To many, the idea of self-examination sounds about as enjoyable as standing before the mirror and slowly surveying your bodily imperfections. Who has heard, “Let’s spend some time examining ourselves,” and smiled?

For some, self-examination may even recall memories we have tried hard to forget. Maybe, in some miserable past, we spent untold hours digging inwardly, desperately trying to root out hidden sins. In the process, we discovered just how dark and hopeless — how Christless — life underground can be.

I can sympathize. I remember times when I felt locked in my own soul like Christian in the castle of Giant Despair. I’ve lived through long seasons without spiritual sunshine. Morbid introspection still tempts me today.

“In Scripture, healthy saints look outward mainly, but they don’t look outward only.”

But alongside that dismal past and present danger, I’ve also discovered something unexpected: the cure for unhealthy introspection is not simply to think about yourself less, but to think about yourself better. Yes, self-examination can become a prison cell of introspective gloom — but it need not. Done rightly, self-examination can become a pathway to spiritual health, a friend who leads us inward only to lead us further outward, who shows us self so we might see more of Christ.

Search Me, O God

But why, some may ask, do we need to examine ourselves at all? If God transforms us as we behold Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18), why would we spend any time beholding self? We change by the outward look, not the inward, don’t we?

Indeed we do. We are plants who grow by the rain of self-forgetful worship, the sun of Christward praise. Nevertheless, even well-watered, well-lit plants need to watch for thorns. Similarly, self-examination doesn’t grow us by itself, but it may clear the ground for growth — and keep us from getting choked.

In Scripture, healthy saints look outward mainly, but they don’t look outward only. Like Timothy, they keep a close watch not only on the gospel but on themselves (1 Timothy 4:16). Like David, they love to consider God’s glory in sky and Scripture, but they also allow that glory to illuminate self (Psalm 19:11–14). As the author of Hebrews exhorts, they devote their best attention to “looking to Jesus,” but from time to time they also consider the weights and sins that slow their pace (Hebrews 12:1–2).

The wise know that spiritual progress yesterday does not guarantee spiritual progress today. Judases become traitors and Demases become worldlings one small, self-deceived step at a time. And as both history and experience testify, it is all too possible to live a half-life as a Christian, bearing tenfold fruit when one hundredfold could be ours — if only we would stop to pull the thorns that block our way.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates famously said. And we justly add that the unexamined soul will not go on living — or will limp instead of run.

How to Examine Yourself

How then might we examine ourselves without becoming imprisoned by introspection? How might we draw water from the soul’s well without falling in?

Healthy self-examination can take many forms, and what helps one soul may help another less. As with prayer and Bible reading and other spiritual disciplines, Scripture gives us principles but leaves plenty of room for personal application. Consider, then, some basic guidelines for self-examination and how you might make them your own.

1. Plan to examine yourself.

Often, self-examination becomes morbid when it turns from a spiritual practice to a spiritual atmosphere: a vague cloud of condemnation that follows you around, a crippling sense of self-consciousness.

Scripture never counsels such a constant inner gaze. The life of a saint is a self-forgetful, Godward, others-oriented life. “Love God” and “love neighbor” are the twin priorities of our days (Matthew 22:37–39); “examine yourself” is a practice meant to serve those greater loves. And strangely enough, one way we might reclaim healthy self-examination is by giving it a thoughtful, well-defined spot in our schedule. Instead of perpetually examining yourself, plan to examine yourself.

“Only the Searcher of hearts can expose our hearts; only God can make us known to us.”

Such a plan will include a specific when. Many saints across church history have benefited from a brief time of self-examination every evening, a few minutes when we can remember the day’s mercies and confess the day’s sins. But for growing in the practice of self-examination, especially for those prone to morbidity, I might suggest something a little longer but less frequent — say once a week (perhaps in place of a normal devotional time).

