Psalm 139:1-6, "O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it."

This text leaves us no doubt that nothing about us is hid from God. He knows all about us. There is another text that tells us man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. People sometimes like to use that text to hide themselves from other people, but mostly they use it to hide themselves from themselves.

I have come up with a take-off on the saying that goes, "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I say, "You can fool some of the people some of the time and you can fool yourselves all of the time, but you can't fool God anytime." Some people take pride in trying to fool other people, but usually they are fooling no one but themselves. Trying to fool other people might be a nice game for some, but trying to fool ourselves is not only a foolish game, it is one that can end up being fatal to our spiritual life. But in the Christian life, trying to fool God is a ridiculous impossibility.

The Bible tells us that we ought not to judge each other. Specifically, it says, "Judge not that ye be not judged." Though we are forbidden from judging each other, the Apostle Paul tells us we would do well to judge ourselves. 1 Corinthians 11:31 says, "For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged."

What does the Bible mean when it says we must not judge each other? When the Bible tells us not to judge each other, it is saying we should not try to discern each other's motives. Only God can read the heart and only He knows why we do what we do.

But sometimes it seems we have not caught on to what the Bible is trying to tell us. We seem to insist on doing what only God can do. When someone commits a crime, "pop psychology" will not be content until it has satisfied itself as to why the person committed the act. For instance, when a person has robbed a bank we could declare that person to be a thief. We would not be guilty of judging; we are simply discerning between right and wrong. The Scripture calls such a person a thief and so should we. But the prevailing pop psychology would cry that calling the person a thief is being judgmental. Pop psychology would study the thief and try to discover why he took the money. When it can be showed that his parents never gave him the toys that other children had, or that society in some way discriminated against him, the popular mind-set would declare him not a thief, but of doing what he did as the result of being an abused child and that his parents or society itself is to blame.

This, my friends, is judging. God alone knows the heart. He is the judge of all the earth. He is the One to say why a person robs a bank. When you come to think of it, what we are doing many times these days in our courts of law is what is called "applying situation ethics." The ultimate result of this type of thinking is that a person could break the Ten Commandments if they had a good enough reason for doing so.

As I read earlier, Paul calls on us to examine (judge) ourselves. But you might ask, "If only God knows my heart, how can I be expected to know it?" The fact is, you can. In fact, we must, because only a person who knows they are sick will go to a physician.

If we are going to submit ourselves to the healing power of the gospel, we must be continually judging ourselves. I am aware that most people don't like to do this unless it is to affirm themselves. Anything that would reveal something negative about ourselves is seen to be counterproductive. Yet the truth is, in the on-going process of salvation, it is just the opposite.

About a year ago I began to have pain in my right shoulder. Some years before I had pain in my left shoulder. The result was I had lost most of the range of motion in the left arm and I had to undergo physical therapy for about a month to get the motion back. So when I began to have pain in my right shoulder, I suspected that I was having another episode of Adhesive Capsulitis; another name for that is "Frozen Shoulder."

This time I was older and wiser. I knew that if I stopped moving the arm for fear of the pain, it would freeze up and I would have to go through the same type of therapy on this arm. So I determined to keep moving it. I had no idea what I was in for. Soon I was having acute pain in the shoulder. The more I tried to move it, the more painful it became. Especially at night, great waves of pain would go up and down the arm. I could feel it down to my fingertips.

I began to get really worried and to think this was something I was going to have to live with the rest of my life. I wondered if I were going to have to have some kind of big surgery. I even wondered if it was more than I had suspected--maybe a torn rotor cuff. So several months later I went to the doctor and he prescribed an MRI. For the MRI they laid me on a table and affixed a form-fitting brace around my shoulder at the site where the pictures would be taken; this was to assure the shoulder would be perfectly still for the camera. When all was ready, they slid me into a long tube. The tube cleared my nose by only a few inches. I suppose it could be compared to rolling up a calendar and putting it into a mailing tube.

I was not allowed to move while the pictures were being taken. I was in the tube for forty-five minutes. While the pictures were being taken, the equipment made a sound like an old-fashioned threshing machine.

The result of all this is that the machine takes pictures of the affected area in what could be called "slices;" they are three-dimensional pictures that allow the doctor to peer into the affected area slice by slice.

