If I Will Not Stir Up Myself to Go Forward Right Now...

Take care what I am doing... 

• If I will not stir up myself to go forward, 
• how should I feel anything but doubt about my soul?

But what if I am like those whom others stand in doubt...

• What if I am in a worse case even than the almost Christians? 
• Like those who once made a high profession of faith, 
• but have now given it up?

Like those who were once reckoned to be true believers, 

• but have turned back again to the world and fallen away? 
• Have I gone back from the point in faith I once seemed to have reached?

Do I walk no more in the ways I once seemed to choose? 

• In short, am I a backslider?

Is this the state of my soul? 

• If it is, know for a certainty that my condition is most unsatisfactory. 
• It matters little what my past experience was. 
• It proves little that I was counted among true Christians 

It may have been all a mistake and a delusion. 

• It is my present condition of soul that I must look at, 
• and as I do so, 
• I must stand in doubt.

-Adapted Excerpt From

Startling Questions

J. C. Ryle