God knows our hearts

The Good News Bible translates Psalm 17:3 this way:  You know my heart.  You have come to me at night; you have examined me completely...."

While the writer of this psalm pleads innocence, I for one would not make such a plea for myself.  Sometimes my heart is a clear as freshly fallen snow.  At other times, my heart resenbles a gall bladder filled with stones.  The stones have names like, envy, harted, prejudice, bitterness, ill-will, selfishness.

Yet the psalmist knows that God knows his heart.  Such knowledge can become for us a personal source of courage to look upon the mixed nature of our own hearts, affirming those aspects that reflect God's likeness in us and confessing those aspects that reflect our hearts in need of transformation.

Because God knows our hearts, we can pray with Howard Thurman:
                    Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.
                        Here is the citadel of all my desiring,
                            where my hopes are born
                             and all the deep resolutions of my spirit take wings.
                    In this center, my fears are nourished,
                         and all my hates are nurtured.
                    Here my loves are cherished,
                          and all the deep hungers of my spirit are honored
                             without quivering and without shock.
                    In my heart, above all else,
                          let love and integrity envelop me
                            until my love is perfected and the last vestige
                            of my desiring is no longer in conflict with thy Spirit.
                    Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.   Amen.
                                 (from the United Methodist Hymnal, pg 401)

And that can be our prayer, because God does know our hearts.  A grace worth pondering.