The Examined Life
A sermon preached on April 23, 2006, in the evening service at Capitol Hill Baptist Church
Lamentations 3:40 – “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”
About two and a half millennia ago, while on trial for his life before the citizens of Athens, charged with atheism and corrupting the city’s youth, the Greek philosopher Socrates offered a defense of the life he had lived. His actions and his words, the things that had gotten him in trouble, he said were the product of his philosophical, contemplative way of life, of his pursuit of the truth. From this defense comes what may be his most famous statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He showed that he truly believed that statement, as he chose to have a death sentence carried out on him rather than go into exile or change his way of life.
Well, what do you think? Is Socrates right? Is self-examination the key to the good life, the only kind of life that is worth living? It certainly doesn’t seem that most people in our society today live as though this were the case. Among the things that we often turn to for meaning, fulfillment, and a happy life—money, possessions, pleasure, work, whatever—contemplation and self-examination probably doesn’t rate very high on the list. In some ways, one might say our society isn't altogether different from the one with which Socrates clashed so many years ago.
Well, our text tonight has something to say to all of this. If you have your Bibles with you, please turn with me to the book of Lamentations, chapter 3. Lamentations is in the Old Testament, one of the books we call the Major Prophets, a little more than halfway through the Bible. It is right after Isaiah and Jeremiah. If you’re using one of the pew Bibles provided there, you can find it on page 862. We’re going to focus on verse 40 tonight, but I’ll start reading in verse 37.
Lamentations is divided into five chapters, each one a poem describing and grieving over the suffering of the people of Israel. Their capital city, Jerusalem, had been captured and sacked by the Babylonian army. The devastation was almost incomprehensible, and they faced the prospect of exile and slavery. Any people would find it difficult to cope with the near-total ruin of their society, but what made it particularly difficult for Israel to deal with was that they were God’s chosen people, the ones He had elected specially to display His glory to the world. Lamentations was written in part as an expression of lament, but also to help the people deal with their suffering by pointing them to God’s sovereignty, His justice, and His mercy. Chapter 3 in particular tells us that: 1) God is sovereign over our suffering; 2) suffering at God’s hands is the punishment our sins deserve; 3) we still can have hope because God is merciful; and 4) if we repent of our sins and return to God, He will forgive us and restore us.
Look at verse 40 again: “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.” I want to briefly look at two things this passage isn’t saying, then meditate on what this kind of self-examination looks like and think through some ways we can apply it and practice it in our lives.
First, this isn’t an exhortation to simple philosophical contemplation and abstract thought. The ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates are remembered as some of the first ones to try and transcend the mundane activities of daily life and the material world around us to try and think about higher truths and deeper questions regarding ultimate reality. How did the universe come into existence? What is most really real, and how does it affect the world around us? What does the good life look like? How can we know anything? As useful and important as philosophical reasoning is, mere contemplation isn’t what Lamentations is calling us to. The kind of examination this verse urges is spiritual examination of ourselves. It’s a deeply personal, introspective look at the depths of our own hearts, of our motivations, our affections, our actions and words. Taken literally, these words are very expressive—‘let us uncover our ways, and search.’ God wants us to strip off the cover of pretenses and posturing and make an inquiry into the character of our ways. One of the most feared phrases in this city is “appoint an independent commission to look into the matter.” Nobody wants to be the object of a audit or an inquiry that will brush by all the PR and façade of honesty and make a thorough examination of the documents and emails and recordings that will tell the truth about whether they have acted according to the law. This is the kind of test and examination that God wants us to subject our own lives to, because it’s the kind of scrutiny that He will subject us all to. If we don’t examine our lives according to the standards God gives us in His word, we will be sorry when we come to the day when we have to give an account of them.
Second, notice that this verse isn’t just exhorting us to moral resolution, to finding out where we’ve gone wrong and resolving to do better, as though we could get back to the point of being OK with God if we just figure out how we’ve wronged Him and stop doing those things. Contemplation and self-examination alone will get us nowhere with God. No, friends, the idea that we can please God and get Him to stop making us suffer if we just figure out the right things to do and say is not what Lamentations is teaching us. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is nowhere in Christianity. The message of Christianity, the truth that God tells us in His Word, is just the opposite. You see, we believe that each one of us is made by God, His image, and that we were made to glorify Him by loving Him and obeying Him. But we haven’t done that. We’ve all lived our lives as if God wasn’t really God and didn’t really deserve to be the focus of our lives. We’ve lied about Him. This is what the Bible calls sin, and makes us the object of His perfectly just wrath. God would have been right to punish us for all eternity in return for our rebellion against Him, but He hasn’t done that. He sent His only son, Jesus, to live a perfect life and to die on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath and paying the penalty for the sins of all those who would ever repent and put their trust in Him. It’s only through Jesus’ work on the Cross that we can ever be reconciled to God and experience anything other than His anger.
