As a child I had test anxiety. Neither my parents nor I recognized it at the time. I just knew that when important tests and year-end exams rolled around, I felt nauseous and my head would hurt. I wrote exams anyway because I was raised in a “no excuses” household. It took me years to realize that I had been struggling with anxiety.
That anxiety was reinforced by what I was taught in the Brethen Sunday School I went to each week. They taught me to love the Lord Jesus — and for that I am grateful. They also taught me that Jesus would return in the middle of the night and, if I had not confessed every sin in my life, I would be left behind. The chief sins for children were disobedience of parents, teachers and other authority figures. What I learned was to try to get straight As because my teachers and my parents praised me when I did. And if they liked it, God must like it too. Hence the test anxiety —my worth was on the line!
Christians have test anxiety too. Ours comes when we believe that God is testing us to see if we pass or fail as a person of faith. The Bible does talk about God testing us. “As for you, Lord, you know me; you see me. You test whether my heart is with you” (Jeremiah 12:3). Both the Hebrew and Greek words for test refer to being examined, scrutinised, recognized as genuine. Most of the time in Scripture this is understood as God’s way of determining if what we say we believe is what we actually live. Are we genuine?
Personally, I don’t believe God devises tests for us and places them in our lives. I think life tests us and reveals to us what we actually believe or how we genuinely respond to something. God may know our hearts and minds but frequently we do not know ourselves. St. Paul recognized this when he said, “For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do” (Romans 7:18).
In the midst of turmoil, grief, or fear we may be less than loving, fail to be compassionate, ignore injustices, betray someone we love, stop praying, “forget” to read the Scriptures, think unkindly about others, treat people harshly — and so on. As Romans says, we fall short of the glory of God.
Sin — falling short — does not prevent God from loving us or reaching out to us. Our failures reveal to us our need
for God and His saving grace. If we pay attention to our lives, we soon realize that messing up as a Christian is a frequent occurrence. Acknowledging our failures and limitations is part of being open to God.
When we pretend that “all is well, we are good, life is perfect” we are ignoring the spiritual reality of our lives and shutting ourselves off from the experience of God’s grace and forgiveness. Our forebears in the faith understood this. Article XVI of the Thirty-Nine Articles acknowledges that sin is a state into which we all fall — even when we have been baptized and intend to lead the new life. It declares that “by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives.”
One way to do that is to examine our lives on a regular basis. In 2 Corinthians Paul says “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves” (2 Corinthians 13:5a). In this verse the Greek word for test, peirazo, means to try something, to endeavour; and the word for examine, dokimazo, means to test to see if something is genuine.
We are encouraged to stretch ourselves as Christians and to see what happens when we do. We are asked to engage in self-examination on a regular basis to determine where we might learn more, when we need to ask forgiveness, how we might seek help from others, why we have fallen short, and what we do differently. This kind of testing ourselves and seeing our strengths and weaknesses is a way of growing in our faith.
As we approach a new year and the inevitable talk of New Year’s resolutions, consider a resolution to examine your life on a regular basis. If at the end of a day you don’t like how you behaved or what you thought, look for what God can teach you about who you are and who you can become in His grace.
Canon Cheryl Toth is a retired priest in the Diocese of Qu’Appelle still actively involved in a few congregations.
for 2025, consider a resolution to examine your life
regularly and see what God can teach you about who
you are and who you can become in His grace.