As important as the when is the what. Where will you focus your attention? For most of us, “examine yourself” offers too broad a charge. But “examine your prayer life,” “examine your friendships,” “examine your parenting,” “examine your relationship with money” — these we can get our hands around.

I find it helpful to think in two broad categories for self-examination: callings and concerns. By callings, I mean the areas of responsibility God has given you: disciple of Jesus, husband or wife, mother or father, church member, friend, neighbor, employee, and so on.

And by concerns, I mean those areas of your soul that call for careful attention. Say, for example, you feel a pang of envy on a Tuesday afternoon at work. You confess the pang but don’t have time in the moment, or perhaps even in the day, to plumb its depths, even though you sense it would be helpful to do so. Why did I feel that? Where did that come from? Having a plan for self-examination allows you to say, “I’m not sure, but I don’t need to figure that out now. I’ll return to it on Friday” — or whenever you have planned.

2. Let God’s word guide you.

So there you are on Friday morning (or whenever), with time set aside for self-examination. What might that time look like? We might take some cues from David’s prayer 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 grievous way in me,     and lead me in the way everlasting!

David knows that only the Searcher of hearts can expose our hearts; only God can make us known to us. So, instead of diving into his own soul unaided, he asks God himself to search him.

Notice, however, that David doesn’t simply ask God to search him; he also places himself in the presence of this searching God. Most of Psalm 139 travels the depths of God, not self. David stands in awe of God’s all-knowing thoughts, God’s all-seeing eyes, God’s all-encompassing presence, God’s all-consuming righteousness. And then, in the context of this profound Godwardness, David says, “Search me.”

Psalm 139 (and the rest of Scripture) gives self-examination a decidedly asymmetrical focus: we see ourselves rightly only in relation to God. So, if you want to examine yourself well, follow David and place yourself in God’s presence. Practically, as you examine yourself, allow adoration to play just as significant a role as confession. And all along the way, treat God’s word as your best guide — the word given for our reproof and correction (2 Timothy 3:16), the only word that can discern the heart (Hebrews 4:12).

To that end, consider choosing a passage relevant to your present focus and using it like a pathway into the soul. If you want to examine your prayer life, linger over the Lord’s Prayer. If you want to examine your husbanding, look into the mirror of Ephesians 5:22–33. If you want to get beneath some persistent tug toward bitterness, walk slowly through Psalm 37 or 73. And as you do, ask God himself to search you.

3. Query your soul and confess your sins.

To sharpen our self-examination, we might look again to David’s prayer. As he asks God to search him, he doesn’t ask God to reveal everything about him. But he does ask to see “any grievous way in me” — any unknown or half-known sin, any deepening unbelief, any developing pattern that could keep him from following “the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:24).

Similarly, we don’t need to treat self-examination as an exhaustive enterprise. We cannot know everything about ourselves, or even everything about one part of ourselves. No matter how self-aware we become, we will die knowing ourselves, just as we know God, only “in part” (1 Corinthians 13:12). But we do want to see anything that needs our present attention — any poisonous bud that could open into grievous sin.

As we meditate on a passage, we may find help from asking questions like the following (drawn from page 148 of Tim Keller’s book Prayer):

Am I living in light of this?
What difference does this make?
If I believed and held to this, how would that change things?
When I forget this, how does that affect me and all my relationships?

If such questions reveal sins we have tolerated, habits we need to stop, subtle compromises that have grown over time, good — our self-examination is bearing fruit. An hour ago, something troubling lay hidden in the soul; now no longer. Now we can take it, place it before the Lord who knows us exhaustively yet loves us eternally, and say with David,

I acknowledged my sin to you,     and I did not cover my iniquity;I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”     and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. (Psalm 32:5)

4. Forget about yourself.

Self-examination, like deep-sea diving, is a good but occasional exercise. God has not given us enough light or oxygen to swim always in the deeps; sun and air and land await us above. So, once you have queried your soul and confessed whatever sins you’ve seen, return to the surface.

