Self-Examination

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.”

Probably no subject connected with the religious life has caused more discomfort and suffering to tender consciences than this subject of self-examination; and none has led more frequently to the language of “much less,” which we found in our last chapter to be such a great obstacle to all spiritual growth. And yet it has been so constantly impressed upon us that it is our duty to examine ourselves, that the eyes of most of us are continually turned inward. Our gaze is fixed on our own interior states and feelings to such an extent that self, and not Christ, has finally come to fill the whole horizon.

By self, I mean here all that centres around this great big “me” of ours. Its vocabulary constantly repeats “I,” “me,” and “my”. It is a vocabulary we are all very familiar with. The questions we ask ourselves during self-examination are proof of this: Am I earnest enough? Have I repented enough? Do I have the right sort of feelings? Do I understand religious truth as I should? Are my prayers fervent enough? Is my interest in religious things as great as it should be? Do I love God with enough passion? Is the Bible as much of a delight to me as it is to others? All these, and a hundred more questions about ourselves and our experiences, fill up all our thoughts, and sometimes our little self-examination books as well. Day and night, we focus on the personal pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my,” to the total exclusion of any thought concerning Christ, or any word concerning “He,” “His,” or “Him.”

Many of us know the misery of this only too well. But the idea that the Bible is full of commands for self-examination is so common that it seems like one of the most truly religious things we can do. As miserable as it makes us, we still feel it is our duty to continue with it, despite an ever-increasing sense of hopelessness and despair.

In view of this idea, many will be surprised to find that there are only two texts in the whole Bible that speak of self-examination, and neither of them can be used to support the morbid self- analysis that results from what we call self-examination.

One of these passages I have quoted at the start of this chapter: “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.” This is simply an encouragement to the Corinthians, who were in a sadly backsliding condition, to settle definitely whether they were still believers or not.

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.” It does not say examine whether you are sufficiently earnest, or whether you have the right feelings, or whether your motives are pure, but simply and only, whether you are “in the faith.” In short, do you believe in Christ or do you not? It was a simple question that required only a simple, straightforward answer: Yes or No.

This is what it meant for the Corinthians then, and it is what it means for us now.

The other passage reads: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” Paul was writing here about the abuses of greediness and drunkenness which had crept into the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In this encouragement to examine themselves, he was simply urging them to ensure they did none of these things, but partook of this religious meal in a decent and orderly manner.

In neither of these passages is there any hint of that morbid searching out of one’s emotions and experiences that is called self-examination today. It is amazing that from two such simple passages, a teaching has evolved that causes so much misery to earnest, conscientious souls.

The truth is there is no Scripture authority at all for this modern-day obsession; those who suffer from it are the victims of mistaken ideas about God’s ways with His children.

Some of my readers, however, are probably asking themselves whether I have overlooked a large class of passages that tell us to “watch”; and whether these passages mean watching ourselves or, in other words, self-examination. I will quote one of these passages as an example, so that we may see what their meaning really is: “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake.

Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”

I think if we carefully examine this passage and others like it, we will see that instead of teaching self-examination, they teach something that is exactly the opposite. They tell us to “watch,” it is true, but they do not tell us to watch ourselves. They are plainly commands to forget ourselves while watching for Someone Else. The return of the Lord is what we are to watch for. His coming footsteps, and not our own past footsteps, are to be the object of our attention. We are to watch as a doorkeeper watches for the return of the master of the house, and we are to be ready, like a good watchman, to receive and welcome Him at any moment He may appear.

“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes.” Watching what?

Themselves? No, watching for Him, of course. If we can imagine a doorkeeper, instead of watching for the return of his master, spending his time morbidly analysing his own past conduct—trying to discover whether he had been faithful enough, and becoming so absorbed in self-examination that he missed the master’s call and the master’s return—we would have a picture of what happens to the soul that is given up to the mistaken habit of watching and looking at self, instead of watching and looking at Christ.

These passages, therefore, instead of teaching self-examination, teach exactly the opposite. God says, “Turn to me and be saved”; but the self-analysing soul says, “I must look at myself if I am to have any hope of being saved. Salvation must come by getting myself right.” And yet the phrase, “looking to Jesus,” is generally acknowledged to be one of the watchwords of the Christian religion; all Christians everywhere will unhesitatingly declare that, of course, this is the one thing we all ought to do. But after saying this, they will continue in their old way of self- introspection, trying to find some salvation in their own internal states and feelings, or in their own righteous works, and being continually plunged into despair because they never find it.