If you read all of Lamentations 3, it’s perfectly clear that the author understands this. Whatever sufferings we experience in this life are just a pale reflection of the punishment that our sins deserve, and the only hope that we have is to cast ourselves on God’s own mercy. When he says, then, “Let us…return to the Lord,” he understands that Israel’s sufferings are meant to point them to God, and to cause them to depend on God’s incredible kindness and mercy.
This, then is what it means for us to examine our ways, and test them—to realize the truth about our them. Hold your life up to the light of God’s holiness, and see how you have failed to live as He calls you to. Realize that your ways are evil, and they deserve nothing but punishment from God, the One you have offended by them. Confess your sins to God, and confess your need for His forgiveness. Cast yourself upon His mercy, and trust only in His provision for your sins in Christ’s work on the Cross. Though He deals with sin severely, He still kindly invites us to be freely pardoned.
So Socrates was right, in a sense—the unexamined life really isn’t worth living, because as Mark pointed out this morning, the only way to have the good life, the kind of life that is worth living, is to realize the truth about ourselves and our sins. Ultimately, we see both in Lamentations and in 2 Corinthians that the purpose self-examination—the purpose of the life worth living—is to glorify God. The reason we should be so careful in looking at ourselves is so that it will cause us to look even more at the Savior. Mark has often recounted Spurgeon’s statement that “he who thinks little of sin will think little of a Savior.” Well, the converse is true: the more careful we are in examining ourselves and understanding the truth about our sins, the more we will treasure the mercies of God and glory in His provision for us in Christ.
How, then, can we go about developing a habit of self-examination? What are some practical ways we can cultivate the skill of testing and proving our thoughts and our actions? This would be a great thing for us to think about all the rest of this week, but here are a few thoughts to get us started:
First, and most importantly, know God. Be a student of God’s word, and seek to understand more and more of who God is, and who we are to be as His creatures made in His image. The more we understand God’s law, the better we will understand how we fail to obey—and the more we will delight in Christ.
Second, walk out of the main sermon time on Sunday morning each week thinking about how your life the previous week looks in light of what the sermon has taught you about God. This is, at least in part, why we don’t call for a public response at the end of our services here—because we think it’s important that those who have just spent an hour listening to God’s word focus on quietly examining our own hearts and applying it to our lives. Use the moment of silence after the benediction to do that. The measure of the effectiveness of a sermon is not whether it moves anyone to a particular public response, but whether it illuminates for us the reality of our state before God and results in deeper trust in Him.
Another thing you can do to help examine yourself: Keep a list of everything you do for a day. Be as specific as possible. Then sit down with that list later, maybe in your quiet time, and use it to examine your motivations. Ask yourself, “Why did I do that? What was my motivation for spending an hour reading that?” See how closely your motives and priorities line up with the Bible’s description of a Christian. This exercise might be especially useful for a weekend, or another day when you’re out of your normal routine or have more free time than usual.
One noteworthy thing about this verse is that it has a distinctly corporate emphasis: “Let us examine our ways…and let us return to the Lord.” The author of Lamentations knew that just as Israel’s sin against God was corporate, so their repentance would have to involve the whole nation, as well. As God’s people gathered in a body here, it would be good for us to think about how we can put this verse into practice together, corporately.
First, be attentive to the regular preaching of the Word. Examining ourselves and being equipped to do so are fundamental to what we intend to be doing together in our main gathering on Sunday morning each week. We also do this in a particularly specific way each time we observe the Lord’s Supper, when we use the church covenant to examine ourselves and our relationships with one another.
Second, cultivate relationships where you can spend time examining yourselves together and pointing out areas of sin. This is part of what we commit to doing in the church covenant when we join the congregation: “We will…exercise an affectionate care and watchfulness over each other and faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require.” Find someone who knows you well, and have them help you search out blind spots in your life, places where you may be self-deceived or may not be able to see areas of sin. If there’s nobody in the congregation who knows you that well, work on cultivating that kind of open, honest relationship with someone. As you’re praying for your fellow church members using the membership directory, pray that they would be diligent in examining themselves and repenting of sin, and that they would be moved by thinking about their sin to greater and greater dependence on Christ.
Well, brothers and sisters, God in His mercy has not given us the punishment our sins deserve. He has blessed us with spiritual riches and treasures beyond anything this world can provide. Let us be diligent in examining ourselves to see whether we really are motivated by genuine love for God and desire to glorify Christ. Let us test and scrutinize each other to see where we fail to be an accurate picture of God. And let us especially, in the week ahead, pray that our self-examination would cause us to delight more and more in the Author and the Perfector of our salvation.