“The end of self-examination is not self-consciousness, but Christ-consciousness.”

The prayer acronym A.C.T.S. puts thanksgiving after confession for good reason: in Christ, confession of sin is not a room but a doorway, not a wall but a path. God would not have us sit forever in some gloomy cellar of guilt; he would have us sing under the blue sky of his kindness and walk in the broad fields of his grace, his steadfast love our atmosphere (Psalm 32:10). So, if self-examination does not regularly lead us to a fuller, deeper, sweeter taste of God’s grace in Jesus, then somewhere self-examination has gone wrong.

The end of self-examination is not self-consciousness, but Christ-consciousness. Yes, we have scrutinized our souls for a time, but only so we might bring our sins to Christ and receive his strength to walk a better way. The last step of self-examination, then, is simply this: forget about yourself. Go love your God. Go love the people he has placed before you. Go walk in “the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:24).

At various points in my Christian life, I’ve felt my cheeks burn with shame as I’ve faced my sin. I’ve felt humiliated, disappointed, and sometimes disgusted with what I’ve done.

Perhaps you’ve felt a similar anguish. You can’t believe those ugly words just came out of your mouth. You look back with a sense of embarrassment over how you acted so foolishly toward your parents. You’ve all but despaired over some ongoing sin that you cannot seem to confess.

As Christians, we have all looked at ourselves and felt sorrow over sin. But have we ever deeply considered why we do it in the first place? Why do we sin?

Searching Our Past Sins

In Confessions book 2, Augustine (354–430) probes for an answer to why we sin by considering moments in his own life. But he does so cautiously, clarifying that he looks back on his past sin “not for love of them but that I may love You, O my God” (2.1.1). He does not peruse past sins like we muse over old photos on our phone, but rather, like a doctor dissecting tissue to locate a cancerous tumor, Augustine remembers sin in order to discover its root cause. With Augustine, we should gaze at the darkness of past sin only to better understand our own hearts and, most importantly, to see the brightness of Christ’s mercy more clearly.

Augustine takes us back to his teenage years when his “delight was to love and to be loved.” Yet he “could not distinguish the white light of love from the fog of lust” (2.2.2). As he recounts how his “youthful immaturity” swept him away into “the madness of lust,” we expect him to stop and analyze the sinful motives behind his lusts. But he doesn’t. He turns instead, almost abruptly, to a very different kind of teenage sin: stealing pears with his pals as a prank (2.4.9).

“Behind every sin — from pride to greed to anger — is a perverse desire to imitate God.”

Augustine labors to understand this seemingly trivial sin to such an extent that some have worried he veers into scrupulosity. Yet he is not troubled with doubts about whether he sinned, as the overly scrupulous are. Rather, he struggles with understanding why he committed the sin at all. What motivated his teenage self to steal with such senseless disregard for God’s law against theft (Exodus 20:15)?

Why Steal Pears?

Augustine makes clear right away that the problem with his theft of the pears was that the pears themselves were not the problem. He had no desire for the pears. The pears were not lovely, and he had even better ones back at home. Nor did he steal because he was hungry: he and his buddies just threw them to the pigs after they had stolen them. So, why did he do it? Why steal something you don’t even want and won’t even use?

Before Augustine describes two motives for why he stole the pears, he considers what usually entices us to sin: disordered desire for otherwise good things. Our attraction to beauty, our delight in physical pleasures, and our satisfaction in success all become distorted when we love them apart from God. Like the prodigal son demanding his inheritance so he could run from his father (Luke 15:11–32), we sin when we spurn the Giver and selfishly love his gifts.

We can discern in disordered desires a certain logic to sin, even to a heinous sin like murder. Augustine points to Cataline, the archetypal Roman villain, to underscore that even in committing murder “he loved some other thing which was his reason for committing [his crimes]” (2.5.11). In our selfish pursuits, we may even commit murder to get what we want or protect what we’re afraid to lose.

