Morbid Self-Inspection Kills Love
Psalm 26:2
Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.


Many years ago I knew an excellent much esteemed Christian mother, who had become morbidly introverted, and could not find her love to God. Seeing at once that she was stifling it by her own self-inspecting engrossment, which would not allow her to so much as think of God's loveliness, I said to her, "But you love your son, you have no doubt of that." "Of course I love him, why should I not?" To show her, then, how she was killing her love to God, I said, "But take one week now for the trial, and make thorough examination of your love to your son, and it will be strange if, at the end of the week, you do not tell me that you have serious doubt of it." I returned at the time, to be dreadfully shocked by my too cruel experiment. "No," she said, "I do not love him;" I abhor him. She was fallen off the edge, and her self-examination was become her insanity!

(Horace Bushnell, D. D.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.

WEB: Examine me, Yahweh, and prove me. Try my heart and my mind.




God Trying the Reins and the Heart
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