As uncomfortable and frightening as this procedure was, I didn't care--I was desperate. My arm was killing me. When the MRI pictures were developed, I was given an appointment with a shoulder specialist. He took one look at the pictures and declared it was indeed Adhesive Capsulitis with some slight rotor tearing.

The doctor gave me a shot and sent me home. But the shot wore off in a few days and I was back where I started. The pain was as bad or worse than ever. Now I was really desperate. So I did what anyone in the nineties would do when desperate to find an answer to a question. I turned to the Internet. I went to one of the search engines and typed in the word, "Adhesive Capsulitis." You may not believe this, but in less than ten seconds I had a list of articles I could research to find out about the disease.

I want to share with you what all these articles said I could expect regarding my problem: "You can tell your patients that on the average it takes approximately thirty months before comfort and motion are restored in insidious fashion. You can tell your patients that in about three years it may go away by itself. You can tell your patients that some patients have continued loss of motion even at seven-year follow-up."

Encouraging don't you think?

You might be asking, "Pastor O'Ffill, why are you telling us all of this? If you are going to spend time talking about your aches and pains, just wait until you hear about mine." I don't mean to take advantage of your time for that. The reason I tell you about this is to illustrate that, as I said before I started the story, and that is, only a person who knows they are sick will go to a doctor.

This is the reason Paul tells us to judge ourselves. We will not go to Jesus until we realize we are sick with sin, and we will not admit we are sick with sin while we are doing our best to fool ourselves into thinking we are all right and all that ails us is that we have low self-esteem.

If we are to have a victorious Christian life, it is imperative that we be always doing an ongoing self-evaluation. It must be ongoing and it must be honest. You see, what the Holy Spirit does in our hearts, He does only by our invitation and by our continual submission to it. Remember, the heart transplant that the Holy Spirit does on us, the complete remake of our lives from the inside out, He does without anesthesia; in other words, we are wide awake during the process. Our lives are dynamic and in continual flux; therefore, what He must do He can do only with our complete and entire cooperation.

When we invite Jesus into our lives, He graciously comes in; however, He will not--indeed He cannot--have the run of the house. We have all seen people who carry an immense ring of keys. They seem to have a key for everything. In the same way, our hearts are exceedingly complex. There are many compartments and they are all locked. It is we who must, by a continual submission of our will, let Jesus finish the work He has so graciously begun.

Here is where a problem comes in, and it has to do with what I was saying at the beginning. We are very accustomed to hiding or trying to disguise what we really are. Even when we give our hearts to Jesus, it is difficult to get out of this tendency. This is precisely why the Apostle Paul admonishes us to judge ourselves.

The point is, if we will willingly open the doors to every part of our heart, then the Lord won't have to break them down in the Day of Judgment. That is what it means when the Bible says, "For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged."

The victorious Christian life is not a point we arrive at. It simply describes a process we are going through. Although it is certain that our victory doesn't come from ourselves any more than the air we breathe or the food we eat comes from ourselves, even so the victory we are enjoying is from Christ, in Christ, and by Christ. It is all of this with our on-going participation and cooperation.

Here are some suggestions of what we must be continually aware of. I will state them as questions we might ask ourselves if this self-evaluation is to be effective. You might be asking, "Why would this be necessary?"

Let us not forget that even in the best of conditions, even in the cases where we have made a heart commitment to Jesus, it is necessary to continually realign ourselves with Him. This shouldn't seem strange. Those who have looked at the stars though a telescope know that you have to continually adjust the telescope. It will appear as though the star you are observing is moving out of the line of sight; this is because the earth is moving.

In the same way, because we live in a sinful world, which is all around us and even in us, we must continually adjust our hearts to make sure we are still in line with Jesus.

Question #1: The first question we need to ask ourselves is, "What do I want most?" This question helps us discover what our priorities are.

What would you rather have than anything in the world? We need to be brutally honest here. Don't answer this question from some kind of script. You could reply immediately, "I want to go to heaven." That is a good answer, but the devil might respond he also wants to go to heaven, for the simple reason that he doesn't want to go to hell. We must discover where our heart really is. So the first question is not enough; we must ask ourselves another. All of the answers together will give us a truer picture of ourselves.