But in Augustine’s case, he wasn’t motivated by a nefarious goal beyond the robbery or by distorted love for the sweetness of the pears. Rather, he says, he desired the sweetness of sin itself.

For the Thrill

When he considers why he stole the pears, he first says his “only pleasure in doing it was that it was forbidden” (2.4.9). The reward of the theft was not the pears but the stealing itself — “the thrill of acting against [God’s] law” (2.6.14). Augustine discerns something deeper in the thrill, though, than the racing heartbeat and giddy delight of getting away with a prank. Behind the thrill is the same desire to “be like God” that drove Adam and Eve to sin (Genesis 3:5). Even in rebellion, Augustine says, man is “perversely imitating [God]” (2.6.14).

Behind every sin — from pride to greed to sinful anger — is a perverse desire to imitate God. Pride, for instance, “wears the mask of loftiness of spirit,” even though God alone is high over everything (2.6.13). Greed hungers to possess more than it should, yet God possesses everything. Sinful anger seeks vengeance, but God alone can justly avenge. Therefore, we find a certain thrill in the forbidden precisely because, in pretending to be omnipotent, we perversely imitate God.

Such a perverse desire to be godlike, though, is not satisfied with sinning solo.

For the Fellowship

Our perverse imitation of God wants an audience. Augustine insists (three different times) that “I am altogether certain that I would not have done it alone” (2.8.16). “Perhaps,” he pauses to consider, “what I really loved was the companionship.” But no, he finally concludes, “since the pleasure I got was not in the pears, it must have been in the crime itself, and put there by the companionship of others sinning with me” (2.8.16). Augustine suggests that the good desire for fellowship with others, which symbolizes the ultimate fellowship enjoyed by God in his Trinitarian relations, becomes a perverse desire when it leads us into sin.

“Discovering the insanity of sin turns us back to the immeasurable mercy of Christ.”

These two motives — the thrill of transgression and friendship with fellow sinners — intertwine to move him to steal the pears. They go together because the feeling of a pretended omnipotence is consummated by the praise of others. The thrill of stealing, then, was not enough to motivate Augustine’s sin. Companionship adds the pleasure of praise to the thrill of the theft and becomes, in Augustine’s words, “friendship unfriendly” (2.9.17).

Yet, in naming these two motives, Augustine does not believe he has explained fully why he stole the pears.

Our ‘Complex Twisted Knottedness’

Even as Augustine lays out the two reasons for his theft, he asks himself, “What was my feeling in all this?” He wonders along with the psalmist, “Who can understand his errors?” (Psalm 19:12 KJV). Augustine recognizes that, at bottom, sin is persistently perplexing. Even a relatively trivial sin like a prank leaves Augustine uncertain about the root motive. Augustine’s analysis simultaneously reveals man’s desire for God even in our sinning and acknowledges man’s inability to explain why we pursue that desire for God by turning away from him.

What is finally inexplicable, then, about our sin is not that we sin without reasons but that those reasons do not ultimately make sense. Any attempt to peel back the layers of sinful motives ends in futility because identifying an original motive for evil is like trying to “hear silence” or “see darkness” (City of God, 12.7). We cannot see what is not there or hear what does not sound. Augustine points to a perverse imitation of God as the driving motive behind all vices, but why we desire to perversely imitate God in the first place is ultimately inexplicable.

Augustine feels the anguish of his inexplicable root motive when he exclaims, “Who can unravel that complex twisted knottedness?” (2.10.18). His anguish echoes Paul’s exclamation, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Like Paul, Augustine looks to Christ’s mercy (Romans 7:25).

Discovering the insanity of sin turns us back to the immeasurable mercy of Christ. Just as a child who has made a mess of his problem runs to his parent for help, so too we must run to God for mercy from the mess we’ve made. We will not do that, though, if we don’t feel the desperation of our situation. The whole of Confessions, says biographer Peter Brown, is “the story of Augustine’s ‘heart,’ or of his ‘feelings’ — his affectus” (Augustine of Hippo, 163). In the story of stealing the pears, Augustine feels — and helps us feel — the anguish of our inexplicable decision to turn away from God. He shows the depths out of which we cry to God for help.

