Reality Check: Examining Your Spiritual Condition

Info

Quarter: 2026Q2: Growing in a Relationship with God

Lesson: 1

Lesson title: Reality Check: Examining Your Spiritual Condition

  1. Intro: Because the lesson is too long to adequately cover in 15 minutes, Tendi and I are going to focus in on a smaller subset of the topics covered in the lesson.
    1. Can you remember a time when you experienced a strong spiritual high?
      1. I remember the day I was baptized. I was 13 years old. Our church was holding its first evangelistic series in many years, and as I listened and participated, I sensed God calling me to be baptized. I remember entering the baptistry and noticing that there was a thin layer of warm water on top, and the rest was cold. I remember that my feet slipped when the pastor lowered me under the water, so I didn’t pop back up as easily as might be expected. But what I remember more than anything was the sense of incredible peace that washed over me when I came up out of the water.
    2. How about a time when you experienced a strong spiritual low?
      1. I also remember what happened after potluck lunch the day I was baptized. I found myself getting into conflict with one of the other kids in the church, and that sense of peace vanished. Moreover, that conflict had a follow-on effect that lasted for months, until my family eventually moved away from that area.
    3. Or how about this: What about a time when you experienced a spiritual “blah”? Those times can be harder for me to remember, because they can seem so–unremarkable.
    4. As we consider examining our spiritual condition, it’s those “blah” times that are the most relevant. Or are they?
  2. Laodicea: Our lesson spends a fair amount of time discussing the Laodicean church
    1. Revelation 3:14-17: While this is a message to a church, I’d like for us to focus on its application to us as individuals. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t.
      1. We’ve been talking so far about experience: How we feel spiritually. But in this passage, we’re warned that our feelings aren’t a reliable measure of our true spiritual condition.
      2. What is your honest spiritual condition right now? This quarter is entitled, Growing in a Relationship with God, and that starts with confronting the reality of our situation.
        1. In 2 Samuel 10, we read how God gave King David victory over the Syrians and Ammonites who had attacked him. This comprehensive victory seems to have given David a great deal of confidence, because after this victory, while Israel was in the mopping-up stage, we come to 2 Samuel 11:1.
        2. David’s confidence led him to remain home while Joab finished mopping up. You know the story. David saw Bathsheba, got her pregnant, then had her husband killed in order to cover up his sin.
        3. 2 Samuel 12:1-7: David seems to have thought he’d gotten away with it, and that he was fine. But God in his love pointed out his true condition, and caused him to reckon with his sin.
        4. Back to Revelation 3:18-19: I’m glad that God doesn’t just see our broken condition and leave us there. God reproved and disciplined David, and David repented. But until Nathan pointed out his sin, David doesn’t seem to have really thought seriously enough about it to come to the point of repentance.
    2. Revelation 3:20: This is the key message here: If we let Jesus in as He knocks, we invite the Spirit to point out our sin, to show us our true condition, and to provide the only true solution.
      1. So many times I’ve heard people lament about how we’re Laodicean, but that isn’t the message here. The message here is to invite Jesus in, and it ends with more good news: Revelation 3:21.
  3. What we’ve covered so far is more or less an introduction. Tendi will take over now and bring us to the most important part of our study.