Question #2: What do I think about most? Someone has said, "Sow a thought and reap an act; sow an act and reap a habit." The Scripture says we are what we think about--"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Obviously, in trying to survive in this life, we have to think about many things. We have to think about our work, our families and children, and all the rest. But the real test of our thoughts is what we are thinking about when we are not thinking about something else. In other words, what we think about voluntarily. Please note, our voluntary thoughts reveal the kind of people we really are. These first two questions are about our inner selves.

After this, a person needs to ask himself questions that reach outside the inner person. After all, you can tell for sure what kind of tree it is by the fruit that it produces.

Question #3: So another question that will reveal where we are in our lives is, "How do I use my money?" Again we are not talking about the money we spend for necessities of life. But we need also to analyze what kinds of things we consider to be necessities. A person may argue that they have to have a place to live, and so the mortgage payment each month would be considered a necessity.

We have to be careful here, though. I have talked with real estate agents who told me they have seen cases where people have bought such expensive houses, they couldn't afford to turn on the air conditioning or to have more than just the minimum furniture in the house. What this means is that even what we call necessities could actually be extravagances if it is beyond our means. How we spend our money is an important indicator of what our priorities are.

Question #4: Another indicator of who we are is, "What do I do with my leisure time?" I recognize that a significant part of our time is spent in working and sleeping. But the question here is how we spend our free time. Most people waste it watching television, reading novels--doing things that don't amount to much. What we do in our spare time is a good indicator of who we are.

Question #5: Another question we need to ask ourselves is, "Who are my friends?" I don't need to remind you that we are like our friends. Remember the saying, "Birds of a feather flock together?" If we don't want to be like our friends, we had better find new friends.

There is a thing called peer dependency. Notice that I didn't say peer pressure--I said peer dependency. A person can actually resist peer pressure, but peer dependency is a character flaw. You know what peer dependency is. It means you depend on other people to set your values, and you feel you are a failure unless you are dressing and otherwise imitating the culture and lifestyle of the people around you.

It is also true that we become like those we habitually admire. Let me ask you a question. Don't answer out loud, but I challenge you to answer the question in your own mind and be perfectly honest with yourself. The question is, "Who do you admire most?"

Sadly, a great number of people who consider themselves Christians admire people who have nothing to do with the Christian lifestyle. It is a matter of great concern to see who our young people have chosen as their role models. Like it or not, we become like our role models. Even though it may be imperceptible, our role models are likely to be some TV or sports personality. Is it any wonder that society is in the state it's in? I can't figure out for the life of me why the kind of shoes that Michael Jordan wears should have any bearing whatsoever on the kind of shoes that I wear!

We seem to have forgotten that a human being is like both a sponge and a mirror, and there are no exceptions to this rule. We are continually reflecting what we look at, and not only reflecting, we are also soaking it up.

Question #6: Finally, "What do I laugh at?" We can know something of our true selves by noticing what makes us laugh. I am not talking about whether or not we should laugh. Of course we should. The Scripture says that a happy heart is like a medicine. What I am talking about is what kinds of things we laugh at. Obviously, some things are inappropriate to laugh at. No reverent Christian finds death funny, nor birth, nor love. It is curious that bathroom humor will usually bring a laugh. To tell jokes about God is out of the question.

I am not mentioning these things to put us on a guilt trip. I am only suggesting that we would do well to ask ourselves these kinds of questions, because if we are going to let the Holy Spirit do in our hearts what needs to be done, we are going to have to know what needs to be done. I am sorry to say that many of us have been fooling no one but ourselves, and the time has come to be honest with ourselves. We have made a commitment to Jesus. We want Him to save us--not just some day, but we must be letting Him save us every day of our lives. To do this we must, like looking in the telescope, be continually doing a self adjustment, lest with all the cares of this life we lose sight of Him, Who is our life and our hope.

Beloved, now are we the sons and daughters of God. It does not yet appear what we will be, but one thing is sure, and that is when He comes we must have permitted Him to have finished His work in our hearts and in our lives. As we grow in grace and submit ourselves to what salvation is all about, our outlook on life begins to change. The things that used to be important aren't so important anymore.

