As I spoke to this woman who was a new Christian, she kept pressing me “Carl, I hear you talking about maturity often. How can I become mature ?” We talked about the faithful adherence to the ordinary means of grace (Word, Prayer, Sacraments, Fellowship). But as we pressed on it became apparent that this was a person who had almost no discernment. So, I carefully encouraged this new saint to work on sharpening her discernment. She is an Israelite in whom there is no guile, so she asked “what IS discernment?”
Here’s the substance of our hour-long conversation:
I would define discernment as the ability to distinguish God’s revealed thoughts and ways from all others.
The NT Greek term for discernment is the word diakrino – which means to SEPARATE & make a distinction between. The key idea is that by separating the false from the true a person makes judgments.
The church, as an institution, increasingly accommodates secular values and methods, and seems unable to tell the difference between what Scripture teaches and what the world promotes. It INTEGRATES the wisdom of the world with the truth of Holy Scripture. Such integration is the exact opposite of discernment – which spots the values of the world & rejects them.
In 1999 I finally (19 years too late) bought my wife, Sandy, a ring at Zales in the Meadows Mall in Las Vegas. When I went to pick it up the jeweler was still working on the setting. Being a total neophyte concerning jewelry I began to ask questions. He educated me on “the 4 C’s” (Cut, Clarity , Color and Carat). He explained what made a diamond worth anything. He KNEW value. That was HIS business and he was good at it. He had DISCERNMENT. He could distinguish one diamond from another, the spurious from the genuine, and could spot flaws and imperfections not noticeable to most people.
Spiritual discernment is the Christian’s TRADE! When it comes to God’s Truth you’d think every believer would want to be as discerning as possible. But, it is an odd reality that many people who are careful & explicit & exact in every department of their lives are content (when it comes to spiritual realities) with vague uncertainties. I’ve met engineers who must be precise about all manner of details on the job, who cannot make the simplest distinctions in the Church and their Christian Life !
Spiritual discernment is far greater than the discernment the jeweler possesses. His skill can be learned by going to classes and thru hours of apprenticeships. Spiritual discernment can only be given ……BY THE SPIRIT . Listen to 1 Cor 2:12-14:
12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. 13 These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
Paul is asserting here that the Holy Spirit indwells the believer as the One who imparts the ability to ascertain the mind of God. The Holy Spirit does this by enabling the believer to successfully investigate the things of God in order to distinguish between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God. THIS is Spiritual Discernment. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in the process, enlightening the believer so that he is able to understand the Scriptures. That makes spiritual discernment radically different from ANY other kind of discernment.
So now let’s sharpen our initial definition of discernment: It is the DIVINELY GIVEN ability to distinguish God’s thoughts and ways from all others.
Discernment thrives in an atmosphere of absolutes, among people whose minds have been molded to think antithetically. Discernment means making necessary distinctions between false ideas and true ideas, righteous people & ungodly people. Discernment (i.e. making distinctions) is a Christlike and godly exercise. Jesus Himself discriminates and makes distinctions. On the last day Jesus WILL distinguish between the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46). Utilizing God’s impartial standard of justice, He WILL send the goats off to perdition. On that day He will NOT collapse into indiscriminate sentimentality. He WILL discriminate: the sheep will go to the right, the goats to the left.
We, in the church MUST be skilled at this. Elders must know the differences between wolves and the sheep (Acts 20)….and between false professors and true professors. In 1 John 4:1 the APOSTLE OF LOVE gives us an inspired imperative: Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world… As the passage continues, the test is applied to heretics in the early church who denied that Jesus Christ came in the flesh (verse 2-3). The test is doctrinal. There is no direction to consult your feelings about these persons or to expect any subjective promptings or “checks in your spirit”. It is their TEACHING which must be examined.
Following this, we must test the FRUIT of all teaching (Matthew 7:15-20). If the teaching SOUNDS vaguely right, but if it leads men away from Christ or it doesn’t take sin seriously…it must be rejected.
In 1 Thess 5:21, the same Apostle who penned 1 Cor 13 gives a command: “Test all things”. To test (or “prove”) means to test content as a metallurgist does, to determine genuiness from counterfeits. The idea is NOT so you’ll always be picking at little flaws, the passage clearly states the object of the test, it is so you may “Hold fast what is good” (i.e. RETAIN that which is true”). The formula for discernment is “Test all things (against the Word), retain the true, reject the unbiblical.”
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