Try My Reins

"Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart."

The verse just before it is one most of us could not say out loud with others listening: "Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity." The reins are the kidneys. In Hebrew thinking they stood for the deepest inner part of a person, so the reins and the heart together cover everything a man cannot see about himself. The word "try" comes from the work of refining metal, when a smith heats it to find out whether it is pure. "Prove" is a plainer word for testing that stands beside it.

Jeremiah gives both sides of this in two verses. First the problem: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Then God answers: "I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins." David asks for the same search in another psalm, and he adds a line that shows he expects God to find something: "And see if there be any wicked way in me." Paul had good reason to feel sure about how he had lived, yet even he will not run the test on himself. He writes, "I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord." In the old English, "I know nothing by myself" means "my conscience is clear."

Paul leaves the matter there, and he leaves it with a promise: "judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God." That examination is coming for everyone, whether they ask for it or not. So you can ask for it now, the way David did, without fear. The God who searches the heart is the same God who leads His people "in the way everlasting," and for those who belong to Him, His examination ends in praise from God Himself.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 126 is As Your Soul Prospers (3 John 1:2).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two