A Different Perspective

Through the wonderful resource that del.icio.us has become, I found this self-examination from John Wesley that Jordon Cooper bookmarked in his del.icio.us:

Wesley’s self-examination quiz

Here is one set of nearly two dozen questions which John Wesley gave to members of his discipleship groups more than 200 years ago. The questions may have their origin in the spiritual accountability group started by Wesley when he was a student at Oxford — a group that detractors called “The Holy Club.”

1. Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am better than I really am? In other words, am I a hypocrite?
2. Do I confidentially pass on to others what has been said to me in confidence?
3. Can I be trusted?
4. Am I a slave to dress, friends, work or habits?
5. Am I self-conscious, self-pitying, or self-justifying?
6. Did the Bible live in me today?
7. Do I give the Bible time to speak to me every day?
8. Am I enjoying prayer?
9. When did I last speak to someone else of my faith?
10. Do I pray about the money I spend?
11. Do I get to bed on time and get up on time?
12. Do I disobey God in anything?
13. Do I insist upon doing something about which my conscience is uneasy?
14. Am I defeated in any part of my life?
15. Am I jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy or distrustful?
16. How do I spend my spare time?
17. Am I proud?
18. Do I thank God that I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisees who despised the publican?
19. Is there anyone whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold a resentment toward or disregard? If so, what am I doing about it?
20. Do I grumble or complain constantly?
21. Is Christ real to me?

“Encourage one another daily . . . so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” — Hebrews 3:13

Source: Culbertson: John Wesley’s self-examination questions

I think these questions could be valuable for regular self-evaluation. Of course, one would have to walk the fine line between beating one’s self up and owning up to faults. This list of questions could be harmful for one who thinks they will be able to maintain perfectly a life that could answer “right” to all of the above questions. But too often, we (I guess I mean I) use our lack of perfection to continually justify sin.

Perhaps the answer to that justification is to regularly admit to our sins so we are no longer justifying them but confessing our shortcomings? Just reading through a couple of the questions was difficult for me, much less trying to actually answer them! I’m going to give it a shot now…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Faith, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.