Over the course of the recent weeks, there have been many activities of the Lord in my life. Some of them have been initiated by me, with the Lord having to make His way known instead of my way. Others have simply swept me up in the tide of their seemingly endless crashes upon the sand of my faith. Still others have been centered in the complete assurance of what God is doing, and that He is doing it well, and doing all to full completion. 
	It is a time of joy and anguish, sorrow and rejoicing, love and hatred, trust and fear, devastation and rebuilding. It is a time described by the Psalmist in verses 23 and 24 of Psalms 139 "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." 
	Taken as our text this evening, I seek to caution each one of us in this room, that this short prayer of David, has consequences far beyond a few days, a few weeks, a few years, far beyond our lifetime or even that of our children's lifetime. It is a prayer that will span the remainder of eternity, as it has eternity past. This is a prayer of utmost portent in the very plan and purpose of God. To utter this desire for God to search us, to know us and then to guide us is to be brought into line with the fulfilled purpose of God in Christ, and that is the way of the cross. It is a bitter road of self-denial and self-devastation, because it means that every fiber of our essence will be brought under the excruciatingly brilliant, and utterly irradiating light of the Holy Spirit as God makes known the very depths of our beings.
	This is not a new concept for the people of God. We have all had dealings with the Lord as to our self-life being crucified, that our Lord Jesus Christ might more fully live His life in us. We are very fortunate that God has graciously worked, continuously in each one of us, individually and corporately to this end. 
	As a teaching, we have heard these words before, and have accepted them as the normal course of a daily walk with the Lord. Someday we are more accepting, and other days we are less accepting, but altogether, we know that this is what the Lord will accomplish in our lives, and in the lives of each one of His people. 
	There comes, however, a great difference when this concept of asking God to search us, when this teaching of the effective ministry of the Holy Spirit, no longer is allowed to reside passively in our thoughts, in our minds, but, rather, becomes a turbulent, violent, destroying agent of change in our hearts. This change of heart goes far beyond those, sometimes seemingly endless times of despair when we call out to the Lord for relief from the onslaughts of this realm. There is too much of self-preservation evident in our seeking to find some relief in the midst of the daily calamity of this realm. In all His Omnipotence, Christ has overcome this world's worst and most depredating elements to the final degree. We may not consciously live in that truth, but the fact is that we have nothing to fear from this present realm's power.
	As we are under the daily pressure of living in this world, though no longer a part of it, proclaimed by Christ in John 17, those day-to-day trials, though not easy and not comfortable, and not pleasant, serve to cause us to be ever increasingly reliant upon God. In that truth there is no doubt. But, too many of us, I fear, are settled in our Christian complacency, to make it through every day with God serving as but our safety-net. Yes, using God, to keep our selves from having to undergo the discomfort of being utterly changed in every spiritual fiber of our essence. There must come a time, when even the very practice of our Christianity is destroyed to the utmost - and that violent, religious overthrow far exceeds the paltry fears of the powers of this realm. 
	We may know the language. We may be well versed in the Word. We may fully practice the doctrinal requirements, and find ourselves self-satisfied and even smug in the delusion that we are doing great things for the Lord. We defend our Christian position against all the onslaughts of family and friends and foes, never realizing, until we pray the prayer of the Psalmist, that the words and the thoughts and the ideas and the truth that we know in our minds and in our hearts is not sufficient to satisfy God. He takes no pleasure in even a life that is daily calling upon Him for survival, because that life is a lie! The vileness of the old humanity is so depraved that it seeks even to desecrate the very blood of Christ in its nefarious efforts of subsistence!
	I do not speak of you, for that is between you and the Lord. I speak of me! I speak of a person so despicable in self-righteousness and egotism as to try to lord himself over the very Lord of Lords, the most Holy Creator of all things on earth and in heaven. A man who can become so complacent in his Christianity, that he would try to mold it to fit the very course of self-will, and call it God's will.
	With our self-made, intellectual Christianity, that old humanity tries to set aside the glorious work of Christ, and make it a bridge for the survival of the fittest - the fittest being me, and the rest of you can follow to the best of your own abilities. I will show you the way. I will give you the formula and if you can't keep up, that's your problem. Go to the Lord when you need a hand, but stay out of my way! Is this too harsh? Is this untrue? Is this a lack of sensitivity to the emotional self-esteem of the members of the church seated before me this evening? 
	I am just giving an introductory statement of how the Lord has begun to take the knowledge Christianity of my training and make devastating application of it to the outer defenses of my heart! To survive, we call upon the name of the Lord to help us, to comfort us, to assist us through the rigors of the day, and thankfully, He is faithful to respond and to aid and to comfort and to strengthen as each day progresses. But that loving action of God precedes another, even more loving action of God. He faithfully works on our behalf to prove Himself over and over again in order to establish Himself as our hearts! His motive is none other than to love us to the utmost, and the utmost is the cessation of Ted, of that defiled and decrepit old humanity that desires anything other than Christ! It is the end of who we are, so that Christ will live forth His life unto others. It is the end of the survivalist mentality that will use the very love of God in an attempt to remain a vital element of decision and the center of attention!