It is an obvious fact that we see what we look at, and cannot see what we look away from; and we cannot look to Jesus while we are looking at ourselves.

The power for victory and the power for endurance come from looking to Jesus and considering Him, not from looking at or considering ourselves, our circumstances, our sins, or our temptations. All looking at ourselves causes weakness and defeat. The reason for this is that when we look at ourselves, we see nothing but ourselves, our own weakness, poverty, and sin.

We do not, and cannot, see the remedy and the supply for these, and naturally, we are defeated.

The remedy and the supply are there all the time, but they are not to be found in the place where we are looking, for they are not in self but in Christ. We cannot be looking at ourselves and looking at Christ at the same time. Again, I repeat that it is the unavoidable nature of things that we see what we look at. If we want to see the Lord, we must look at the Lord, and not at self. It is a simple question of choice for us, whether it shall be “I” or Christ; whether we shall turn our backs on Christ and look at ourselves, or whether we shall turn our backs on self and look at Christ.

I was very much helped many years ago by the following sentence in a book by Adelaide Proctor: “For every one look at self, take ten looks at Christ.” It was entirely contrary to everything I had previously thought was right, but it convinced my soul and delivered me from a habit of morbid self-examination and introspection that had made my life miserable for years. It was an unspeakable deliverance. And my experience since leads me to believe that an even better motto would be: “Take no looks at self at all, but look only and always at Christ.”

The Bible law regarding the self-life is not that the self-life must be watched and made better, but that it must be “put off.” The Apostle, when urging the Ephesian Christians to live in a way worthy of the calling to which they had been called, tells them that they must “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires.” The “old self” is, of course, the self-life, and this self-life (which we know only too well is indeed corrupt through deceitful desires) is not to be improved, but to be “put off.” It is to be crucified.

Paul says our old self was crucified—that is, put to death—with Christ; and he declares to the Colossians that they could no longer lie, seeing that they had “put off the old self with its practices.” Some people's idea of crucifying the “old self” is to set it up on a pedestal and then walk around it and stick nagging pins into it to make it miserable, but keeping it alive all the time. But, if I understand language, crucifixion means death, not making someone miserable; and to crucify the old self means to kill it outright, and to put it off as a snake puts off its dead and useless skin.

It is of no use then for us to examine self, and to tinker with it, in the hope of improving it, for what the Lord wants us to do with it is to get rid of it. Fénelon, in his Spiritual Letters, says that the only way to treat self is to refuse to have anything to do with it. He says we must turn our backs on this great big "I" of ours, and say to it, "I do not know you, and am not interested in you, and I refuse to pay any attention to you whatever." But self is always determined to secure attention, and would rather be thought badly of than not to be thought of at all. And self- examination, with all its miseries, often gives a sort of morbid satisfaction to the self-life in us; and even deludes self into thinking it is a very humble and pious sort of self after all.

The only safe way and scriptural way is to have nothing to do with self at all, either with good self or with bad self, but simply to ignore self altogether; and to fix our eyes, and our thoughts, and our expectations, on the Lord, and on him alone. We must substitute for the personal pronouns "I," "me," and "my," the pronouns "he," "him," and "his"; and must ask ourselves, not "am I good?" but "is he good?"

The Psalmist says, "My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the net" (Psalm 25:15). As long as our eyes are toward our own feet, and toward the net in which they are entangled, we only get into worse tangles. But when we keep our eyes toward the Lord, he plucks our feet out of the net. This is a point in practical experience that I have tested hundreds of times, and I know it is a fact. No matter what sort of a snarl I may have been in, whether inward or outward, I have always found that, while I kept my eyes on the snarl and tried to unravel it, it grew worse and worse; but, when I turned my eyes away from the snarl and kept them fixed on the Lord, he always, sooner or later, unravelled it and delivered me.

Have you ever watched a farmer ploughing a field? If you have, you will have noticed that, in order to make straight furrows, he is obliged to fix his eyes on a tree, or a post in the fence, or some object at the farther side of the field, and to guide his plough unwaveringly towards that object. If he begins to look back at the furrow behind him in order to see whether he has made a straight furrow, his plough begins to jerk from side to side, and the furrow he is making becomes a zigzag. If we would make straight paths for our feet, we must do what the Apostle says he did; we must "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).

To forget the things that are behind is an essential part of pressing forward towards the prize of our high calling; and I am convinced this prize can never be reached unless we will consent to this forgetting. When we do consent to it, we come near to putting an end to all our self- examination; for, if we may not look back over our past misdoings, we shall find but little food for self-reflective acts.

We complain of spiritual hunger and torment ourselves to know why our hunger is not satisfied.

