Earlier today I was listening to the Newsboys on Spotify and an ad banner popped up:
When I saw this I realized how alone and isolated we all truly feel. Perhaps that’s why social media is so rampant; in an attempt to feel intimacy we’ve become hyper-connected. The problem is that our social circles have become very wide, but very, very shallow. It’s almost as if the ad is telling me that now it’s no longer good enough to just listen to music alone, now I also need to know what my friends are listening to. Strange, right?
If you don’t believe me or think I’m reading too much into a simple marketing gimmick, take a moment to think about the person who knows you best. Perhaps it’s a parent or a sibling or a spouse. How well do they really know you? For example, my beautiful wife probably knows about 5% of who I really am. She’s known me just over 5 years, so almost a 1/5 of my life. We were separated 1.5 years of that due to deployments. We don’t spend every waking hour together, and even when we are together I don’t tell her every single thing that I think about. She doesn’t know what happened every single day of my life before I met her and she only knows a small portion of the days we do spend together.
So how well does my wife truly know me? And how well do I truly know my wife? And how well does that person truly know you? How fully and truly do we know anyone? Proverbs 14:10 affirms this when it says “The heart knows its own bitterness and no stranger shares its joy.” The Hebrew word for heart doesn’t just mean your emotional center or something like that; the heart is the total essence of you as a person. The heart is the self that you know and, even deeper, the self that you don’t even know. The heart is who you truly and wholly are and it knows its own bitterness and no one can fully share its joy. Feeling alone yet?
And yet I find great comfort in this thought. I don’t try to compensate by telling my wife everything in hopes that she’ll understand me. Nor do I constantly ask my wife what she’s thinking so I can know her. Why? Because I rest in the firm knowledge that God does know me. Tim Keller, in The Wounded Spirit, said that “if you don’t have an intimate, personal relationship with God, you are utterly alone in the world.” And he’s right!
The comforting truth is that God knows me better than I know my self. Read Psalm 139 and you’ll quickly see what I mean. In verse 1, David says “O LORD, you have searched me and known me!” The word for search here means something like “spy; probe; search; examine; explore; sound out; see through; be explored; investigate.” God hasn’t just searched you out and found you, He’s also searched you within and knows you completely. God knows us to a degree that is impossible for us to know one another or even ourselves. The description continues:
“you discern my thoughts from afar.
3You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.“
(Psalm 139:2b-4)
God knows our thoughts before we have them because He knows the minds that produce them. God knows all our ways far better than even we do. In fact, God knows us so well that He knows what we’re going to say before we do. David paints this wonderful picture of God being with us from the moment we fall asleep to the moment we wake up (I awake, and I am still with you. Psalm 139:18b).
Wikipedia defines loneliness as “an unpleasant feeling in which a person experiences a strong sense of emptiness and solitude resulting from inadequate levels of social relationships.” Our great comfort is that we’re never truly alone. In fact, we’re never, ever alone. Not if we know God. The Person who knows us better than we know ourselves is with us always; He will never leave us nor forsake us. May you be comforted by the knowledge that God does know you and He is always with you.