Vance Havner, the renowned preacher, once told the story of a writer who knew an elderly lady who loved to give her testimony in church. The lady would always begin by saying, “Forty years ago…” After hearing her do that many times, the writer said, “I felt like asking her, ‘Lady, hasn’t anything happened since?’” Havner then played off the illustration to say:

We thank God for the happy day that fixed our choice on Him as our Savior and our God, but there should be more happy days all along. Christian lives sometimes become like some married lives — they get to where there is nothing left but anniversaries.

I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I’ll trust you to give honest answers to them:

• What is your spiritual condition right now?
• How is your faith in Christ right now?
• How is your trust in Him right now?
• How is your confidence in Him right now?
• Are you currently overjoyed about the way God the Father is running the universe or do you currently find yourself somehow disappointed in Him, perhaps even mad at Him?
• Have you seen some prayer requests met recently or has it been a while?
• Are you happy serving Christ or has it become more like clocking in for work?

I myself have enjoyed some mountaintop experiences with Jesus. Then again, I’ve endured some valley experiences with Him. There have been times in my life when serving Him was the greatest passion of my life. Conversely, there have been other times when I was hurt at Him, disappointed in Him, and (I’ll admit it) downright ticked off at Him. I’ve seen prayer requests answered the same day I made them. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of times when my prayer life seemed to have no effect at all upon my daily life. And my guess is, all of that makes me normal.

One thing I don’t do, though, is dwell on spiritual anniversaries. Even though I remember the day I got saved, I don’t remember the exact date. Even though I remember the evening I got baptized, I don’t know that exact date, either. Even though I remember the time of my life when the Lord called me to preach, I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when I yielded to that call. Rather than dwell on what happened umpteen years ago, I just get up each day and try to submit myself to Jesus afresh and anew that day.

I once met with the pulpit committee of a church that is located on the North Carolina coast. I saw their pastoral vacancy in an online ad, submitted my resume, and made the cut down to their last three candidates from a stack of resumes. At that point, their pulpit committee asked me to drive down to Denver, NC, and meet with them in the conference room of a hotel.

The interview went fine as those things go, but in the end the committee chose another candidate over me. That stung a little, but it wasn’t the first time I had been turned down by a pulpit committee. However, the one thing I remember the most about that meeting was a question one of those fellows asked me as a part of the interview. He looked me squarely in the eye and asked, “How would you describe your walk with the Lord these days?”

I’ve gotta tell you, that question struck me like a harpoon that day. It did so because at that particular moment in my life I was still reeling from a time when the Lord had allowed our local high school football coaches to perpetrate some downright evil stuff on my oldest son, Ryan, in the realm of athletics. I’m not talking about physical abuse or anything like that, but I am talking about emotional, mental, and psychological abuse. I won’t go into all the gory details, but suffice is to say that it had been by far the worst experience of not only Ryan’s young life but also the lives of his parents.

And what had made the experience all the worse had been the fact that during it all Tonya and I had begged the Lord each day to deal with those men and right their wrongdoing. In the end, though, God just hadn’t done it and that had really hurt our faith, trust, and confidence in Him. So, as I was still trying to process all of that hurt and disappointment with God, I drove down to Denver that day and had that man ask me out of the clear blue, “How would you describe your walk with the Lord these days?”

Now, I could have painted some glowing, flowery picture about the awesome times the Lord and I had recently been having. In other words, I could have lied. But, instead, I just gave the man an honest answer. I started out with something like, “Well, right now I am coming out of the hardest time I’ve ever had in my walk with the Lord.” Then I went from there.

Did my answer cost me the opportunity to pastor that church? Possibly. I prefer to think, though, that a pulpit committee member insightful enough to ask such a probing question was appreciative of an answer that was obviously genuine. Regardless of whether my answer hurt or helped my cause that day, what I can say with certainty is that I don’t regret telling the truth. If I had lied and become the pastor of that church, I’d have felt like I got the job by way of false pretenses.

Anyway, my purpose in writing this post is to motivate you to set aside some time to do a thorough spiritual assessment of where you are with Jesus Christ right now. Ask yourself, “What is my spiritual condition at this very moment?” You see, what I’m doing is playing the role in your life that pulpit committee member played in mine that day. I’m looking at you and asking, “How would you describe your walk with the Lord these days?”

Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that if you will drop your guard long enough to be REAL about your answer, you will then be able to talk things over with the Lord in prayer and in so doing take your prayer life to a much deeper level. Never forget that the Lord doesn’t want anything fake from you, and whatever difficult conversations you need to have with Him, He is more than willing to have them. I’m not saying those prayers will be pleasant and leave you feeling like you’re ready to take on the world, but I am saying they will keep your walk with the Lord authentic and fresh. Most importantly, they will keep you moving forward with Him, and that’s infinitely better than becoming locked in place concerning some experience (either a good one or a bad one) that happened to you way back there sometime in your past.