The life of the victorious Christian is a life in which a person wants to be holy rather than happy. This is not saying that the victorious Christian life is not a happy life. It may be happy at times, but it may be sad, too. A person who sets out to find only happiness will be unstable and even unhappy much of the time. You see, happiness is a by-product of the life in Christ. We do not come to Jesus to be happy; we come to Him to be holy. He commands us, "Be ye holy, for I am holy." Holiness is not a product of happiness. The truth is, holiness is often produced through experiences of sadness and pain.

The victorious Christian wants to make God look good. The Christian will do this even if at times the price they must pay is that they will look bad themselves. These days in many places the gospel is being badly misrepresented. Believers are being told that if they really want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise they should come to Jesus. Much of the marketing of the gospel, rather than putting down selfishness and pride, actually gives them legitimacy. The victorious Christian does not pray that God will do their will, but rather that they will do His.

Although Jesus invites all who labor and are heavy laden to come to Him and He will give them rest, the truth is that in the Christian life we must lay down one set of burdens and take on other. We lay down selfishness and pride and the kinds of things we talked about earlier, but then we must take up a new burden. Jesus calls it a cross. He tells us to take up our cross and follow Him.

The cross of Christ means we put God first. It means we think of helping others first. The cross is not about building our self-esteem, but in the words of Philippians 2:3, "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem the others better than themselves."

It means that in the life of the Christian looking out for Number One is out of the question. It means that rather than seeking self-esteem, we are to esteem others as better than ourselves.

The victorious Christian actually comes to the place where they more and more see life from God's point of view. Someone said years ago that true wisdom is seeing life from God's point of view, and true knowledge is doing what He would do in a particular situation. This does not come naturally. The Scripture teaches that the natural man does not understand the ways of God, and in fact, they are foolishness to him.

The Scripture also says that God's ways are not our ways, neither are His thoughts our thoughts. A person who has a new life in Christ gets with it a new perspective, a new outlook on life.

A person who is experiencing salvation would rather die right than live wrong. There is a text that says that a person who tries to protect his life will loose it, and that a person who is willing to lose his life for Christ's sake will gain life, not only here and now, but life everlasting. My mother used to tell me, "Dickie, better to die than to tell a lie." A person who is interested only in saving their hide is a candidate for blackmail by the devil.

A friend of mine once said, "Dick, we must be prepared to die." I thought long and hard about what he said. He meant that if we are not afraid to die for Jesus, we will not be afraid to live for Him. I read somewhere that a truly spiritual person becomes increasingly indifferent to the number of his years here on earth. At the same time, he becomes increasingly careful of the kind of life he lives while he is here. He will not trade a few extra days of life at the cost of compromise or failure. He wants most of all to be right, and he is happy to let God decide how long he will live. He knows that he can afford to die now that he is in Christ, but he knows that he cannot afford to do wrong. This knowledge, then, becomes a gyroscope to stabilize his thinking and the things he does.

The Christian life is one in which we try to see that other people advance and not just ourselves. I have often wondered why we try to compete with each other. God has not made two of us the same; and if that is true, He has a special work for each of us to do. It is not the same work, but a complementary work.

For us to compare ourselves among ourselves is not wise. Why should I compare myself with you and you compare yourself with me? To do this is to compare, as we say, apples with oranges. We have been wisely advised that, just as there is a special place prepared for us in heaven, so there is a special place prepared for us on this earth. God always chooses the best person for a particular job. What we must pray is not that God will help me to beat you out, but that He will help me to find just the place that He has meant for me to have.

So there we have it. This is no time to judge the hearts of other people, but it is definitely the time for us to judge ourselves. Though it is Christ whom through the Holy Spirit is working in us both to will and to do His good pleasure, He will never be able to accomplish His will unless we have willed that it be so.

We must not forget that the human heart likes itself the way it is. It will do all it can to hide the truth, even from us. It was for this reason that David prayed in Psalm 139:23-24, "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

I like that prayer. Jesus is the Great Healer. If we will admit we are sick, He will make us well. One of the things I learned when I had the shoulder problem is that when you get sick and it really hurts, it is then you want something to be done about it.

I know how much I need Jesus to give me a new heart. He will come in and give me a new start, but He will not assume the run of the house. It is we who have the keys.

I love the text in Revelation 3:19-21, which says, "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous, therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne."