What is Christian Discernment?

Question

For Christians God gives us discernment. So does it work?

Answer 1

I need some verses for this one *smile*!

At the most basic level, discernment is "the process of exhibiting keen insight and good judgment". By viewing what we are taught through the lens of His word, we are given discernment.

However, I've always thought of "discernment" as being a special gift...one not given to every Christian just as not every Christian is given a gift for healing or a gift for preaching. In this context, I always thought of Christian discernment as being the ability to, through observation of the words and behaviors, discern whether another Christian was being honest and truly following his or her faith. People I've known with the gift of this type of discernment can see through the surface to uncover hidden agendas.

As a child, this type of discernment was my strongest gift. I remember being about 10 years old when a new family joined the church my family attended. On the surface, they seemed like wonderful Christians, especially the wife. She immediately joined various women's bible studies and volunteered as a sunday school teacher. She was always outwardly professing her love for God and for people in the church and holding herself out as a model wife and mother. Everyone else, including my parents and esp. my mom, believed her but though I was a child, I sensed something just wasn't right.

I remember going to my mom a few months after she started teaching my sunday school class and expressing my concern that this woman was going to cause some major problems for everyone in the future. My mom (and later my dad) dismissed my concerns as childish...until a few years later when everything I suggested (and more) came true! This woman started creating dissension by gossiping from woman's group to woman's group...she told one woman that my mom had lied to her about something while telling my mom that the other woman had lied about my mom (she did this with several women). All the while, she was having an affair with another woman's husband and she eventually left her husband and abandoned her children to run away with him. The chaos she left behind nearly destroyed the church as people started taking sides and arguing about all sorts of issues that she had stired up in an effort to hide her true nature. This wasn't the first or the last time that I was able to "see" something that others weren't able to see...in fact, I was one of the few people in most of those situations that wasn't totally shocked by what eventually transpired because I had "discerned" from various clues that the facade and the real person just didn't match!

Answer 2

Discernment is simply the ability to discern good from evil. Or in some cases just to do the right thing. I should mention that it is necessary that reason and judgement are not ruled out in discernment. So often, people see only their own will in their or other peoples actions.

You personal ability to discern things is cultivated by reading the Word, understanding Tradition, and contact with God.

Tradition is that which has been passed down to us by the Saints. In the case of protestants, you replace all the literature from 2000 years with the pastor of the church and their possibly a beliefs handbook from the current denomination you belong to. That would contain your dogma and doctrine.

Answer 3

No. We humans are not infallible. 1 Corinthians 2:14: 14 But people who aren’t spiritual[a] can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means. Discernment means that you can tell the difference; for instance. Someone asks a "hateful" question. I have just discerned that it was hateful or malicious. Hosea 14:9 Let those who are wise understand these things.Let those with discernment listen carefully.The paths of the Lord are true and right,and righteous people live by walking in them.But in those paths sinners stumble and fall. dis·cern·ment (d-sûrnmnt, -zûrn-) n. The act or process of exhibiting keen insight and good judgment. Keenness of insight and judgment. And yes, Christians had discernment when it came to Al Gore and G.W. Bush. I'm so glad Al wasn't in office when 9/11 happened! Hope that helps!

Answer 4

How to describe this gift is for me hard if not impossible. Being able to see something that should not be but you might not always be able to put your finger on it. This is the best I can do in trying to tell you what is the gift of discernment. All saints have a certain degree of discernment. Your The Spirit of God within you will, and for lack of better words, show you whether something ought not to be.

Answer 5

Yes it does. I once got caught up in a religion that is considered a sect although i had no idea at the time. I felt as though God gave me the discernment to acknowledge this and so,i started reading just to make sure they were teaching the truth and, even though i loved this church and was baptized in the Spirit there, i still in time came to realize that it was not teaching exactly what the bible was and, with Gods help i was able to get my family out of there and into a wonderful church. To me, that was discernment that came from the Holy Sprit but, i had to follow up with the Sprit by taking the time to read what had discerned me in the first place. I hope this helps you and, God bless!

Answer 6

Usually referred to as spiritual discernment it is a gift of the Holy Spirit that enables us to know if something is from God or not.
Example - You meet someone and start to communicate with them and in your heart there is a connection with them. You have just discerned they are a believer. In short, The Spirit knows the Spirit.

Likewise if you have a "check" in your heart then God is saying proceed with caution.

Answer 7

Yes, if it is God given discernment then it cannot fail.
Everything that comes from God is perfect, lacking nothing.
It is when we mistake God's discernment for our own wisdom, do we make a mistake. This is why we need to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit at all times.

Answer 8

I use it all the time. It saves my keister in a million different ways. I could give you countless, COUNTLESS examples.

Answer 9

Jews were banned from entering BRITIAN for 300 years, until Oliver Cromwell allowed their return.

In the Middle Ages, lending money with interest - usury - was considered a sin and forbidden to Christians. But medieval monarchs found it useful that Jews were allowed to engage in the practice. The outsiders financed royal consumption, adventures and wars - and made themselves rich in the process. By 1168, the value of the personal property of the Jews (around £60,000) was regarded as a quarter of the entire wealth of England. And when Aaron of Lincoln died not long after - all property obtained by usury passing to the king on the death of the usurer - Henry II inherited the then massive sum of £15,000.

During Henry II's reign, Jews lived on good terms with their Christian neighbours. They helped fund a large number of the abbeys and monasteries and were allowed to take refuge there in times of commotion which came from time to time for religious or commercial reasons.

They needed the refuge. Clerics and Popes routinely stirred up ill-feeling against the Jews as the "killers of Christ". Ill will was fed by the Crusades, in which the Jews were as much a target of the righteous sword-wielders as were the infidel Saracens(Muslims). One of the most popular - and heinous - myths was that known by Jews as "the blood libel", which appears to have originated in England in an accusation against one William of Norwich in 1144.

It suggested that he and other Jews killed a young Christian boy to use his blood in the ritual preparation of unleavened bread for the Passover ritual - a claim which spread from England to France and Spain and throughout Europe in medieval times and which resurfaced in Nazi propaganda in the 20th century.

In 1218, in what became the precursor of anti-Jewish laws all over the world, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, made Jews wear a badge - an oblong white patch of two finger-lengths by four - to identify them. Barons, to whom Jews lent money, encouraged the mob responses to such claims, in which Jewish homes were ransacked and records of their debts were destroyed.

At the end of the 12th century, as part of an epidemic of religious fervour during preparations for Richard the Lionheart's Third Crusade against the Saracens, massacres of Jews were staged at Stamford fair, in Bury St Edmunds and, most notoriously, in York. In 1190 the city's Jews were given refuge in Clifford's Tower at York Castle only to be besieged by a mob demanding they convert to Christianity. Most of those inside committed suicide; those who surrendered were slaughtered. By 1290 the inevitable happened when Edward I - who had found an alternative source of finance in the Italian merchants known as the "pope's usurers" - banished the Jews from England.




http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article878482.ece



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Answer 10

like anything....we can have something, and not use it.