Lamentations 3:40 – “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”
About two and a half millennia ago, while on trial for his life before the citizens of Athens, charged with atheism and corrupting the city’s youth, the Greek philosopher Socrates offered a defense of the life he had lived. His actions and his words, the things that had gotten him in trouble, he said were the product of his philosophical, contemplative way of life, of his pursuit of the truth. From this defense comes what may be his most famous statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He showed that he truly believed that statement, as he chose to have a death sentence carried out on him rather than go into exile or change his way of life.
Well, what do you think? Is Socrates right? Is self-examination the key to the good life, the only kind of life that is worth living? It certainly doesn’t seem that most people in our society today live as though this were the case. Among the things that we often turn to for meaning, fulfillment, and a happy life—money, possessions, pleasure, work, whatever—contemplation and self-examination probably doesn’t rate very high on the list. In some ways, one might say our society isn't altogether different from the one with which Socrates clashed so many years ago.
Well, our text tonight has something to say to all of this. If you have your Bibles with you, please turn with me to the book of Lamentations, chapter 3. Lamentations is in the Old Testament, one of the books we call the Major Prophets, a little more than halfway through the Bible. It is right after Isaiah and Jeremiah. If you’re using one of the pew Bibles provided there, you can find it on page 862. We’re going to focus on verse 40 tonight, but I’ll start reading in verse 37.
“Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come? Why should any living man complain when punished for his sins? Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”
Lamentations is divided into five chapters, each one a poem describing and grieving over the suffering of the people of Israel. Their capital city, Jerusalem, had been captured and sacked by the Babylonian army. The devastation was almost incomprehensible, and they faced the prospect of exile and slavery. Any people would find it difficult to cope with the near-total ruin of their society, but what made it particularly difficult for Israel to deal with was that they were God’s chosen people, the ones He had elected specially to display His glory to the world. Lamentations was written in part as an expression of lament, but also to help the people deal with their suffering by pointing them to God’s sovereignty, His justice, and His mercy. Chapter 3 in particular tells us that: 1) God is sovereign over our suffering; 2) suffering at God’s hands is the punishment our sins deserve; 3) we still can have hope because God is merciful; and 4) if we repent of our sins and return to God, He will forgive us and restore us.
Look at verse 40 again: “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.” I want to briefly look at two things this passage isn’t saying, then meditate on what this kind of self-examination looks like and think through some ways we can apply it and practice it in our lives.
First, this isn’t an exhortation to simple philosophical contemplation and abstract thought. The ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates are remembered as some of the first ones to try and transcend the mundane activities of daily life and the material world around us to try and think about higher truths and deeper questions regarding ultimate reality. How did the universe come into existence? What is most really real, and how does it affect the world around us? What does the good life look like? How can we know anything? As useful and important as philosophical reasoning is, mere contemplation isn’t what Lamentations is calling us to. The kind of examination this verse urges is spiritual examination of ourselves. It’s a deeply personal, introspective look at the depths of our own hearts, of our motivations, our affections, our actions and words. Taken literally, these words are very expressive—‘let us uncover our ways, and search.’ God wants us to strip off the cover of pretenses and posturing and make an inquiry into the character of our ways. One of the most feared phrases in this city is “appoint an independent commission to look into the matter.” Nobody wants to be the object of a audit or an inquiry that will brush by all the PR and façade of honesty and make a thorough examination of the documents and emails and recordings that will tell the truth about whether they have acted according to the law. This is the kind of test and examination that God wants us to subject our own lives to, because it’s the kind of scrutiny that He will subject us all to. If we don’t examine our lives according to the standards God gives us in His word, we will be sorry when we come to the day when we have to give an account of them.
Second, notice that this verse isn’t just exhorting us to moral resolution, to finding out where we’ve gone wrong and resolving to do better, as though we could get back to the point of being OK with God if we just figure out how we’ve wronged Him and stop doing those things. Contemplation and self-examination alone will get us nowhere with God. No, friends, the idea that we can please God and get Him to stop making us suffer if we just figure out the right things to do and say is not what Lamentations is teaching us. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is nowhere in Christianity. The message of Christianity, the truth that God tells us in His Word, is just the opposite. You see, we believe that each one of us is made by God, His image, and that we were made to glorify Him by loving Him and obeying Him. But we haven’t done that. We’ve all lived our lives as if God wasn’t really God and didn’t really deserve to be the focus of our lives. We’ve lied about Him. This is what the Bible calls sin, and makes us the object of His perfectly just wrath. God would have been right to punish us for all eternity in return for our rebellion against Him, but He hasn’t done that. He sent His only son, Jesus, to live a perfect life and to die on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath and paying the penalty for the sins of all those who would ever repent and put their trust in Him. It’s only through Jesus’ work on the Cross that we can ever be reconciled to God and experience anything other than His anger.
