Fully Known and Not Abandoned: For the Week You Did Not Choose

The kitchen chair at 1:17 a.m. does not ask if you had a sermon series planned. The manila folder on the table still looks ordinary. The extra bedroom is still furnished. The voicemail is still unplayed because playing it would make the week official. Nobody voted. The furniture of ordinary life is still in the house, and the floor plan has already changed.

People in that chair often run a second sentence under the first. The first sentence is the one they will say in the greeting line. We are taking it a day at a time. The second sentence is the one that keeps them sitting: if God knew, he would have stopped this.

Psalm 139 will not scold the chair. It is a prayer from a worshiper who discovered that being fully known by God is not the same thing as being found out and left. If you preach it as a pep talk about self-worth, you will lie to people whose week has already stripped the slogans. If you preach it as a threat, you will send already-exposed people home more afraid of God than of the folder. Preach it as poetry: the God who searches you has not abandoned you in the week you did not choose.

Text

Hear Psalm 139:1-18, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh, you have searched me, and you know me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, Yahweh, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me. This knowledge is beyond me. It’s lofty. I can’t attain it.