Prodigal’s Return

In our sin, we need the desperation of the prodigal son who, after he squandered all his inheritance, recognizes his only hope is to return to his father (Luke 15:17–19). Or like the psalmist who calls to the Lord for mercy from the abyss of his sin (Psalm 130:1–2), we too must turn to God with hope-filled pleas for mercy. “For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption” (Psalm 130:7). We have been led by the insanity of sin to run from our Father, but he is ready and eager to run to us, brimming with forgiveness.

Augustine’s final paragraph draws us away from the darkness of our sin to gaze, by the mercy of Christ, on the beauty of God’s holiness:

Who can unravel this most snarled, knotty tangle? It is disgusting, and I do not want to look at it or see it. O justice and innocence, fair and lovely, it is on you that I want to gaze with eyes that see purely and find satiety in never being sated. With you is rest and tranquil life. Whoever enters into you enters the joy of his Lord; there he will fear nothing and find his own supreme good in God who is supreme goodness. (2.10.18; trans. Boulding)

God’s full forgiveness restores us to rest with him forever. So, as you search your past or present sins, find hope in your Father’s “plentiful redemption.”

Isaiah 6 recounts one of the most stunning revelations of God’s majesty in the Old Testament. The prophet writes, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). The six-winged seraphim — fiery, flying heavenly beings — call to one another with booming voices, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3).

Isaiah responds to this awesome theophany with distressed confession: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). One of the fiery angels touches Isaiah’s mouth with a coal from the heavenly altar to remove his guilt, and then the Lord calls and commissions his prophet. Isaiah’s initial zeal — “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8) — turns to confusion — “How long, O Lord?” (Isaiah 6:11) — when the prophet considers his challenging charge:

Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.” Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. (Isaiah 6:9–10)

While Revelation 4 recalls Isaiah’s vision of the divine throne, Jesus and the apostles more frequently cite the prophet’s commission to preach to a recalcitrant people unable to hear or see spiritual truths. These verses feature prominently in all four Gospels (Matthew 13:13–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:39–41), the book of Acts (Acts 28:25–28), and even Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 11:8). Why? This Old Testament passage helps to explain how the rejection of Jesus and his followers fulfills the larger biblical pattern of the maligned messengers of God.

Let’s review the context of Isaiah’s prophecy and then consider Jesus’s use of this passage in Matthew 13:13–15.

Isaiah’s Startling Commission

Isaiah 1–5 establishes Judah’s chronic idolatry, hardness of heart, and lack of spiritual understanding. Though there are flickers of hope about what God will do “in the latter days” (Isaiah 2:2–5), these chapters repeatedly expose the people’s rebellion and announce God’s coming reckoning. The people are like unruly children who have despised the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 1:2–4). In their idolatry and immorality, Judah resembles Sodom and Gomorrah, the wicked cities God destroyed with fire and brimstone (Isaiah 1:9–10). The beloved vineyard of the Lord has yielded nothing but wild grapes (Isaiah 5:1–7).

For five tense chapters, Isaiah decries their sins and warns of judgment. Then, in chapter 6, Isaiah beholds God’s glory and receives his commission to blind the people’s eyes, stop up their ears, and harden their hearts (Isaiah 6:9–13). The prophet’s preaching would not merely warn the people but would confirm them in their stubborn rebellion against God.

The biblical prophets often speak of Israel’s malfunctioning eyes and ears to illustrate their inability to respond rightly to divine revelation. This imagery reflects God’s earlier word of judgment in Deuteronomy 29:4: “To this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” Moreover, pronouncements about the people’s spiritual blindness, deafness, and dullness reveal that they now resemble the lifeless idols they have revered. Psalm 115:4–8 unpacks this biblical logic:

Their idols are silver and gold,     the work of human hands.They have mouths, but do not speak;     eyes, but do not see.They have ears, but do not hear;     noses, but do not smell. . . .Those who make them become like them;     so do all who trust in them.

