Sermon:
The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Christians (4)
Live the UneXamined Life
Cardiff Heights Baptist Church
23 January 2000

As we come to the fourth habit of the highly ineffective Christian, I
am sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that each of the habits
has featured a shape. Habit 1 was to “Live in the Circle of
Ineffectiveness”. Habit 2 was to “Put God in a Square Box”. And
Habit 3 was to “Embrace the Triangle of Mediocrity”. Now some of
you may have hypothesized that this is just some fixation of mine
with shapes but that is not the case. These shapes were carefully
chosen because these shapes were a vital part of my research for
this sermon series. The shapes come from my research
instrument this.

Hold up Playstation controller

Here we have the circle, the square, the triangle and the fourth
button is an X. Which brings us to the fourth habit of the highly
ineffective Christian.

Show Overhead http://www.geocities.com/dreamingisdangerous/unexamined.JPG

The fourth habit of the highly ineffective Christian is that they “Live
an uneXamined life”.

You will enter a new sphere of ineffectiveness if you live an
unexamined life. The truth, that living an unexamined life will
produce mediocrity beyond compare, is not a new discovery. The
ancient Greeks new it well. It was Socrates who said, “The
unexamined life is not worth living”. To be effective in your
Christian walk you need to examine your life in order that you can
as Socrates put it “Know Thyself”. This habit is actually quite easy.
We seldom examine ourselves since we don’t want to know
ourselves. If we knew ourselves we would probably run away.

To examine yourself is to take the most treacherous journey there
is. The journey within. The famous American Monk, Thomas
Merton is said to have once claimed, “The real journey is the
journey within.’ For the effective Christian it is crucial that the
impact of the gospel upon their inner life is taken seriously.

A great deal of Christian teaching and books have to do with how
people deal with their ‘outer world’: being Christian in lifestyle;
sharing the gospel with others; engaging in works of justice,
compassion and mercy and upholding traditional Christian work
ethics and moral stances. The emphasis is often on service or on
ministry to others as if such activity is the hallmark of Christian
obedience. However, it is not possible to sustain any such
dimensions of Christian living without renewing the inner world.
Without taking the inner journey and examining your life, you
cannot cope with the activity. A good example of this can be found
in the story of Elijah found in the first book of Kings chapters 18
and 19.

This was a period in the history of the nation of Israel like so many
others where they were worshipping other gods. The king at the
time, Ahab, was married to a woman named Jezebel who
worshipped Baal and Asherah. And in chapter 18 we have a kind
of contest between Elijah and four hundred and fifty prophets of
Baal. The contest was not to show that the Lord was more
powerful than Baal but to show that Baal was no god at all. Cutting
to the chase, God won and then Elijah killed all four hundred and
fifty prophets of Baal and then after that Elijah had a race with the
king, Ahab. The King in his chariot and Elijah on foot and Elijah
won. All in all