	Pray the prayer of the Psalmist for God to search us and to know our hearts, and we will cease to be! It goes far beyond even the glorious change wrought by our salvation experience, because God effectively works to utterly eliminate Ted, period! There is no room for any intellectual working of the old man, with all its twisted plots and ploys to center the attention upon me. There is no area for my self-justification of actions, whether they be good, bad or seemingly non-consequential. The very best of my abilities to establish a well thought out system of survival and benefit, serve to but indicate another avenue that God must break asunder in order to establish another life, another person. 
	The Apostle Paul reiterates the very crux of this desire after Christ in Gal. 2:20 "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."  Yes, we know this passage, we quote it from memory, we delude ourselves even into believing that we understand its very import in our being. I knew it very well at one time, but not today. I used this very verse to justify how I thought God was working in my life to His glory, but it was just a cover-up of what I wanted from God for me! I felt so good inside, to think that God was pleased that I was allowing myself to be put to death, so that Christ could live forth from me. I was permitting God to take me through the trials and the anguish in order that I would be recognized as a man of God. I was willing to lay down my life, so that I could pick it up again and be elevated above all others. I..I..I! I knew what I was doing, and I loved it, and I justified it and I cherished it and I am perishing with it. So deceptive, even to the point of spiritual martyrdom in order to salvage any aspect of who I am in the place and purpose of God!
	God's earnest desire is the relationship that can only be fulfilled in Christ. Not one cancerous cell of that old humanity will be permitted within the Body of Christ, to defile the perfection of the beauty of our Lord Jesus Christ! The surgery is radical, severe and uncompromising. It cuts asunder soul and spirit. It reduces every element to the sum and substance of Christ. 
	The illuminating light of the Holy Spirit begins to pry into every element of our being, exposing and fomenting to the very core of our regurgitated, humanistic training. The seething of our beings is relentlessly bombarded with the torturous purity of Christ until we cry out in utmost despair for God to end our lives. Our humanity, in torment cries peace, peace, let me die in peace, but God will have none of it. No cry of surrender is acceptable to God. He cannot accept it for to do so is to compromise, to lower His standard of Christ, to not express Himself unto the utmost element of love.
	This is why He loves us, in order to unconditionally extinguish that old humanity with such a relentless and final pursuit, that the person of Christ can bloom forth from these vessels in a beauty of a relationship that never was before and will never cease to be! That relationship is the heart of Christ. No other heart is acceptable, not my heart, not your heart, not even the Apostle Paul's heart could find any avenue of access before God. It is Christ and Christ alone! 
	In Jeremiah 17:9 we have the specific reason that any heart other than Christ is completely unacceptable to God "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" There is but One Who knows every crevice of the heart of man, that old humanity. God, and He Alone is able to search out and try the every fiber of the being of man. And, He has determined, rightfully, that there is no good in that heart of stone. What about all those "good" people who are trying to make the world a better place, who have not treated others in any vile manner? Surely those hearts must be acceptable to God? Never! The depravity of all mankind resides in the dark recesses of that heart. It is a heart after self-righteousness and self-adoration. It is a heart motivated by the ideal that man is able to be as God, that we are capable of all good works if but left to our own devices. These are the very hearts that harbor much more animosity toward God, because they feel no need of God. The outright sinner makes no claim to godhood, but that deception is the very basis of any who feel that they can earn a place in the world order of things. Gen 6:5 "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." 
	This is why God allows no acceptance of that humanity of old which lurks in the deceived notions of the honesty, the fairness, the kindness and the justice of the human being. No heart of Christ - no place in the heart of God! This is a hard saying to us. We are so content in our attitudes of being able to handle our Christian life, that we mask the hatred that lurks in us toward the work of God to bring us into His fullness. 
	I fear that I tread on some toes, some concepts, some beliefs at this point, especially my own, but I cannot but speak forth what must be said! We cannot enter into true relationship with God, with ANY part of our old heart in tact! He will not have it! In Ezekiel 36:26 He puts it very bluntly "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh." There is no place for our hearts before God. He will not have it! He must remove that cancerous organ from our beings and rather pump life into us with the very heart of Christ. 
	Even this is something that I have tried to do for myself. I was the one who told God that, yes, I wanted a new heart, so give me a knife in order to perform my own open-heart surgery. I will cut out much of the old, and but graft a little bit of the remainder to the heart of Christ and God said No! Not acceptable!
	But I'm forgiven, I'm saved, I have a new heart after you God, let me keep the shavings of the old to comfort me in my times of emotional upheaval, in my times of earthly distress. My old heart knows some of the secrets of survival, I need it, I want it, I demand it as my human right! 
