Episode #382 Nothing to Hide: Bringing Your Whole Self to God – Practicing Conversations With God
From Today's Episode:
In today’s episode, we talk about how intimacy with God requires honesty.
There's a difference between knowing God is aware of your struggles and actually inviting Him into them—and that difference changes everything. This faith-based reflection explores the honest, vulnerable kind of prayer that leads to real closeness with God, and offers one simple question to help you get there today.
Our Good God talks with us and we're created for life with Him, so let's experience more of it!
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Verse
Psalm 139:23-24
"Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting."
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Question
God, where am I resisting you right now? And how can I come honestly?
Here's the episode transcript
Hey, friend. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Good God Talks as we grow our habits of having uncommon conversations with God in everyday life moments. And one of the most uncommon types of conversation, at least for me, was honest ones. I would come to God and try to prove myself to Him, try and say things that I thought He wanted. I would process things that were hard for me internally, as if He didn't know already, but kind of trying to keep them away from Him. So I could come to Him with my best foot forward, trying to communicate to Him the things that I thought He wanted to hear from me.
But as we all know, close relationships, intimate ones where you feel seen and known and understood require honesty. Intimacy requires honesty. And that happens in our relationships with God too. Because as I learned over the years, when I withheld me from the Lord, that was a sign to me that I wasn't really trusting Him. I was withholding this thing that I thought he wouldn't approve of or that He would reject me for. I was trying to clean myself up for Him instead of bringing my struggles to Him. And in doing so, I assumed poorly of Him.
I had misunderstandings about who God was and about his love for me. And those misunderstandings fed on themselves. And so I spent a lot of years missing opportunities to experience who God truly is and to receive what I truly needed from Him because I hadn't taken the step to be vulnerable enough to be honest.
The passage I wanna share with you today is from Psalm 1:39, and it's verses 23 and 24. "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting."
This psalm echoes an invitation that we can extend to God, inviting Him to search us. Trusting who He is, His character, His unchanging, unfailing love enough to know our hearts, to know our thoughts, and to lead us into everlasting ways.
I love the awareness that this passage brings because God already knows our hearts. God already knows our thoughts. He knows us better than we know ourselves, but the practice that we have and that's modeled in these verses is to invite God in with us. We don't simply accept that He knows those things, and avoid talking with Him about them. Instead, we participate in the conversation. We trust God enough to invite His searching, and in doing so, instead of resisting His care, instead of resisting the intimacy and the closeness of relationship that He offers us, we get to experience it on a new level.
No matter where we are in our walks with God today, there is more that we can experience of Him. There's more of Him that we can know, and there's more of us that we can intentionally share with Him.
And so here's a question that I invite you to ask God today:
God, where am I resisting you right now?"
Maybe there's an area of life that you haven't been talking with Him about. Maybe there's a struggle in your thoughts or in your emotions, a worry that you have, or an area of pain or grief that you've kind of withheld from Him to process or handle on your own. And instead, God wants you to let Him in. God wants to lead you in an everlasting way in that area of your life.
I know when I brought God this question, He showed me some things that I was kind of embarrassed to admit to myself, and so I was embarrassed to admit them to Him. And so in inviting Him to search my heart, He showed me these things, and then I had the choice, as we all do, on what I was gonna do with that revelation. And I got to practice choosing intimacy. I got to practice walking with Him in this area in a greater way. I don't know what He has for you today, but I know He does.
So here's that question one more time:
God, where am I resisting you right now? And how can I come honestly?
Have a good talk.
And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!
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