When I turned 40, MOH sent me a letter encouraging me to go for regular health check-ups. For the older folk (like myself), health screenings are increasingly becoming a feature of life. We want to detect and correct any potential health problems that we may have, because health is important to us.
In the same way, our souls would benefit from regular check-ups as well. For Christians, our spiritual health is a matter of eternal significance, making it much more important than our physical health. This article gives six questions to diagnose the health of our souls.
We will read the first three this week, and I pray that you will reflect on them, and by God’s grace, detect and correct any signs of spiritual problems it may highlight to us.
Pastor Luwin Wong
The devil uses many weapons in his assault against our soul, but one of the most overlooked is simply time. We are changeable creatures in a long war, called to “resist the devil” not for a day or a week or a year but a life (James 4:7). And spiritual health yesterday does not guarantee spiritual health today.
So, let’s stop to take some spiritual vitals. How healthy is your soul?
Six Questions for the Soul
Bunyan is not the only one who would call us to take heed. Strewn throughout Scripture, prophets and apostles, wise men and the God-man all urge us to watch ourselves, pay attention to ourselves and stay awake “lest we drift away” (Hebrews 2:1). Unless we keep our hearts “with all vigilance” (Proverbs 4:23), they will not be kept.
To get started, we might focus our attention on six of the most important areas of the Christian life: our heart, our habits, our hope, our enemies, our friends, and our neighbours.
1. Your heart: Do you desire God?
Proverbs exhorts us to keep our heart with all vigilance because “from it flow the streams of life” (Proverbs 4:23). If this fountain is polluted, all is polluted. If the heart is lost, all is lost. And at the centre of a healthy heart — its strong beat and lifeblood — is deep desire for God. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
What, then, does your desire for God look like right now? With David, has “the beauty of the Lord” become your “one thing,” the chief of your prayers and the cream of your pleasures (Psalm 27:4)? Would you say with Asaph that God himself is your heaven and that earth holds no rival to him (Psalm 73:25)? Can your heart sing with Paul of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8)?
God made us to hunger and thirst for him (Psalm 42:2), to faint and yearn for him (Psalm 63:1), to feel his absence like death and his presence like resurrection morning. He made us to desire him.
Of course, our delight in God rises and falls throughout this fallen life. Not even the most mature saint lives with a continual sense of God’s nearness. But as Don Whitney writes, “It’s one thing to long for a sense of God’s presence while not experiencing it, and another to live routinely with no awareness of his absence” (Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health, 61).
So, do you desire him — either with joy over his nearness or with grief over his seeming distance? Or has your heart grown cold to the one whose steadfast love is better than life (Psalm 63:3)?
2. Your habits: Do you draw near to God?
Typically, the health of our heart today reflects the health of our habits in recent weeks and months. A cold heart often betrays a closed Bible. A numb heart often tells of a neglected prayer life. And so our habits today prophesy the future state of our heart.
Public habits (like regular fellowship and corporate worship) are crucial for keeping the heart. But private habits may call for even closer attention because of how easily we can omit them without others noticing. No one sees whether we meditate on Scripture or visit the prayer closet or fast, and therefore no one sees whether we don’t. But so often, these private habits, these secret resolves, build the walls that keep our hearts.
Consider, then, the last month or two. How often (and with how much pleasure) have you prayed to “your Father who sees in secret” (Matthew 6:6)? How regularly (and with how much delight) have you meditated on his life-giving instruction (Psalm 1:2–3)? How familiar or foreign is the testimony of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne (1813–1843), who once journaled, “Rose early to seek God, and found him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?” (Memoir and Remains, 23).
3. Your hope: Do you live heavenly minded?
Near the heart of our faith lies the hope that one day soon, we will live with God in a world without end. We will shed this mortal body for one immortal, these tears for songs of joy, this thorn-cursed land for “a better country” (Hebrews 11:16). We will awake to the face our souls were made to see, whose gaze will slay our remnant sin and fill our hearts to breaking with happiness (1 Corinthians 13:12; 1 John 3:2).
Such we declare by faith. Do we also declare it by life? Would anyone, catching a smile on our face, ask the reason for our joy and hear the answer “heaven”? Does the weight of coming glory put our pain into perspective, such that we groan without grumbling and lament without losing hope (2 Corinthians 4:16–5:2)? Do we marry and buy and sell and laugh and mourn as if “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31), as if the life we know now will soon crash upon the shores of eternity?
The heavenly minded are known by their stubborn joy in sorrow, their modest expectations for this world, their stability in societal chaos, and their willingness to risk and sacrifice like heaven will make up for every lost comfort here.
(1) Scott Hubbard, (2024, Dec 31). How Healthy is your Soul? DesiringGod
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