Test Yourselves

Transcript

Good morning and greetings in Jesus’ name. We ought to walk with God with sincerity, firmness in our belief and a pursuit of God’s presence. The more we see his presence manifest in our daily lives, the more we are able to identify when God’s presence comes and we also become sensitive to what God is speaking or doing. 

Our strength is not determined by how much Bible we read or how much time we have prayed. Our growth and our strength is determined by how much we are able to understand God, how much we are able to sense and know and receive from the Lord. 

Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves.Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.”

Pau is asking us to examine ourselves to see if our faith is genuine. He’s not asking us to examine our pastors or our neighbors or the church or the doctrines and the theology. He is asking us to examine ourselves. 

The Bible has always encouraged us to judge ourselves so that we are not judged with others. And here Paul says, “Examine yourselves”. The goal of this examination is to see if our faith, our trust, our reliance is genuine.

It is one thing for the Lord to test us, and it’s a completely different thing for us to test and grade ourselves, assess ourselves, examine ourselves, judge ourselves. Let us put ourselves through a trial, through a testing phase. Then he says, the result of this test and this exam has to be that we know that Jesus Christ is among us. The way that we will know that our faith is genuine is that we sense the presence of Jesus in our midst,we see the manifested voice of Jesus, we see what God has been building, painting and developing inside of us. 

Then he goes on to give us the other side of the inference. He says that if we fail to recognize the presence of God, if we are not sensitive to His voice and His works, then our growth in faith has not happened or our faith is not genuine. 

The ultimate purpose of faith is not to disconnect from the person of Jesus. It is to see His presence manifest. Share on X

We are not supposed to live devoid of God just because we are living by faith. Lot of people say that it’s ok to not hear from God or if we don’t talk to God because we live by faith! Here Paul says that when we do test ourselves, the first knowledge, the first revelation that should come through that testing phase is that Jesus Christ is among us.

Apostle Paul is telling us that if we have not this place where we have been experiencing God’s presence and have been hearing His voice, then we have missed the whole point of following Jesus. So we need to restart this pursuit. We need to restart our understanding and see where we are lacking, see what we are missing and fill in those gaps, fill in those blanks so that we can rebuild our faith, a faith that is genuine.

Let’s pray together. Father, we pray over each and everyone of your dear children that are listening to this and are intentional to examine and test their own hearts, their own minds, their own motives, their own desire to serve you. Lord, I pray that they will experience and see and taste and know that your voice was behind every decision that they made.

And if not, if it is not your presence that is motivating them, if they fail to see your presence in their work, in their marriage, in their ministry, then I pray that each and every one of us who fail this test of genuine faith, we will be able to rebuild our faith, start from the scratch of necessary, but go back to pleasing God by genuine faith so that we can experience the raw, the real, the beautiful presence of Jesus in everything that we do. We thank you, God, for hearing our prayer. In Jesus’ name, we pray Amen.