The Psalmist says, "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season" (Psalm 145:15). Having our eyes upon ourselves, and on our own hunger, will never bring a supply of spiritual meat. When a man's larder is empty and he is starving, his eyes are not occupied looking at the emptiness of his larder, but are turned toward the source from which he hopes or expects to get a supply of food. To examine self is to be like a man who should spend his time examining his empty larder, instead of going to the market for a supply to fill it. No wonder such Christians seem to be starving to death in the midst of all the fullness there is for them in Christ. They never see that fullness, for they never look at it; and again I repeat that the thing we look at is the thing we see.

I feel as if I could not repeat this evident truism too often, for somehow people seem to lay aside their common sense when they come to the subject of religion, and seem to expect to see things upon which they have deliberately kept their backs turned. They cry out, "O Lord, reveal yourself;" but, instead of looking at him, they look at themselves and keep their gaze steadily fixed on their own inward feelings, and then wonder at the "mysterious dealings" of God in hiding his face from their fervent prayers. But how can they see what they do not look at?

It is never God who hides his face from us, but it is always we who hide our faces from him, by "turning their back to me and not their face" (Jeremiah 32:33). The prophet reproaches the children of Israel with this, and adds that they "set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name" (Jeremiah 32:34). When Christians spend their time examining into their own condition, raking up all their sins, and bemoaning their shortcomings, what is this but to set up the "abomination" of their own sinful self upon the chief pedestal in their hearts, and to make it the centre of their whole religious life, and of all their care and efforts. They gaze at this great, big, miserable self until it fills their whole horizon, and they "turn their back" on the Lord, until he is lost sight of altogether.

I will venture to say that there are many Christians who, for one look at the Lord, will give a thousand looks at self, and who, for one hour spent in rejoicing in him, will spend hundreds of hours bemoaning themselves. We are never anywhere commanded to behold our emotions, nor our experiences, nor even our sins, but we are commanded to turn our backs upon all these, and to "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29). One look at Christ is worth more for salvation than a million looks at self; and yet, so mistaken are our ideas, we seem unable to avoid thinking that the mortification which results from self-examination must have in it some saving power, because it makes us so miserable; for we have to travel a long way on our heavenly journey before we fully learn that there is no saving power in misery, and that a cheerful, confident faith is the only successful attitude for the aspiring soul.

In Isaiah we see God's people complaining that they fasted and he did not see, and afflicted their souls and he took no knowledge; and God gave them this significant answer, "Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?" (Isaiah 58:5). Whoever else is pleased with the miseries of our self-examination, it is very certain that God is not. He does not want us to bow down our heads like a reed, any more than he wanted his people of old to do it; and he calls upon us, as he did upon them, to forget our own miserable selves and to go to work to lessen the miseries of others. "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him?" (Isaiah 58:6-7).

This service for others is of infinitely greater value to the Lord than the longest seasons of self- examination and self-abasement; and I am convinced that he has shown us here what is the surest way of deliverance out of the slough of misery into which our habits of self-examination have plunged us. He declares emphatically that if we will only keep the sort of "fast" he approves of, by giving up our own "fast" of afflicting our souls and bowing down our heads like a reed, and will instead "pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail" (Isaiah 58:10-11).

All this is exactly what we have been striving after, but our strivings have been in our own way, not in God's. The "fast" we have chosen has been to afflict our souls, and to bow down our heads like reeds, and to sit in sackcloth and ashes; and, as a consequence, instead of our bones being made strong and our souls refreshed like a watered garden, we have found only leanness, and thirst, and misery. Our own "fasts," no matter how fervently they may be carried on, nor how many groans and tears may accompany them, can never bring us anything else.

Now let us try God's "fast." Let us lay aside all care for ourselves and care instead for our needy brothers and sisters. Let us stop trying to do something for our own poor miserable self-life and begin to try and do something to help the spiritual lives of others. Let us give up our hopeless efforts to find something in ourselves to delight in, and delight ourselves only in the Lord and in his service. And if we will but do this, all the days of our misery will be ended.

But some may ask whether it is not necessary to examine ourselves in order to find out what is wrong and what needs mending. This would of course be necessary if we were our own workmanship, but since we are God's workmanship and not our own, he is the one to examine us, for he is the only one who can tell what is wrong. The man who makes watches is the one to examine a watch when it is out of order and to set it straight. We have too much good sense to meddle with our watches; why is it that we have not enough good sense to give up meddling with ourselves? Surely we must see that the examining of the Lord is the only kind of examination that is of any use. His examination is like that of a physician, who examines in order to cure; while our self-examination is like that of the patient, who only becomes more of a hypochondriac the more he examines the symptoms of his disease.

