O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. (Ps. 139:1­2)
In the end, David—lusty, vengeful King David—gained a reputation as a friend of God. For a time in Israel, Jehovah (or Yahweh) was known as "the God of David"; the two were that closely identified. What was David's secret? This majestic psalm hints at an answer.
The psalms form a record of David's conscious effort to subject his own daily life to the reality of that spiritual world beyond him. Mainly, Psalm 139 reveals the intimacy that existed between David and his God. Although his exploits—killing wild animals bare-handed, felling Goliath, surviving Saul's onslaughts—made him a hero in his nation's eyes, David always found a way to make God the one on center stage.
Whatever the phrase "practicing the presence of God" means, David experienced it. He intentionally involved God in every detail of his life.
David firmly believed he mattered to God. After one narrow escape he wrote, "[God] rescued me because he delighted in me" (Psalm 18:19). Another time he argued, in so many words (Psalm 30), "What good will it do you if I die, Lord? Who will praise you then?" And this psalm, 139, beautifully expresses David's sense of wonder at God's love and concern.
Reading David's psalms, with all their emotional peaks and valleys, it may even seem that he wrote them as a form of spiritual therapy, a way of talking himself into faith when his spirit and emotions were wavering. Now, centuries later, we can use those very same prayers as steps of faith, a path to lead us from an obsession with ourselves to the actual presence of God.
Life Question: How do you "practice the presence of God" in your life?
