Ron DeBoer
7/5/2008

Much has been written about the all-knowing Google. Perhaps you have Google set as your homepage. Writer Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and last year’s novel, Jpod, muses that with the Google search engine, we have become all-knowing. We can do a search on any topic, and with lightning speed Google is able to gather and organize information and bring it to your computer screen in a nanosecond.

Have you ever stopped to think that the speed of Google or Wikipedia or even the most sophisticated surveillance equipment developed by the CIA all pale in comparison to God? He can summon every detail of our thoughts, actions, and even futures in an instant!

It’s interesting to me that words or phrases often take on more significant meaning with the evolution of our language. Consider, for instance, David’s invitation to God in Psalm 139:23: “Search me.” Can you imagine God typing in the word “sin” and doing a Google-type search of you? All kinds of information would come up that you probably didn’t even know existed. In David’s prayer, he asks for a complete search:

Are you brave enough to pray such a prayer? If you’re like me, you know there is lots of junk in your life that offends God. And even so, if you’re like me, you keep on offending despite your best efforts not to.

David knew sin. He lusted after and seduced a married woman and then, to cover his sin, he had the woman’s husband put to death. The same man who knew that “every day of my life was recorded in [God’s] book” (Psalm 139:16) couldn’t overcome his own desires. We’re no different.

But despite God’s perfect searches of our inner beings, he has a delete button, too. In Psalm 32:1-5, David celebrates God’s grace and speaks to the freedom of confessing our sins:


Are you willing to let God do a search of your life? In the study notes to David’s “Search me, O God” passage in Psalm 139:23-24, the editors of the Life Application Study Bible (New Living Translation) have the following to say: “David asked God to search for sin and point it out, even to the level of testing his thoughts. This is exploratory surgery for sin. How are we to recognize sin unless God points it out? Then when God shows us, we can repent and be forgiven. Make this verse your prayer. If you ask the Lord to search your heart and your thoughts and to reveal your sin, you will be continuing on the ‘path of everlasting life.’ ”

If your preference is to pray through song, check out for Rebecca St. James’s prayer-song, “Forgive Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nsahyXC0oA or Third Day’s song of hope, “Cry Out to Jesus”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLSKSlJ0-2s&feature=related.

Ron DeBoer is vice-principal at Eastwood Collegiate Institute and author of the book Questions from the Pickle Jar: Teens and Sex to be released this summer. He can be reached at rd2@queensu.ca.

This article appears in the christian journey column on the New Living Translation website. For more information, or to visit the NLT site, please click here.