But the question may be asked whether, when there has been actual sin, there ought not to be self-examination and self-reproach, at least for a time. This is a fallacy which deceives a great many. It seems too much to believe that we can be forgiven without first going through a season of self-reproach. But what is the Bible teaching? John tells us that "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

All that God wants is that we should turn to him at once and acknowledge our sin and believe in his forgiveness; and every minute that we delay doing this, in order to spend the time in self- examination and self-reproach, is only adding further sin to that which we have already committed. If ever we need to look away from self and to have our eyes turned to the Lord, it is just when we become conscious of having sinned against him. The greater the multitude of our enemies, the greater and more immediate our need of God.

All through the Bible, we are taught this lesson of death to self and life in Christ alone. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20) was not intended to be a unique experience for St Paul, but was simply a declaration of what ought to be the experience of every Christian. We sometimes sing, "Thou, O Christ, art all I want," but in reality, we actually want a great many other things. We want good frames of mind and feelings; we want fervour and earnestness; we want realisations and satisfying experiences; and we continually examine ourselves to try and find out why we do not have these things.

We think if we could only discover our points of failure, we would be able to set them straight.

But there is no healing or transforming power in gazing at our failures. The only road to Christlikeness is to behold, not our own hatefulness, but his goodness and beauty. We grow like what we look at, and if we spend our lives looking at our hateful selves, we will become more and more hateful.

Do we not find as a fact that self-examination, instead of making us better, always seems to make us worse? By beholding self, we are more and more changed into the image of self. On the contrary, if we spend our time beholding the glory of the Lord—that is, letting our minds dwell upon his goodness and his love, and trying to drink in his spirit—the inevitable result will be that we shall be, perhaps slowly but surely, changed into the image of the Lord upon whom we are gazing.

Fénelon says that we should never indulge in any self-reflective acts, whether of mortification at our failures or of congratulation at our successes. Instead, we should continually consign self and all self's doings to oblivion and should keep our interior eyes upon the Lord only. It is very hard during self-examination not to try to find excuses for our faults, and our self-reflective acts are often in danger of being turned into self-glorying ones. The only way is to ignore self altogether and to forget there is any such being in existence.

No one who does not understand this can possibly appreciate the comfort and relief it is to be done with self and all self-reflective acts. I have known Christian workers whose lives have been one long torment because of these acts; and I am convinced that the "Black Mondays," of which so many clergymen complain, are nothing but the result of indulging in self-reflective acts concerning their services in the church the day before.

The only way to treat all forms of self-reflective acts, of whatever kind, is simply to give them up. They always do harm and never good. They are bound to result in one of two things: either they fill us with self-praise and self-satisfaction, or they plunge us into the depths of discouragement and despair. Whichever it may be, the soul is inevitably shut out from any sight of God and his salvation.

One of the most effective ways of conquering the habit is to make a rule that, whenever we are tempted to examine ourselves, we will always at once begin to examine the Lord instead. We should let thoughts of his love and his all-sufficiency sweep out all thoughts of our own unworthiness or our own helplessness.

I have been trying in this book to set the Lord before our eyes in all the beauty of his character and his ways, in the hope that the sight will be so ravishing as to take our eyes off everything else. But no revelation of God will be of any use if we will not look at it, but instead persist in turning our backs on what has been revealed and gazing at our own inward experiences. For again I must repeat that we cannot see self and see the Lord at the same time, and while we are examining self, we cannot be looking at him.

Fénelon says concerning self-examination: "There is something very hidden and very deceptive in the suffering it causes; for while you seem to yourself to be wholly occupied with the glory of God, in your inmost soul it is self alone that occasions all your trouble. You are indeed desirous that God should be glorified, but you wish it should take place by means of your perfection, and you thus cherish the sentiments of self-love. It is simply a refined pretext for dwelling in self... It is a sort of infidelity to simple faith when we desire to be continually assured that we are doing well. It is, in fact, a desire to know what we are doing, which we shall never know, and of which it is the will of God we should be ignorant. It is trifling by the way, in order to reason about the way. The safest and shortest course is to renounce, forget, and abandon self, and, through faithfulness to God, to think no more of it. This is the whole of religion—to get out of self and self-love, in order to get into God."

What we must do, therefore, is to shut the door definitely and resolutely, once and for all, upon self and all of self's experiences, whether they are good or bad. We should say with the Psalmist, "I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure" (Psalm 16:8-9).