Prayer and the God Who Wants to Know You

Search me.O God, and know me. (Psalm 139:23)

And he walks with me; and he talks with me,
and he tells me I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

HOW WE ARE KNOWN BY GOD

One of the foundations of prayer is knowing that God wants to know you.  The invitation of the psalmist is not that God would know something that God does not know propostionally, but that God would become familiar with him.  Also, that he would have the experience of being known by God.  That experience is laid out in intimate detail in the psalm:

You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue,
You know it completely, O God.

Perhaps the psalmist intended for this to be read as a description of what it is to be known by God instead of as an argument for God's omniscience.  God knows because God cares.  He knows where I am because he cares about where I am.  He knows my thoughts and my ways because he is so familiar with my voice, how I speak, and what I like to do.  He knows what I am going to say before I say it because he adores me and knows mr as his child with a love I can only dream about.

Maybe this is what it means to walk with God.  If we are to follow Adam's fallen path in the Garden and hide from God, God must hide from us.  We will not be known and familiar to him.  We will escape from the experience of being known as only God can know us.  Walking with God is the opposite of hiding from him.  Walking with God is a continual longing to be known by him.

That longing can only come if we realize he wants to know us.

HOW GOD GETS CLOSE TO US

You hem me in behind and before;
You have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me
Too lofty for me to attain.

It may be that we have trouble grasping God's love for us because it makes no sense.  It is "too wonderful," "too lofty to attain."  The value of each human being is incalculable.  That comes from God's accounting.  It makes no sense.  We are not only small in the scheme of things, we are often despicable.  We may not see this in ourselves, but we are quite conscious of it in others.  How could God bear to have us "hemmed in" so close to him?

The amazing thing in knowing and following Christ is that we discover how God can come to know us even when we can be so small and despicable.  He has a plan to change all of that.  Christ's death on the cross reveals how helpless we are.  Like the Pharisees of Jesus's time, our religions only end up rejecting this God who is with us.  Like the Romans or the first century, our governments gladly crucify him in favor of their own convenience and power.  Like Peter his follower, even our friendship with God turns to betrayal.  We are indeed helpless in our brokenness, in our darkness, in our disregard for God.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me,
and the light become night around me"
even the darkness will not be dark to you,
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

In the cross of Christ, our darkness becomes light.  He sees a way through it and makes what is horrible into a good thing.  The cross shows our deep value to God.  He gave his own Son to keep us near him and to find our worth in him.  He also gave his Son with hope, knowing that we could be recaptured and rejuvenated as rulers over his creation.  In order to know each of us as worthwhile creations of hope, he made a way for each of us to know him.  Through Jesus we can really come to know a God who wants to know us.  He sees us in our darkness and we are not hidden from him.  He reaches out to us with the light of Christ, who died for us.

RENEWED MINDS AND BETTER PRAYER

Here is the ground of prayer.  We must begin with a God who longs to know us.  He wants to walk with us in our hours and days, months and years.  Although such knowledge can be too wonderful for us, we can find certainty of that knowledge in Christ.  As we come to trust him, we find a God who made us, let us go our own way, and yet called us back to him.  The deeper we are grounded in God's heroic love for us in particular, the more prayer will make sense to us as a part of that searching and saving God.  Only in the light of God's work for us through Jesus can we find ourselves able to say, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful.  I know that full well."

Our minds must be renewed by knowing God in this way for our prayers to begin to be effective.  God wants to know me.  God wants to know you.  If we do not care about this, then we will not care about praying.  If we do not believe this, then our prayer will be marked by uncertainty.  We must weigh the evidence that we are given in Christ and his followers and allow it to deepen our faith.  Our certainty depends on it.  We must remember how far God has brought us and see it as an indication of how far he will take us.  As we  ground our minds in such thoughts, we will find prayer is more natural, more real, more beautiful, and also more effective.  With a God like this, who wouldn't pray?