garden-to-come by cultivating an intimate relationship with God as we share our deepest pains? Can we harvest the fruit of a heart healed by honest prayer & continual submission to the Father?
Spend some time in Psalm 139. Just dwell there. Don’t rush through it. Lately God has been leading me to the Psalms when He wants to speak to my emotions. I was recently feeling worried about my future & confused about what to do with my life. I felt the Spirit prompt me to get into Psalm 139 - one of my favorite ones. In earlier years, God really highlighted the middle part of this Psalm (Psalm 139:13-16) to reveal to me my worth. Recently, He illuminated the parts that frame the familiar middle - the parts that tell me I am deeply known, understood, & accompanied by God. God is ever-present. God’s thoughts toward me are innumerable & precious. God searches me & knows my heart, my worries, & my sin & as I place my life in His hands, He leads me into eternal life.
I can’t hide my emotions from God because He knows every detail of my existence - my sitting & rising, my waking & sleeping, my words & my thoughts. He fashioned all my days. I can’t flee from His presence & I don’t want to because in His presence is freedom & eternal life. He knows my anxieties but offers the gift of eternal life if I submit myself to Jesus Christ as Lord & Savior of my life. It is not an either/or, it is a both/and situation. I can honor God and be real about my feelings because God already knows the deepest parts of me. He is trustworthy, faithful, always present & He desires to have an intimate relationship with me as I pour out my heart like a river of Psalms.
When you face difficult emotions or just don’t know where to go, know that God knows & He calls you to know Him in return. God invites us to seek Him & find Him as He searches & finds us, carrying us to eternity as the only Good Shepherd.