Self-Examination  Alive@5   10.3.19       1 Cor 11:23-32; 2 Cor 13:1-10

Audio: https://www.dropbox.com/s/15yvqlqjab6909r/REC_0012.aac?dl=0

Video: https://youtu.be/9dUD8s-yY-g

Introduction

When I was informed that the under 31’s writing for the Christian Today website unanimously declined to opt in for a yearly critique by senior writers I was shocked. Knowing beforehand that some of their articles were focussed on personal experience should have alerted me already that the age of narcissism has invaded the Church. To say a younger generation can’t cope with criticism would be prejudicial; for the whole Church seems to be losing the spiritual discipline of healthy self-criticism which was common amongst believers in past generations.

Without a revival of serious self-examination the people of God will remain condemned to ignorance of their real spiritual condition and trapped in a superficial lacking vital holiness and depth of character. The Bible warns us, “exhort one another…that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb 3:13). Only a life willingly standing under the testing scrutiny of God can escape the snare of such self-deception.

 

God TestsSomething vast and profound was at stake in the testing in Eden. God was looking for a couple in his family-likeness with whom he might partner in ruling the world (Gen 1:26-28). The entry of the serpent into the Garden provided an opportunity to trust God despite a seeming contradiction between what God had said, disobedience means death, and what the eyes showed, a very alive serpent (Gen 3:1-6). Only through strong testing can the depths of the human heart be exposed, for good or ill.

 

God himself said after Abraham obediently took Isaac up the mountain to sacrifice him; “now I know that you fear God” (Gen 22:12). What an amazing thing for the Almighty to say, and he was moved him to swear by himself that his covenant with Abraham and his seed will be fulfilled (Gen 22:16; Heb 6:14).

 

The wisdom writers speak freely of being tested. Job complained, “Why won’t you leave me alone, at least long enough for me to swallow!” (7:19). The psalmists remark, “let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous— you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God!” (Ps 7:9 cf. 17:3; 66:10). The prophets, especially Jeremiah,  grasp the necessity of testing, “O Lord of hosts, who judges righteously, who tests the heart and the mind” (11:20 cf. 9:7; 11:20; 12:3; 17:10; 20:12). They recognise that God uses them to test Israel (Jer 6:27) and understand that God tests them (Jer 12:3).

 

The Old Testament saints knew that being examined was desirable. The psalmists don’t try to look into themselves but petition God to look into them and show them what he sees. David wants God to test/prove him, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me!…Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! 24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Ps 139:1, 23-24 cf. 7:8; 26:2). Such prayers have very high stakes, after all God was sovereign over David’s temptation with Bathsheba, which unveiled to him the depths of his inner depravity (Ps 51).

 

Testing is an essential part of God’s plan until the End of the world. In the book of Revelation Jesus explains to the blameless and faithful little church in Smyrna, ““Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.”” (2:10). The Lord uses persecution, division and various other pressures to reveal who is genuine and who is not (1 Cor 11:19), for testing exposes what type of person someone is.

 

The utter deceitfulness of the fallen human heart (Jer 17:9) is that it is self-absorbed, turned in on its self (incurvitas in se Augustine, Luther). Try to get through a whole day without feeling snubbed, ignored, feeling stupid or getting down on yourself (Keller). One minister gives an example of self-obsession, “I left the meeting and spent the rest of the afternoon …considering whether I shared too much or too little, wondering what others thought of me, examining my motives, and especially hoping I didn’t pray anything dumb or heretical.” The human problem isn’t low self-esteem, the problem is a self that centres on itself and not on Godself. No human therapist can ever see what God sees because they can only see through the warped lens of their own inner eyes (Eph 1:18). Without Jesus we are in a dreadful state.

 

The Crisis of the Untested

 

Towards the end of his indictment against human depravity in Romans 1 Paul describes the human mind as “debased”, something tested but found to be worthless before God. This is hardly surprising considering the depths of humanity’s rebellion against the will of God; but it’s when a refusal to be tested enters into the Church that we should be most grieved.

 

In our first reading today (1 Cor 11:23-32) Paul addressed a situation in Corinth where the wealthy were gluttonising before the Lord’s Supper whilst the needy were going hungry. In doing so they were turning the kingdom of God, in which the last are first and the first last, upside down. No wonder God was judging them with illness and death. Like it or not, we will all be examined by God in the End, and the afflictions of the Corinthian believers were a present sign of that coming examination. Paul’s counsel to self-examination and self-judgement was a recipe for deliverance from divine displeasure. He is sure that if the Corinthians do this they will prove themselves to be approved by God and all will be well.

 

Did they accept Paul’s wisdom on this? Our second reading from the end of 2 Corinthians suggests they didn’t understand the framework of Paul’s teaching. (Just like most believers today cf. Gal 6:3-5).

 

“Examine (peiradzo) yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! 6 I hope you will find out that we have not failed the test.” 2 Cor 13:5-6

 

They don’t seem to recognise that by the grace of God Christ lives in them and that in him they share a new existence (2 Cor 5:17). They fail to understand that when a Christian is led by the Spirit to examine themselves they are sharing in God’s judgement on themselves in Christ. This is an incredible privilege, because when we hear the sentence of God on us in Christ (2 Cor 5:19) it is a sentence that we are at the same time both righteous and a sinner (simul justus et peccator Luther). For this reason self-examination in Christ cannot leave a believer feeling condemned, guilty, shameful, a failure etc. any more than will the Last Judgement when we will be declared “holy and blameless” (cf. Eph 1:4; Col 1:10, 22; 1 Thess 3:13; 5:23; Jude 24; Rev 14:5).