If you read all of Lamentations 3, it’s perfectly clear that the author understands this. Whatever sufferings we experience in this life are just a pale reflection of the punishment that our sins deserve, and the only hope that we have is to cast ourselves on God’s own mercy. When he says, then, “Let us…return to the Lord,” he understands that Israel’s sufferings are meant to point them to God, and to cause them to depend on God’s incredible kindness and mercy.
This, then is what it means for us to examine our ways, and test them—to realize the truth about our them. Hold your life up to the light of God’s holiness, and see how you have failed to live as He calls you to. Realize that your ways are evil, and they deserve nothing but punishment from God, the One you have offended by them. Confess your sins to God, and confess your need for His forgiveness. Cast yourself upon His mercy, and trust only in His provision for your sins in Christ’s work on the Cross. Though He deals with sin severely, He still kindly invites us to be freely pardoned.
So Socrates was right, in a sense—the unexamined life really isn’t worth living, because as Mark pointed out this morning, the only way to have the good life, the kind of life that is worth living, is to realize the truth about ourselves and our sins. Ultimately, we see both in Lamentations and in 2 Corinthians that the purpose self-examination—the purpose of the life worth living—is to glorify God. The reason we should be so careful in looking at ourselves is so that it will cause us to look even more at the Savior. Mark has often recounted Spurgeon’s statement that “he who thinks little of sin will think little of a Savior.” Well, the converse is true: the more careful we are in examining ourselves and understanding the truth about our sins, the more we will treasure the mercies of God and glory in His provision for us in Christ.
How, then, can we go about developing a habit of self-examination? What are some practical ways we can cultivate the skill of testing and proving our thoughts and our actions? This would be a great thing for us to think about all the rest of this week, but here are a few thoughts to get us started:
First, and most importantly, know God. Be a student of God’s word, and seek to understand more and more of who God is, and who we are to be as His creatures made in His image. The more we understand God’s law, the better we will understand how we fail to obey—and the more we will delight in Christ.
Second, walk out of the main sermon time on Sunday morning each week thinking about how your life the previous week looks in light of what the sermon has taught you about God. This is, at least in part, why we don’t call for a public response at the end of our services here—because we think it’s important that those who have just spent an hour listening to God’s word focus on quietly examining our own hearts and applying it to our lives. Use the moment of silence after the benediction to do that. The measure of the effectiveness of a sermon is not whether it moves anyone to a particular public response, but whether it illuminates for us the reality of our state before God and results in deeper trust in Him.
Another thing you can do to help examine yourself: Keep a list of everything you do for a day. Be as specific as possible. Then sit down with that list later, maybe in your quiet time, and use it to examine your motivations. Ask yourself, “Why did I do that? What was my motivation for spending an hour reading that?” See how closely your motives and priorities line up with the Bible’s description of a Christian. This exercise might be especially useful for a weekend, or another day when you’re out of your normal routine or have more free time than usual.
One noteworthy thing about this verse is that it has a distinctly corporate emphasis: “Let us examine our ways…and let us return to the Lord.” The author of Lamentations knew that just as Israel’s sin against God was corporate, so their repentance would have to involve the whole nation, as well. As God’s people gathered in a body here, it would be good for us to think about how we can put this verse into practice together, corporately.
First, be attentive to the regular preaching of the Word. Examining ourselves and being equipped to do so are fundamental to what we intend to be doing together in our main gathering on Sunday morning each week. We also do this in a particularly specific way each time we observe the Lord’s Supper, when we use the church covenant to examine ourselves and our relationships with one another.
Second, cultivate relationships where you can spend time examining yourselves together and pointing out areas of sin. This is part of what we commit to doing in the church covenant when we join the congregation: “We will…exercise an affectionate care and watchfulness over each other and faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require.” Find someone who knows you well, and have them help you search out blind spots in your life, places where you may be self-deceived or may not be able to see areas of sin. If there’s nobody in the congregation who knows you that well, work on cultivating that kind of open, honest relationship with someone. As you’re praying for your fellow church members using the membership directory, pray that they would be diligent in examining themselves and repenting of sin, and that they would be moved by thinking about their sin to greater and greater dependence on Christ.
Well, brothers and sisters, God in His mercy has not given us the punishment our sins deserve. He has blessed us with spiritual riches and treasures beyond anything this world can provide. Let us be diligent in examining ourselves to see whether we really are motivated by genuine love for God and desire to glorify Christ. Let us test and scrutinize each other to see where we fail to be an accurate picture of God. And let us especially, in the week ahead, pray that our self-examination would cause us to delight more and more in the Author and the Perfector of our salvation.
posted by Jeff at 6:30 PM
