Examine Yourselves Was Written to People in Church

Paul writes a sentence at the end of a hard letter that I think most people have never really let land.

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.

And the thing to notice first is who he is talking to. That is not written to outsiders. That is the last chapter of a letter to a church, people who were saved, who had spiritual gifts operating among them, who had been taught by Paul himself in person for a year and a half.

He tells that group to examine themselves.

Now I grew up in a world where checking a thing was treated as the first sign that something had gone wrong in you. If you were asking questions about what you had been taught, that was not diligence, that was drift, and the tone people used made the point without anybody having to say it out loud.

So the first time I read that verse for myself, at nineteen, sitting in a truck, it did something to me. Because it is a command. Not a permission. Not an allowance for the intellectually restless. He tells a congregation to test what they are standing on.

And I have found since that a true thing does not mind being tested.

He tells them to test themselves twice

Read it, and notice that he says it two ways in one line.

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates? (2 Corinthians 13:5, King James Version)

Examine yourselves. Prove your own selves.

He doubles it, which in that kind of writing is emphasis. And then he immediately assumes the outcome will be fine: know ye not your own selves that Jesus Christ is in you.

That is the tone I want to catch. He is not writing that verse to frighten anybody. He is writing it to a group who had been distracted by teachers with more polish than him, and he is telling them to go and check their own footing, and he plainly expects that when they do, they will find Christ there.

That is what a person does when they are not afraid of the answer.

You are safe to examine what you believe, and God has never once been threatened by an honest test. That is not me making a sharp verse soft. 2 Corinthians 13:5 gives the command and then assumes a good result in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the actual examining with a person rather than standing over them during it.

What I was actually afraid of

I want to be honest about why I did not check things for so long, because it was not reverence.

I was afraid that if I pulled on one thread, the whole thing would come apart. And underneath that was a second fear that mattered more: if this turns out to be wrong, then the people who taught it to me were wrong, and I was not ready for what that would mean about them.

That second one is the real reason most people do not examine anything. It is not about doctrine. It is about who taught it to you and what it would cost to find out they had it partly wrong.

And I want to say the thing I have landed on after years of this. Finding out somebody was wrong about something is not the same as finding out they were a fraud. My father is sincere. He has been sincere every day of my life, and he taught me to pray, and he is wrong about some things, and every one of those sentences is true at the same time.

A man can be sincere and still be misled, and holding both is the only way anybody stays in a family.

You are not betraying anybody by checking, and God has never once asked you to protect a teaching from Himself. 2 Corinthians 13:5 commands examination of a congregation's own footing, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person test something without it becoming a case against the people they love.

A true thing survives it

Here is what I have found and it is the reason I am no longer scared of this.

Everything that was actually true came back stronger after I checked it. Every single one. The examination did not damage anything real; it only removed the things that had been resting on somebody else's confidence rather than on the text.

That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of people expect the opposite. They expect examination to be a demolition. What it actually is, most of the time, is a sorting, and the pile of things that survive is the pile a person can stand on for the rest of their life without bracing.

And the difference in how a person holds a belief afterward is enormous. Before, it was borrowed. After, it is theirs.

You are able to own what you believe instead of renting it, and He has never once wanted a borrowed faith out of anybody. 2 Corinthians 13:5 tells a whole congregation to prove their own selves, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a thing a person was handed and makes it genuinely theirs.

You are holding everything that was true, and an honest test has never once destroyed something God actually said. Isaiah 40:8 says the word of our God shall stand for ever, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the sorting in a person without taking away what is real.

The Bereans got called noble for it

And there is one more thing I have to put next to this, because it is the strongest support in Scripture.

When Paul preached in a town called Berea, the people there listened to him and then went home and searched the Scriptures daily to see whether the things he said were so. They fact checked an apostle.

And Luke does not describe that as suspicion or as a lack of respect. He says they were more noble than the ones in the previous city, and the fact checking is the reason he gives.

More noble. For checking a man who was writing the New Testament.

You are being commended and not tolerated when you check, and Scripture has never once called that disloyal. Acts 17:11 uses the word noble about people who went and verified what they were taught, and the Spirit of God is the one who leads a person into truth when they actually go looking.