time for a spiritual health check? Jason Roach urges us to focus on the gospel


I passed with flying colours and ate suitably large portions of dessert in the cafeteria for the rest of the week. As far as I was concerned I’d passed and didn’t need to worry for a very long time. Health checks conjure up this kind of pass/fail mentality. Either my health is good enough to make me relax for another few months, or something is flagged up that means I need to take serious action.


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Unfortunately the Christian life is not that simple. Of course we need to ask ourselves initially if we still believe that we are


nucleus easter ‘09


he last health check I had was an occupational health screen at the BMJ.


sinners in need of a saviour, Jesus Christ. If we fail here then we are spiritually dead and need to repent and believe. But if that belief is genuine it is always accompanied by ongoing repentance.


So, in a sense, ‘do I pass the test spiritually?’ is the wrong question to ask. There is no Christian for whom growing in faith and repentance is not an ongoing requirement that will demand different things at different times. We need to view our churches more like hospitals than country clubs. In a country club you don’t expect to see any sick people. In a hospital, intravenous tubes


coming out of people’s necks are normal.


Understood properly, the spiritual health check is a good model for the Christian life for two reasons. Firstly, we need to recognise that we are all sick. Despite our spiritual heart transplant, 1


we constantly need


to pitch up at God’s follow-up clinic because we still need his help. So acknowledging sin and seeking to grow in faith should be normal conversations over coffee in church, not ones that make us wish we’d picked someone else to talk to. Secondly, we need to admit that we are not in the best position to assess our own health, and


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