	Never! God will never give relational access to those who seek to save themselves from His complete and absolute removal of that hardened stone of self within us. This includes even our gathering together in worship. So often, the corporate expression of love unto God has passed me by because I was not permitted by God to enter into it. I wanted to worship Him, but I wanted to do it with my old rags of deceitful pride. My heart was harboring hatred and unforgiveness and feelings that I was somebody spiritual unto myself. 
	God gave no admittance into His fellowship. Sure, I was able to sing songs, but all the while my mind was focused on how well I was or was not singing, and whether or not the others around me were on tune and how slowly it was dragging. I went through thoughts of how to get everyone to speed it up so that it would have a sound of life to it, even though there was a deadness in me. I felt critical about the passages that were read because they did not seem to fit by the focus of my heart. I judged the value of the songs that were lead forth, and placed their selection on a scale of - on target, to having no place in worship. After this period of self-engrandisement and the very critical appraisal of the lacking of my fellow saints, I then proceeded to plan the course of what needed to get done after the worship. What a busy day lay in store, would everyone start getting with the program because I have places to go and people to see. I have to get ready for the Tuesday Night Young People's meeting. Aw come on, not that song again, we sing it every week and we never get the right tempo. 
	On and on and on it goes, without any realization that the one who is lacking is the one who cannot enter into the fellowship, because he refuses to ask God to search me, O God and know my heart. 
	Some will say that they enter into fellowship with God on His basis, as long as His basis is within the scope of their beliefs. If God guides them beyond the comfort of what they have been taught all their lives, they panic and retreat into the safety of doctrines and theology rather than into a desire after that heart of flesh. That granite block of intellect refuses to soften to the heart of Christ, and can be overcome only through the shattering experience of exposure to the incendiary work of the Holy Spirit that blasts away even to the last residue of that inflexible heart of rock. Only then can we know the joy of a living relationship with God singly on the basis of the new heart that is Christ within us, living His life with none of our beliefs or ideas or conceptions to hinder His essence of Love.
	Other Christians, especially those who are young in the Lord, not necessarily young in age, often feel that they have a wonderful time of fellowship with the Lord, as long as their emotional needs are met. They hold forth the feelings of closeness with God as the measure of their spiritual relationship. They feel that they are not hindered by the old-time aspects of Christianity. They see God as doing a new thing, because the old is no longer working in today's modern society. They are willing to worship God with their music and with their terminology and with their ideas of what would be pleasing to God, as long as it is pleasing to them and makes them feel good. The emotional pull of friendships outweighs the spiritual awareness of what would truly please God, utter submission to His desire to set who they are aside, to put their emotions and their feelings and their enthusiasm for newness to death in order to establish that heart of Christ which never waivers nor vacillates with the emotional ebb and flow of feelings, exhaustion, energy and endless endeavor. 
	There is no place for the well-meaning exertion of this natural man into the heart of God. We cannot work our way into fellowship with Him, through a frenzied striving after an emotional high with God. That is catering to the old humanity, that old self which bases every estimation on the value of how we are affected. It sure was a great meeting last night! When I left that place, I never felt so good, and all I wanted was to do the Lord's work for Him. I felt like I could have witnessed about the love of God for all of eternity. At least until the next morning, with the dregs of an emotionally charged hangover beating within our heads. We forget the brief pleasure of the moment in the agony of the feet which sallied forth to pound the pavement for hours on end in every effort to make the Lord of value to others. We cannot make anything of value to anybody. There is no value to the work of this old humanity! Christ is the essence of value, and that only as we are completely removed, and I mean absolutely annihilated to the very fiber of our personalities. There is nothing of value, and nothing worth salvaging in the sediment of human sentimentality. 
	To worship the Lord, to be of pleasure in the assembled company of God's chosen saints is to have the very doggedly beating heart of our human essence torn from this chest and extinguished! God must replace it with the being of Christ, not simply as Savior, not as nominal Lord, but as our only essence of life. Ask God to search our hearts, and we are brought face to face with the truth that in us no good thing abides. The old humanity lives by emotions, and panic attacks, and fears, and upheaval, and perversion through hatred and unforgiveness which lead to the defilement of oneself and of any other who would get in the way. Ask God to try us, and His Word in Proverbs 17:3 will be fulfilled in all His Love to usward "The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts." 
	As evangelizing Christians, we often threaten the world with the fires of hell in order to scare them into Christ. As Christians who would truly desire after the fullness of God, there is a blast-furnace prepared for us that is seven times more searing than the brimstone of hell! It is the Love of God serving to destroy any residue, any remnant of that old human heart, and in the process, constituting a heart, the very heart of Christ, if we will but desire Him to do so, by whatever means, whatever avenues to Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.