The following article is an excerpt from Praying with David by Michael Phillips.
David wants to be clean, pure, righteous. It takes guts to pray with David, “Search me…try me…see if there be any wicked way in me.” Any wicked way. We need to make sure we mean business before we pray that prayer. Because God may answer it.
When God begins answering the prayer of transparency, we cannot predict what he may reveal to our inner eyes.
The result may not be pleasant. The David prayer of transparency is total. Any wicked way. When he went to his knees, David opened himself first to the searchlight of God’s probing gaze— Search me, try me, see if there be any wicked way in me —and then to the scalpel of God’s surgery toward Christlikeness: Cleanse me from all unrighteousness.
David invites God not merely to probe and identify motives of sin and self, but to cut them out. With these prayers, David is giving God a free hand to do with him what he will. Of course we shrink from praying David’s prayer. Transparency costs. When David is praying at his best, he prays not against the wickedness of his enemies. He prays for wickedness to be rooted out of himself. He has himself become the wicked man willing to undergo the piercing lens of God’s scrutiny. See if there be any wicked way in me.
Again, however, David vacillates. After a magnificent beginning, he cannot help lapsing briefly again into remonstrations against his enemies. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God… (verse 17) If only you would slay the wicked… (verse 19) Yet he returns again to pray: Search me, O God, and know my heart… (verse 23) What beautiful humanity we see in this man! Even in the midst of one of the most toweringly beautiful prayers in all Scripture, he remains plagued with self-motives. He is the living, transparent example of mankind’s diverse and conflicting natures.
Like David, we cannot keep ourselves from gravitating toward external prayers. They cost little. There may indeed be a fleshly payoff. Large temporal dividends often accrue in the account of the Old Adam from certain kinds of prayer. Much prayer actually feeds the Old Adam. When the Old Adam prays, there is no need to admit weakness, to admit sin, to admit total bankruptcy of strength. The Old Adam can pray happily and mightily and victoriously without worrying about any of that.
When I said earlier that David might not qualify as a role model, I was speaking of his full life character. He is, however, my prayer-rolemodel. The Psalms—rightly read—represent the biblical guidebook of inner, transparent, searchlight, mirror prayer. David is our guide in these deep regions. The prayer of transparency is more difficult for men to pray. We don’t want weakness exposed. We cannot let go of the image of ourselves as seventeen foot high Michelangelo statues. Who wouldn’t rather be associated with the perfection of humanity than with a man on a cross?
The statue and the cross. Strength and power, weakness and frailty. There is no such thing as Christlikeness with a macho twist. Though much has been made in our time of “manly” and “feminist” Christianity, both are illusions. There is no macho or feminist Christlikeness. Neither the mirror nor the cross tolerate pretense.
– Excerpted from pages 64-66 of Praying with David by Michael Phillips
Continue Reading: Praying with David by Michael Phillips
In Praying with David, best-selling author Michael Phillips explores how David’s prayers were inwardly focused on his thoughts, sin, frailty, spiritual character, and his need for God. When the fiery tempest within him stilled, hearkening back to his youth as a shepherd boy on the hillside with his sheep, the divine Fatherhood slowly crept into David’s heart, mind, and soul.
In those moments of solitude, David discovered what it meant to have a personal, transparent, authentic relationship with his God.