These last two weeks have been an adventure for me. I have been performing an internal audit of our manufacturing process and all of its associated documents. If you haven’t experienced an internal audit at work, congrats. I can’t seem to escape them. But that s a good thing when you remember what I do for a living. I spend all my time ensuring that processes and products are what they are supposed to be. Is the process and product conforming to the design and desired outputs.
Does this sound like something better left for the workplace or something we should be doing for our own lives? Paul had some thoughts on this when he wrote to the Christians in Corinth.
2 Corinthians 13:5. “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”
We need to take the time look at ourselves. How am I thinking? How am I speaking? How am I behaving? Does it meet the standard? Do I meet the standard? Where do I excel? Where do I lack?
As much as I love performing external assessments on other labs’ systems and processes, I have a harder time doing it for my own activities. I have trouble not making excuses or rationalizing why something is okay when it isn’t truly okay. But we need to take an honest look at ourselves and see where we are, objectively.
There are three ways to look at why internal audits are needed.
1. The standard (God’s word) requires it.
2. You want to find all your problems and fix them before the external auditor (Jesus) does.
3. You want to improve and be better.
The first two options are great places to begin but we really want to mature to the third. If you do it just to be obedient (option 1) or to avoid punishment (option 2), good, it’s a place to start. But I hope we can mature to the point where we do it because we realize that examining ourselves and fixing what needs fixing gets us closer to God.
Take the time to take stock. Is Jesus Christ in us?
