What is discernment?

September 1-7, 2024 | Always Peachy Devotionals | Discernment Week 1

How can you tell whether someone is telling you the truth or not?

It’s an important question to ask ourselves, especially as our culture spirals deeper and deeper into misguided leadership. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a spiritual leadership issue, a political leadership issue, or even an economic or financial leadership issue—our world is in big trouble. And if we don’t want to get caught up in the spiral, we need to be able to identify what is true and what is false in every area of life.

But it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers or flipping a switch. You have to know the truth before you can identify it, and at the moment it feels like what is true is concealed or at least difficult to access.

Knowing the truth takes time, practice, consideration, evaluation, and careful study. It doesn’t just come to you like something magical or mystical. What is true can be trusted. When something is true, you can put your whole weight on it.

If you try to sit on a broken chair, it’s going to dump you over onto the group every time. But if you aren’t paying attention, you might not know the chair is broken before you sit in it. You have to look. You have to question. You have to examine.

If you’ve ever wondered what the word “discernment” means, that’s it. Examination. Investigation. The process of careful study so that you can make a judgment on what is true and what isn’t.

Discernment has many forms, but we need all of them if we are to live the best life we can as followers of Jesus. Frankly, many believers don’t have enough discernment, either because we aren’t listening to the Holy Spirit’s leading or we are putting our faith in teachers or trends that go against God’s Word (and we don’t know God’s Word well enough to see the difference).

Knowing what is true and choosing to act on it is the responsibility of every Christ-follower. God has made it possible for each and every one of us to know what is true, but He doesn’t download the truth into us automatically. It’s up to us to learn it by spending time with Him, by reading the Bible, by implementing what it says in our daily lives.

And once we’ve done that, suddenly the truth will be obvious. The wrongness of the world will stand out in neon in your perspective, and you will wonder why no one has any common sense anymore.

But gaining discernment doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process, like sanctification, so that’s what we are going to be talking about throughout the month of September—how to gain discernment so that we can follow Jesus with wisdom.

This week, we’re going to start by defining what discernment is and what it looks like, because it takes many forms.

• Monday - Spiritual Discernment (1 Corinthians 12:10)

• Tuesday - Practical Discernment (Proverbs 4:7)

• Wednesday - Worldly Discernment (Proverbs 18:15)

• Thursday - Faith and Discernment (Psalm 37:23-24)

• Friday - God’s Word and Discernment (Proverbs 3:5-6)

I’m really excited to dig into this topic. The Bible is loaded with statements about having wisdom and getting wisdom, and all of that boils down to implementing discernment in our lives. It’s not impossible, but it does take effort.

But there is something that will make learning discernment easier, and that is knowing Jesus. If you know Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit, and that’s honestly the key to understanding what God expects from you.

Have you ever noticed that people who don’t know Jesus don’t really get you? They don’t understand why you live the way you live, or they don’t understand why faith matters so much to you. That’s not uncommon. That’s normal, because they haven’t experienced spiritual renewal.

How do we know this? Well, we know because that’s what God has explained to us, and that’s the verse we’re going to memorize this week, 1 Corinthians 2:14.

The Holy Spirit isn’t just our Advocate and Comforter, He’s our teacher too. He helps us understand the things of God on a level that those who don’t know Him can’t grasp. If someone who doesn’t know Jesus tries to read the Bible, it may not even make sense to them. They might be able to read the words, but putting it into practice won’t work because they don’t understand. It sounds foolish to them.

But not to us.

But that’s how God has always liked to work. He uses the weak against the strong. He uses the foolish against the “wise” of the world. He uses the underdogs.

I’m excited to learn more about who God is and how He has equipped us to understand what really matters in our lives.

Praying for you guys this week.

Amy

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