The Beginning of Attunement

Psalm 139:13–18 (NIV)

For you created my inmost being;
   you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
   your works are wonderful,
   I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
   when I was made in the secret place,
   when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
   all the days ordained for me were written in your book
   before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
   How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
   they would outnumber the grains of sand—
   when I awake, I am still with you.

CONSIDER THIS

How does attunement work? 

I thought you would never ask! ;0) It begins with a much deeper question. 

Did you know you have an inmost being?

There are many features which separate Homo sapiens (aka human beings) from other species of mammals. These features are biological in nature. There is one feature which puts human beings in a completely distinctive category than any other created creature. It is a divine feature. This is what the Bible refers to as the “inmost being.”¹

For you created my inmost being;

Do you realize you have an inmost being? 

I would go so far as to say this is the stamp of the very image of God on the human creature. This is the place from which our relationship with God originates, the instrument of intimate interface between the human and the Divine.

For you created my inmost being;
   you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
   your works are wonderful,
   I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
   when I was made in the secret place,
   when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
   all the days ordained for me were written in your book
   before one of them came to be.

Though the fall of humanity in the garden of Eden created many layers of chaos, the originating and most crushing and catastrophic blow came to the inmost being of the man and the woman. Imagine a compass whose true north always pointed directly to the presence, ways, and will of God and imagine that figurative compass residing at the core of your deepest identity. Now imagine dropping this compass from a very high building onto the pavement below. The fall broke the glass and destroyed the orientation of the needle. It had some semblance of movement but its direction was hopelessly unreliable. True North is all but lost. Now imagine being lost in a wilderness and this compass is all you have to navigate out. This is the human condition. Another and perhaps better image is that of a tuning fork, but imagine a tuning fork broken into a thousand pieces. Each of those pieces trying to attune to whatever or whoever would attune to it. 

We have at the very core of our being a kind of instrument, an instrument of attunement, indeed the very image of God. The almighty and living God of heaven and earth—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is ever attuning and ever longs to attune with our inmost being. The corollary is all true. This is the deepest longing of our inmost being to live in attuned, abiding, and abandoned fellowship with God and with others. 

For you created my inmost being;

This “inmost being” is the invisible (at least unseen) core of identity in every single person who ever has lived and whoever will live. It is the dimension of personhood that makes a person most deeply who they are meant to be. This is why Augustine and many millions more would say we are restless until we find our rest in God or would testify to a God shaped hole in every soul. This “inmost being” is the place most deeply and intricately formed by our creator God and this is the place the Spirit longs to enter inhabit, regenerate, endow with freedom, baptize, restore, fill, make holy, and to perfect in love. When we see Jesus, we are beholding “as in a mirror” the mirror image of the image of God, and as we grow to behold him we will find ourselves “being transformed” and becoming like him—which is to say the version of ourselves he would be if he were us. This is our truest, most beautiful, most powerful, most loving, real self.²

Do you realize you have an inmost being?

There is much more to say on this matter of our “inmost being.” For now, I want us to permanently bookmark Psalm 139. I commend it to you as another one of those life long anchor texts. As we recently spent time reading and ruminating on the first verse of the psalm, You have searched me, God, and you know me, now let us do the same with this phrase, For you created my inmost being. Dwell deeply there and let’s meet back here tomorrow. This is the beginning of attunement. 

Wake up, sleeper! Rise from the dead! Jesus issues this wake-up call. There is so much he longs to show and share with us. It will take a lifetime to even scratch the surface of the vastness of this vision. 

THE PRAYER

Farmer Father God, thank you for creating my inmost being. Awaken me more to this deepest reality within me, the very core of my God-created being. I confess, this is also the place of my deepest brokenness and the place from which every broken thing in me stems. So I pray for healing today, which your Word calls salvation. I want to be deeply attuned to you and yet I so readily want to know what I need to do. All the while I hear you whispering to me, “Beloved, this is what I am doing. Be still and know that I am God. Be still and attune to my attunement with you. It will grow from there.” Yes, Holy Spirit, lead me in this way. Praying in the name of Jesus, amen.

THE QUESTION

Do you realize you have an inmost being? What about that? 

For the Awakening,
J.D. Walt
Sower-in-Chief
seedbed.com

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NOTES FOR FURTHER REFLECTION

1. I am neither prepared nor qualified to articulate a biblical anthropology in all its sophistication. I will share my sense of “understanding.” It is fascinating how the Hebrew term for “inmost being” most literally means something like “kidney.” The point here is not to make a scientific observation but a more figurative connection. Obviously human beings, like all mammals are made with a sophisticated system of internal organs. When the Bible uses this terminology as it does in multiple places it is pressing beyond the realm of biology and into deep essence—even ontology (i.e. the very nature of being). The “inmost being” is to the nature of personhood what the internal organs (kidney, heart, etc.) is to the physical body. 
2. At the beginning of every band meeting, we pray this stunning prayer together (after we enter into the meeting with “Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” of course! The prayer comes straight out of Ephesians 3:16–19. 
   
   I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
   
   Ponder every single word of this prayer. This is the deep essence of attunement.