The same pattern is at work in the book of Isaiah. The people have chosen oaks and gardens for their pagan worship, so they “shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water” (Isaiah 1:29–30). They have trusted in and treasured carved idols, so God addresses them as “deaf” and “blind” (Isaiah 42:17–18). In this case, the prophetic word brings not salvation but judgment.

God’s Maligned Messengers

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record Jesus’s famous parable of the sower, which challenges people to consider their response to God’s word proclaimed by God’s Son. The challenge is most clear in Mark’s account, which begins with the command “Listen!” (Mark 4:3). Jesus concludes the parable with this enigmatic exhortation: “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9). He repeats the word “hear” five times when explaining this parable (Matthew 13:18–23). The seed sown on good soil illustrates “the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit” (Matthew 13:23). The point is that Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom demands a response of obedience. True hearing entails bearing fruit.

Our Lord turns to Isaiah 6 to explain why he teaches in parables. His disciples are blessed because they see and understand the secrets of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13:11, 16–17). The crowds, however, see yet do not perceive; they hear yet do not understand the spiritual truths that Jesus teaches.

Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. (Matthew 13:14–15)

“Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom demands a response of obedience. True hearing entails bearing fruit.”

Jesus cites Isaiah’s commission to clarify why his own ministry is met with opposition. Here we have the filling up of a biblical pattern, not the fulfillment of a prediction. God sent Isaiah to a recalcitrant people unable and unwilling to see, hear, and understand spiritual truths, those who had become just like the lifeless idols they admired. Isaiah’s situation reminds us of Moses, who spoke God’s word to a nation without eyes to see or ears to hear, and it also parallels the ministries of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and many other prophets who were disregarded and dishonored by their own people.

Throughout the Bible, Israel persecuted and killed the messengers sent by God, so it is unsurprising that the final prophet, the long-awaited Messiah, would receive a similar reception (see Luke 11:49–50 and Acts 7:52). Isaiah’s commission to the spiritually blind and deaf foreshadows the later and greater ministry of Jesus.

Jesus’s Superior Glory

There is also an important redemptive-historical development from Isaiah to Jesus. John 12:41 explains that Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke of him.” This means either that the prophet saw the glory of the preincarnate Messiah, who is “high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1), or that he foretold the exaltation of the suffering servant, who reveals God’s glory as he accomplishes God’s redemptive plan (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). In either interpretation, Jesus is not merely another messenger from God but the glorious God-in-the-flesh, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He is both the fulfillment of the rejected-prophet pattern and the one foretold by the prophets.

Isaiah announces coming judgment followed by an era of salvation, when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped” (Isaiah 35:5). This prophecy prepares the way for the message and ministry of the Messiah Jesus. Our Lord not only preaches good news about the kingdom of heaven but also opens deaf ears and gives sight to the blind. These miracles of reversal signal that the promised time of salvation has come (Matthew 11:2–6).

These miracles also serve as enacted parables illustrating the people’s need for God to grant them the spiritual capacity to recognize Jesus as the divine Savior and Lord, and respond with faith. The blind cannot make themselves see. Nor can people apprehend spiritual truths unless God illumines his word and enables them to see and believe. This is why Jesus says to his disciples, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear” (Matthew 13:16).

Look and Listen

Thus, Jesus and his followers frequently quote Isaiah 6 to explain that the opposition they face fits into a larger biblical pattern of the rejection of God’s chosen messengers. Christ fulfills this pattern as both a true prophet and the suffering servant the prophets foretold. So then, look to and listen to the Lord Jesus, the long-awaited Savior who overcomes our resistance and opens our eyes to see him as the One full of grace and truth.