 

Christ-centred self-examination cannot be morbid, depressive or unhealthy for, “A miserable Christian is a contradiction in terms.” (Lloyd Jones). Anyone who thinks in their heart, “I am not good/spiritual enough.” is still preoccupied with self. Self-hate and self-love are equally obsessions with self and dreadful burdens to carry. They are not crosses appointed by the Lord (Matt 16:24). I was recently talking to a brother trying to recover from an addiction, he said “I am feeling unworthy.” To which I replied, “You are unworthy, I am unworthy, we are all unworthy but Jesus is our worthiness.” I pointed him to 1 Corinthians 1:30, “Christ is our righteousness.”  The tests God sends, not the ones we set up for ourselves, are about the reality of Jesus at the centre of our soul and our living for the glory of God. Charles Spurgeon rightly said, “Any practice that detracts from faith is an evil practice, but especially that kind of self-examination which would take us away from the foot of the cross proceeds in a wrong direction.” Only the lens of the cross can illuminate the spiritual depths of our darkness, for the cross is where the sinless one is reckoned sinful so that the sinful might be reckoned sinless (2 Cor 5:21). Deliverance from ego-obsessiveness can only be found in the life of Jesus the true image of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15) who was tested in a unique way.

 

Jesus Tested for Glory

On his way to the cross Jesus applied to himself the Old Testament prophecy, “the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Matt 21:42). The word for “rejected” means tried and deemed unsuitable. The leaders of Israel examined the life, claims and ministry of Christ and decided he wasn’t part of God’s building plan for their nation. This must have been hurtful for Jesus, but it was hardly a deterrence from obedience. The testing of Jesus which cut to his heart was located in his sin bearing on the cross.

 

The cry, ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34) exposes a testing upon which hinges the future of the whole creation. Stripped of an awareness of the Father, Jesus surely is feeling rejected totally rejected. He is not feeling rejected because he is self-obsessed, but because the Judgement of the world is taking place in him and he is deprived of sharing this testing consciously with his Father. Our iniquities have plunged the sin-bearing Son into the separated state between God and humanity where his face is hidden from our pleas (Isa 59:2). Having endured this test for the glory of God, and having passed it with a blameless fire-formed character, the Holy Spirit is poured into Jesus’ heart and he is resurrected into everlasting joy (Luke 24:26; Rom 5:2-5; 2 Cor 8:2; Heb 12:2; James 1:2-3; 1 Pet 1:6-7). If Christian self-examination means sharing in the trials and triumph of Christ,  then our faith to endure trials like Jesus is shaped by looking at the Lord in the mirror of scripture.

 

The Word

 

Mature believers have learned that we are changed not by beholding self, but by beholding Christ in the light of the gospel; “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Cor 3:18). Robert Murray M’Cheyne famously said, “For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ.”

 

It follows that the contemporary decline in Bible reading overflows into avoidance of self-examination and spiritual immaturity. Having said that, any call back to Bible reading needs to be exercised in wisdom.

James is clear when he says, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.” (James 1:22-25).

 

Commenting on this passage the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, “you must not look at the mirror, observe the mirror, but must see yourself in the mirror… in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking…”. Unfortunately, there is a long tradition in some Christian circles of preoccupation with analysing scripture rather than seeing ourselves in Christ through Scripture. This is an avoidance of true self-examination. The Bible read in the Spirit frees us from substituting Bible-knowledge for Jesus-knowledge (John 17:3) as well as from the “believe in yourself” messages of those who use the scriptures as a mirror with a Jesus tint.

 

When God speaks to our hearts about Christ in scripture, he leads us back to himself through prayerful confession. Thanksgiving and praise at sins forgiven bring renewal and constantly moves the believer forward in faith. Dying and rising with Christ is our point of reference not how we are feeling about our spiritual life. Stop feeling your spiritual pulse and live by faith in the Son of God who loved you and gave his life for you (Gal 2:20). 

 

Conclusion

 

When Paul declares, “with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself” (1 Cor 4:3) he declares that in his new identity in Christ he has been delivered from self-preoccupation and the useless hurts it brings. Tim Keller says of this text, “When he does something wrong or something good, he does not connect it to himself any more. Paul will not be judged by others, but neither will he judge himself. It is only the Lord that judges.” But today very few Christians are in this place.

 

Since objective/real guilt and shame don’t belong to our new identity in Christ (Rom 5:1; 8:1;   Eph 1:4; Col 1:10, 22; 1 Thess 3:13; 5:23; Jude 24; Rev 14:5) the God-distancing feelings we experience must be flowing from our unbelieving hearts (cf. 1 John 3:20). The superficial spirituality in the modern Church, with its psychology, entertainment, business principles, media, high performance etc. is an anaesthetic to dull the bad feelings from which we can only be delivered when we live out the freedom of the crucified self, made alive in resurrection power (Gal 2:20). Grace alone sets me free from the idolatry and slavery of self-centredness (1 Cor 15:10) to become more aware of Jesus. This brings an appreciation of self-examination as a means of glory.

 Whenever God powerfully moves the Church to self-examination it is astonished at its self-centredness and turns to the Lord in urgent prayer. This makes self-examination the first step in revival and the catapult to extraordinary prayer. True self-examination involves a sharing in what Jesus saw of the depths of our fallen humanity in the cross, and a sharing in the delivering power of his resurrection. Jesus is worth going through such a transformation.