Details

Psa 139:1  O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.

God also has a way of searching us by lifting our eyes from the detail to the whole. 

He sets the detail in its true perspective, and seeing it thus, we come to see ourselves. 

You know how the writer of this psalm proceeds: "Thou knowest my downsitting and my uprising," he says. 

These are details, little particular actions, the unconsidered events of every day. 

But the writer does not stop with these details-he passes on to the survey of his life...

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

You will remember that it was through details that Christ revealed the Samaritan woman to herself. 

She had been hiding her guilt from her own eyes by busying herself in the details of the day. 

And then came Jesus with His enlarged vision in which the days are all parts of the one life, and in the eyes of Christ she saw herself because she saw the details as a whole.

Come, see a man, she went and cried, "who told me all things that ever I did."

Actually, it was an exaggeration, for Christ had not spoken to her very long. 

But when you get down to the spirit of the words, you never think of their exaggeration for they reveal the way that Jesus took in searching her and showing her to herself. 

He would not let her hide in the detail...

He wanted her to have a vision of the whole. 

He wanted to show her what her life was like when looked at closely. 

And so this woman was searched and self-revealed through detail in its true perspective, and her conscience, which had long been slumbering, awoke.

I think that is often the way the Lord deals with you and me...

We are all prone to be blinded by details so that we scarcely realize what we are doing. 

There are lines of behavior which we would never take, if we only realized all that they meant.

There are habits and certain sins to which we would never yield if we only saw them in their vile completeness. 

But the present is so tyrannical and sweet and the action of the hour is so absorbing, that we cannot see the forest for the trees, nor see ahead the path that we are taking.

We often say when looking back upon our sufferings, "We wonder how we ever could have borne it." 

One secret of our bearing it was that we only suffered one moment at a time. 

And in looking back upon our foolish past, we sometimes say, How could we have ever done it!..

And one secret of our doing it was that we only acted one moment at a time. 

When a man is dimly conscious that he is wrong, he has a strange ability to forget yesterday. 

When a man is hurrying to fulfill his passion, he shuts his ears to the call of tomorrow. 

And the work of God is to revive that yesterday and tear the curtain from the sad tomorrow and show a man his action of today set in the general story of his life. 

Sometimes He does it through sickness...

Sometimes in a quiet hour such as this...

Sometimes He does it in a mysterious way by the immediate working of the Holy Ghost.

But when He does it, then we know ourselves and see things as they are, and we are ashamed. 

Only then we can cry with David, "O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me."

~George H. Morrison~