Search me, O God / James E. Orr 1936
Search me, O God, and know my heart today,
Try me, O Savior, know my thoughts, I pray;
See if there be some wicked way in me;
Cleanse me from every sin, and set me free.
I praise Thee, Lord, for cleansing me from sin;
Fulfill Thy word and make me pure within;
Fill me with fire, where once I burned with shame;
Grant my desire to magnify Thy name.
Lord, take my life, and make it wholly Thine;
Fill my poor heart with Thy great love divine;
Take all my will, my passion, self and pride;
I now surrender, Lord, in me abide.
O Holy Ghost, revival comes from Thee;
Send a revival, start the work in me;
Thy Word declares Thou wilt supply our need;
For blessings now, O Lord, I humbly plead.
“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. Rebuke, correct, encourage and train me in righteousness for your name’s sake. In Jesus’ name I pray these things, amen.” I read Romans 6:1-14 for my quiet time with the Lord today:
Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ
1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
5 If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace…
My Understanding: I believe the Lord would have me use the stanzas to this song as a kind of outline to provide for me four basic areas addressed in this passage of scripture, and then to discuss the practical application of each one to our (me, too) lives today.
Soul Searching – The premise of this song is based off of Psalm 139:23-24:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
The Psalmist had just finished describing how God knows everything about us. There is nowhere we can go to hide from God, for wherever we go, God is there, and he sees everything we do, he hears everything we say, he knows every thought we think even before the words come on our tongues. There is nothing hidden from God. Then, the Psalmist goes on to describe how God is the one who knits us together in the wombs of our mothers and how he has a plan and a divine purpose for each and every one of our lives. So, God is the only one who truly knows our hearts, our minds, our thoughts, our desires, etc. He knows us better than we know ourselves, because our hearts can be deceitful and we can fool ourselves into believing things about ourselves that are not true. So, that is why we must ask God regularly to search our hearts to see if there is any offensive or wicked way within us that he needs his cleansing power and his renewal in our lives.
This passage of scripture begins with three basic questions that are soul searching questions: 1) Should we go on sinning that God’s grace may increase? 2) No! How can we live in it any longer? And 3) Don’t we know that when we were baptized into Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death? These are good thought-provoking and soul searching questions to regularly ask ourselves. Are we continuing in sin because we feel as though God’s grace will just keep coming? So many believers in Jesus Christ take sin lightly because they feel that they are covered by God’s grace. May that never be that we should take such a casual view of sin just because we have such a gracious and loving God who is slow to anger and abounding in love and compassion. Should we take advantage of this grace? How can we continue in sin after God did all he did to see that we could go free? Don’t we understand that faith in Jesus Christ means dying to sin and to our old lives?
Purifying Process - When we receive Jesus as Lord and Savior of our lives, it means being baptized into his death, i.e. having our old sin nature crucified on the cross, having it buried in the grave where it remains, then having been raised with Christ to a new life, not a “cleaned-up” version of our old lives. It means turning from our old lives of sin and walking in faith and obedience to Jesus Christ, taking up our cross daily, having our all on the altar, and being fully surrendered and committed to Jesus Christ. It means coming before the Lord daily and asking him to search our hearts so that we know what wicked ways exist in our lives so that we can confess, repent and be renewed in the Spirit. Then, when the old is gone, the Holy Spirit of God can fill us to overflowing with his presence, his power, his love, his passion and his desires for our lives so that our lives and the words we speak are like a torch on fire for the Lord that shines brightly for him for his purposes and for his glory.
This passage of scripture compares the life of sin to a life of slavery, and the life of freedom in Christ as also a life of slavery. One life is a life of slavery (bondservant) to sin in which sin reigns (rules; has dominion; controls; influences strongly; dominates; governs; and has power) in our mortal bodies so that we obey its evil desires, offering our bodies to sin as instruments of wickedness. The other life is a life of slavery to righteousness in which we offer ourselves to Almighty God to serve him as instruments of righteousness (being blameless before God) and where sin is no longer our master because we are under grace. So many people use God’s grace as an excuse to remain enslaved to sin, and this should never be. This makes a mockery of what Jesus did for us in dying for our sins so that we could go free. Instead, we need to be living sacrifices to God, holy and pleasing to him.
Sacrificial Life – The song writer asks the Lord to take his life and to make it wholly God’s. This means that no part of our lives are our own to do with as we choose while reserving a section of our lives for God and for God’s service. We cannot and should not compartmentalize our lives into the secular and the sacred, but rather our lives should be sacred - fully committed to, fully owned by, and fully obedient to our Lord Jesus Christ, without reservation, holding nothing back for ourselves. The song writer continued by asking the Lord to remove from him all his selfish will, his self-centered passions and desires and his pride, and to replace them with God’s love and his fire and passion for doing what God requires of us to do and what he purposed for our lives even before we were thought of by our parents. We are to consider our old lives dead and buried never to rise again and we are to consider ourselves now alive in Christ Jesus, fully surrendered to him and to his will for our lives. Instead of planning out our days and doing what we want, we should inquire of the Lord as to what he would have us to do, and then we should obey him.
Reviving the Heart – To “revive” means to come back (from the dead) to life. This is speaking of someone who was alive, but has died, and now must be brought back to life. So, this is not speaking of those outside of Christ Jesus who have never come to life in Christ, but rather this is referring to those who once were alive in Christ, but their commitments to obey their Lord in all things, their hearts’ desires to serve the Lord, their determinations to consider themselves dead to sin but alive to God slowly but surely ebbed away through disobedience and through neglect until they became non-existent or simmering on low heat on a burner with the flame barely lit and visible for others to see. So, they must be brought back to life; they must be revived. And, this happens through repetitive pressure applied to the heart, and the breath of life being blown into their bodies by force in order to get them to breathe and for their hearts to beat once more. And, that is what it often takes to get those who have once been alive in Christ but have allowed their passion for the Lord to die a slow, painful death, to come back to life.
The writer of the song asked the Lord to begin this work of revival in his own life. I pray that with him daily for my life that God will search my heart and that he will point out to me any areas of my life, unknown to me, where I am not walking in obedience to him and where I am allowing sin to reign (rule) in my body so that I obey its evil desires. I ask this so that I may repent and so that I may continue to walk in faith and obedience and to be an instrument of his righteousness in the lives of others for his glory, honor and praise.
Vv. 15-23 (not quoted here) say that when we offer ourselves to sin that we are offering ourselves as slaves to obey its lusts and desires and so we become slaves to the one we obey – whether we are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness. Then, the passage says this: “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.” This is profound! We can’t be slaves to both sin and righteousness, as they are counterproductive. We must choose one or the other to be our master. If we are still being led and controlled by sin, then we are free from the control of righteousness. They cannot and should not co-exist. Yet, so many try to blend the two together as though they are compatible, but the one will always contradict the other. So, we must choose to be free from the control of sin so that we can be slaves to righteousness.
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