Lent #6: Discipline 1 of 7 - Self-Examination.

Examine yourselves,

and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

(First Corinthians 11:28)

Isn’t it interesting that self-examination is put in the plural: Examine yourselves—yourselves, gathered in community around the table of our Lord. I just returned from a gathering of guys for a few days, by a lake, to examine some difficult aspects of scripture together. I didn’t expect, or intended it to have anything to do with my Lenten self-examination project; but, it did.

That’s true of our Lord’s teaching as well. Self-examination takes place within the sphere of fellowship: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eyes, but do not notice the log in your own eye (Mt7:2)? Noticing others causes me to take notice of myself.

Gathered around the Lord’s Table is a good place for self-examination. You don’t want to acknowledge disappointing and troublesome things about yourself without the Bread and the Cup at hand. The Cross frees us to examine our self. Whatever broken self we discover; Calvary heals and makes whole. It frees us for one another. Our Living Lord becomes our present mediator not only between us and God, but between me and you; and, not only that, Christ is our mediator between our old self and our new self: “Christ intercedes in our behalf” (Hb 7:25).