A dictionary defines 'examine' as 'to observe carefully or critically; to inspect; to study or analyze'. If you make a habit of examining yourself, you will be able to keep the Word of God in your heart and practice it without letting it slip away. Thereby you can discover sins and forms of evil in your heart, cast them off, and please God.
Simply put, when you bear the Word of God in your heart and examine your words, deeds, thoughts, and feelings based on the Word, you can achieve sanctification more quickly.
So, let's now delve into what and how to examine in detail.
First of all, we have to examine the Word of God and try to keep it in our hearts
During sermons, if you open your heart and listen attentively to the message, it can be easily understood, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have put it in your heart.
The message may slip out of your mind for several reasons such as: it didn't agree with your knowledge; because you have the faulty habit of hearing but not focusing and concentrating; because you lack the truth in heart; or because you are filled with the worldly things. You have to check the reason.
Let's now look into what we should do after listening to sermons. Suppose we listened to the message "Love Is Patient". We have to repeatedly listen to it, examine the will of God in it, and try to keep it in heart. Only by doing so, can we patiently suppress our anger at first though we feel irritated in heart. By extension we will be able to remember that God wants us to achieve love that doesn't need patience and try to achieve such love. In this way, we can bear the fruit of patience.
When we examine the Word of God, keep it in heart, and practice it with the Word as the standard of criteria, we can achieve sanctification. But what if we have learned about patience and found out that we are still suppressing ill feelings? Then we should realize we still have a long way to go for sanctification. God wants us to have patience that embraces everything and doesn't actually need patience.
Christians learn the Word of God, but many of them forget it easily. This is mostly because they keep many untruthful attributes in their hearts. They have to realize it, pray fervently, and try to concentrate on the Word of God and make a habit of keeping it in their hearts and practicing it.
Secondly, we have to examine and reflect upon ourselves with the Word
Let's continue to think about the message about 'patience'. Now we know that suppression is not the perfect patience. We then have to examine ourselves with the message. To examine is to observe carefully, reflect and analyze one's own flashing thoughts, heart, feeling, and deeds through the Word of God.
Say you saw your subordinate act in untruth, so you admonished him and you think you did it with love but he showed agitation and it caused him discomfort. What should you do now?
You should examine and reflect upon what you said and did to see if your words contained a little bit of discomfort or if your admonishment was not right in some way. If you try to attribute faults to others without examining yourself, you cannot cultivate your heart with goodness and love.
Let's talk about another example. Suppose you heard that someone had slandered you. Of course, you may not take up an argument with him, but you should see if you had bad feelings about it, felt distressed, complained about it to your close friends, or also criticized him when he made a mistake. Then, you should see you have hatred that still remains in you.
Now, let's say someone is complimented by others. Is his shortcoming flashing though your mind? If so, it shows that you have jealousy towards him. Just as described so far, we have to look back upon and inspect every thought we have, even if it is one that passed by for a moment. That is how we can quickly reach sanctification.
As mentioned earlier, we should examine and reflect upon ourselves through the Word of God. More importantly, we should humbly admit our wrongdoings or shortcomings. If someone felt uncomfortable because of our words as in the illustrations above, even though we say something with love, we should figure out what we lack though what we did is almost of perfect goodness and admit the deficiency, thereby we can become perfect men of spirit.
Lastly, we should examine our sinful nature in heart and pray about it
In order to accomplish sanctification, we should repent of not only our past sins but also the sinful nature that caused us to commit the sins, even though we are not committing them now. Furthermore we must root out the sinful nature and forms of evil from our hearts. By analyzing our past evil deeds, we can see our sinful nature deep in our hearts.
If we still make excuses for our past deeds of untruthfulness, we cannot discover ourselves and change. We should reflect upon ourselves not from our positions and viewpoints, but only by the Word of God. Then we can easily discover our wrongdoings.
Suppose there were conflicts of opinions and you quarreled with others. Then you must analyze your behaviors, figure out the sinful nature that made you quarrel, and cast it off in addition to not doing it anymore.
Even if others' opinions are definitely wrong, we first need to listen to them until the end. This is when we can speak about what is wrong with their opinion. We must not cut them off when they are talking. If we do cut them off, it shows that we have arrogance. As explained, we can discover our sinful natures based on the Word of God even through such an incident.
You should investigate your sinful nature that caused you to quarrel rather than just pray not to quarrel. If you seem to change slowly, though you always pray, you are very much likely that you haven't found your sinful nature yet.
In order to become sanctified quickly, we must closely reflect upon our lives with the Word of God, discover our shortcomings and sinful natures that make them and pray to continually remove them until they are completely gone. Examining ourselves through the Word of God and identifying our sinful natures is the shortcut to sanctification.
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