As we continue looking at different aspects of prayer, I hope you all know that it’s okay to pray for yourself. It isn’t wrong to pray for ourselves, but it is possible to pray for ourselves wrongly—to pray in a way that diminishes the divine and elevates the human, in a way that minimizes God and magnifies ourselves. Praying for oneself is the easiest and hardest of all praying. It’s easy in that we know more about our lives than we do about anyone else’s life; we’re more aware of our needs and wants, our strengths and struggles than any other person’s, and this makes telling God about them more natural. But it’s hard in that we have to know when to shift the focus of our praying towards other people and situations—a balance that isn’t easy to strike. I recently found this imbalance in my own prayer life while flipping back through my prayer journal over the last several months. I noticed a lot of first-person pronouns like “I, me, my, mine, myself,” etc., and very few third-person pronouns: “he, she, they, them,” etc.
God certainly wants us to pray for others, like so many Bible saints and Jesus himself did, and we’ll look at praying for others next week. But today we turn to David’s prayer in Psalm 139 as a model of prayer for oneself. Of all the places in Scripture—in fact of all the places in David’s psalms—we could’ve gone for biblical models of praying for oneself, I chose Psalm 139 because in it David touches on so many different aspects of God’s divine character while also exposing so many aspects of his own very human character. After all, prayer isn’t just an activity of relation; it’s an activity of revelation. God doesn’t just want us to know Him in prayer; He wants to show us things about Him and about us in prayer.
Smart folks get regular physical exams, a key part of which is revelation. Your doctor examines you visually and verbally; he or she asks you questions and gives medical feedback, which you hopefully receive and act upon.
Praying for yourself is like a physical—you might call it a ‘spiritual.’ And while praying for ourselves can entail more than a heart exam before God, it must never entail less than that. For example, when our praying becomes begging, we shut the door to examination. Receiving something from God becomes more important than being with God; we so fixate on that thing that we don’t look at God’s word and listen as His Spirit examines our motives for wanting the thing in the first place, much less why God might be withholding it from us for a time.
Today’s big idea is that A heart examined by God is a heart that’s useful to God. Though a powerful king, David knew moments of colossal failure. Yet, even through God’s discipline, he never remained hardened towards God; he kept his heart breakable and open to spiritual examination, making him useful to God’s greater purpose in the world in spite of his many flaws. So today we’ll look at six aspects of David’s well-examined heart in this prayer for himself.
An Examined Heart is a God-Known Heart (vv. 1-6)
The first aspect of an examined heart is that an examined heart is a God-known heart. In the opening stanza, David says in vv. 1-6,
“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.”
It’s one thing to admit that God knows every single thing about our lives in perfect detail; but it’s another thing to prayerfully submit ourselves regularly—daily—to God’s perfect knowledge. A doctor can’t know all your problems before examining you; and if that doctor is thorough, she’ll discover your problems even if you don’t tell her about your symptoms, but it is of course possible for doctors to miss or misdiagnose things. Yet when we come before God in prayer, it’s pointless to leave out the ugly details; He knows them already! As David indicates, “O LORD, you have searched and known me…” (past tense). Before the prayer even began, God was already fully apprised of David’s spiritual vitals, thus the prayer itself is a signal of submission—it’s a signal that God’s exhaustive searching and knowing of his heart was something David valued more than pride.
After sinning, Adam and Eve hid in the garden. Hiding is the opposite of submitting. To hide is pride! We too hide from God in vain through prayerlessness. In Ps. 139, David isn’t confessing sin explicitly, but he surely knows that God completely sees his every area of weakness or failure: “You discern my thoughts from afar…[you’re] acquainted with all my ways…before a word is on my tongue, you know it altogether…” These aren’t the words of a man coming under pretense of perfection; they’re the words of a man yielding to God’s examination of all of his thoughts, ways, and words, good and bad. John Bunyan, author of the Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress, says, “[Either] prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.” Which will it be for you? What sinful thoughts, ways, and words are you protecting or pretending aren’t in your heart by not submitting to the ‘examination room’ of prayer?
An Examined Heart is a God-Accompanied Heart (vv. 7-12)
An examined heart is a God-known heart, and, secondly (very closely related to that) an examined heart is a God-Accompanied heart. God isn’t just all-knowing; He’s all-present. David asks in v. 7. “Where shall I go from your Spirit…where shall I flee from your presence?” Of course the answer is ‘nowhere.’
“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.”
Air may be invisible, but in 39 years I’ve never doubted its presence nor been so discouraged by its invisibility as to give up breathing. Prayer for ourselves that doesn’t on some level acknowledge not only God’s omniscience but His omnipresence is deficient prayer. He is near! James 4:8 in the N.T. says, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Paul says in 1 Cor. 3:16, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”
In praying for ourselves we aren’t lobbing requests up into space hoping they’ll find the ear of a far-distant God—that’s not the God of the Bible! But, though God’s Spirit dwells within us, the temptation to see God as distant is brought on by something else that’s real within us, sin, which of course God wants us to confess and turn away from in prayers for ourselves. And because He’s an accompanying God—as near as our deepest heart—He helps us even with that!
So far we’ve seen that a heart examined through prayer for oneself is a God-known heart and a God-accompanied heart.
An Examined Heart is a God-Formed Heart (vv. 13-16)
Thirdly, an examined heart is a God-Formed heart. To pray to a God who both knows our hearts completely and accompanies our hearts everywhere all the time is to admit that this God must also have made our hearts. “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.” There’s an undeniable physicality to this stanza of David’s prayer, as he envisions quite accurately—apart from any modern scientific awareness of embryo development—the knitting and weaving of genetic material through cellular multiplication within the womb essential to the formation of human life. If his first stanza strikes the note of divine omniscience, and his second stanza a note of divine omnipresence, David’s third stanza strikes the note of divine ownership. If God forms us, He owns us—simple as that!
Think about it: if God can design and then assemble you into the physical being you are from a microscopic strand of proteins, don’t you think He can handle your problems? If God puts you and I together on the atomic, molecular, and cellular level, don’t you think He can help us sort out our relational, occupational, health, and even our spiritual issues? There’s nothing too small or too big for a God who forms us in His own image to handle—nothing too tangled or complex. Why then would praying to this God on our own behalf NOT be a daily priority?
And, by the same token, why would praying to this God on our own behalf be our only (or top) prayer priority? Again, we shouldn’t avoid praying for ourselves, but neither should we obsess over ourselves in prayer. God has formed not only our substance but our season as well. David says in v. 16, “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 was none of them.” You’re not unim-portant, but you’re here on this planet for a God-appointed number of days, and He’s got other people and things He wants you to pray about during your time on earth. So work toward a balance. Keep a list in front of you. Note significant things in your life that need prayer; and also note other people and situations. If you’ve got a limited amount of time for praying (and who doesn’t?), set an alarm to help evenly divide your time. Your needs and others’ needs may require different amounts of your scheduled prayer time day-to-day depending on circumstances.