Someone said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Folks tend to fall in the big open area between thinking only about how they feel all the time or worrying about what other people feel when they think about them.

In times of trial and tribulation there is a lot of examining going on.  The nature of faith, its efficacy, its strength etc can worked over pretty hard. Many of our Bible studies are no more that examinations of faith rather than rummaging around the treasures of the Scriptures that carry Christ to us.

Martin Franzmann wrote about this in his book “Follow Me”.

The men of the New Testament show remarkably little interest in a definition of faith or an analysis of believing. They are much less interested than we are in examining their religious viscera for tokens and omens. When they think of faith, they think of it as relatedness to an object; and so, when the disciples came to write the record of Jesus, they did not write meditations on faith, though faith was central in their relationship to Him; they wrote Gospels.