How to Train Your Spiritual Discernment to Grow

We explore the challenging question of discerning authentic Christians in a world where everyone from politicians to pastors claims the label. With limited visibility into others' private lives, appearances can be deceiving, making it difficult to know who to trust for spiritual guidance.

• Prayer is essential for spiritual discernment, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal truth even when painful
• Divine protection shields us from the worst consequences of our inevitable mistakes in judgment
• Seeking wise counsel provides multiple perspectives that complement our individual discernment
• Pay attention to gut feelings as potential spiritual insights when evaluating someone's character
• Ask practical questions: Would you trust this person with your children, finances, or spiritual growth?
• Living by these principles doesn't guarantee perfect judgment but minimizes trouble and helps us learn faster

Remember that discernment is a spiritual skill that develops over time with practice and divine assistance.

Transcript

The Challenge of Identifying Christians

Speaker 1 0:00

How do you really know if someone who's identifying themselves as a Christian is legit? Everybody's cashing in on the Christian label Mega church pastors, politicians. There's so many cases where we want to know what somebody's character is and what their value system is, but that's so easily manipulated because we just hear and see some portion of their lives. That's all we got, whether it's leadership in the church, in the community, on the political stage. Wouldn't it be nice to have an instruction manual on how to go about determining who's who? I'm going to give you some concrete, biblically-based tools for you to walk much more effectively in terms of your ability to judge people in wisdom, and then I'm going to wrap up the video by giving you a couple questions you can always ask yourself right off the top of your head. Jimmy James Johnson, guilt-free faith. If you're looking for guilt, you're in the wrong spot. We don't get down like that here. I'm going to get you feeling better about yourself and walking in victory today. Let's get into it. For most of us, if someone asks us if a person is a Christian, we'd have pretty strong feelings about them, particularly if they're a public figure. But can we really know if somebody's a Christian just by the words they're saying or what we hear reported about them. People can be Christians while still looking in every way as if they're not saved, right? The truth is, you really don't know, because whatever their relationship is with Christ is private. They can tell you something, or you can even see them go through a ritual or a service or a baptism, but really, how would you really know? You know what they say, they are, you can observe some of their actions, but you're at a loss because you end up trying to evaluate them by their deeds right, and the downfall of that is us. Being able to call ourselves Christians and avail ourselves of Christ's salvation, thankfully, isn't conditioned upon our actions. We will never be sinless.

Pray for Spiritual Discernment

Speaker 1 2:16

Depending on what day you catch me, I may look better or worse as a Christian. I might be really great at volunteering, but I treat people terribly in my family. Or I might be very generous, and then you find out behind the scenes that I'm actually very arrogant and that generosity is really just a front. Every day, we're faced with the challenge of how to discern who's who around us, whether those are people at work, people in the church, people in positions of leadership. It could be politicians, managers. It could be people in our friends group, in our family.

Speaker 1 2:57

When you're someone that's trying to live the Christian life, when you're trying to follow Christ or find Christ, you naturally have to try to evaluate who are the people that I want to associate with or who are the people that I want to take Christian advice from. I want to know who's who right. I don't want someone pulling the wool over my eyes. I don't want to be looking up to someone or trusting someone or following someone's leadership, thinking they're a Christian. I don't want to be taking Christian advice from somebody that's not a Christian.

Speaker 1 3:37

Obviously, christ doesn't want us to be deceived. He doesn't want us to be led astray. He says some pretty harsh things about people that do deliberately lead Christians astray that it would be better that there was a millstone tied around their neck. He knew there would be wolves in sheep's clothing, right? What tools does God give us? Number one thing we can do is we have to pray. We have to pray that the Holy Spirit guides us to open our eyes to the truth of the situation, even if that truth is painful, even if that truth is not something we want to believe. We know that when we invite Christ and the Holy Spirit into our hearts, that some amount of spiritual discernment comes along with that. We are praying for that type of discernment. God, please show me the truth.

Speaker 1 4:28

I know there are things that I don't see. There are things that I don't understand. There are people operating in underhanded ways. I know there are spirits plotting on my downfall. Is that a false prophet? Is the enemy trying to come against me through this person? As opposed to? Oh, I think God's reaching out to me. Through this person, I think you can feel Christ's spirit, love and patience coming through, and they've been a blessing to me. They've been a good friend, partner, parent or pastor. Because in all my imperfection and idiocy and ignorance and greed, lust or my desire to elevate or enjoy, support or promote this person, I'm going to make mistakes and I need your protection so that I don't get too hurt by those situations. We need Christ's arms around us as we walk through a fallen world. We need discernment and we need protection Because many times we will misjudge situations right. We misjudge people, leaders, business partners and spouses all the time, because whatever imperfections we have in our spiritual vision of who's who and what is what, we're going to make mistakes. So we're dependent upon God's protection to shield us from too much blowback, from putting our trust in the wrong people.

Speaker 1 5:59

Thirdly, we have wise counsel. The Bible talks a lot about seeking out wise counsel. In the modern age, using words like wisdom seem kind of outdated. You know who walks around praying for wisdom. The thing is we really need to pray for wisdom and oftentimes wisdom comes through those with whom we're breaking bread or surrounding ourselves with. So we have to pray that God surrounds us with people that will feed that wisdom into us, because they love us, because they want the best for us, and they're able to see something from another angle.

Speaker 1 6:36

It's wonderful and it's encouraged that we would have wise counselors around us. I mean, you're blessed If you have wise counselors around you and you're willing to take counsel, you're willing to be honest, you're willing to bring something to those people and allow them to share their wisdom. What the Spirit is guiding them to reveal to you, man, like that's worth its weight in gold. There's no position that's high enough, unless you're God himself. No one is above needing counsel. Even kings need wise counselors. When we rely just on ourselves in the flesh, as human beings, we're stumbling through the fog of could be anything Could be pain, it could be fear or sadness, it could be desperation. When we're stumbling through the fog, we need the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and the wisdom of wise counselors, and when you combine all these together, when you combine the Holy Spirit giving you the power of discernment, giving you the protection from your own mistakes, and wise counselors around you, that's a really powerful cocktail for walking through the world much more effectively and much more wisely. And all of those are biblical. Those are all things that we're encouraged to do and that are modeled for us.

Speaker 1 7:59

Let's wrap it up with this. Now that you have those tools, what are some specific questions you can ask yourself when, say, you meet somebody who's claiming to be a Christian? One question is how do you feel when you're around that person? People will say well, you can't just go by your feelings and you can be swayed. You could be conned. Yes, you can be. As we all know, our gut feelings aren't to be ignored, and I would say that the gut feeling may be our imperfect understanding of what God or the Holy Spirit is trying to reveal to us. What seems dangerous and frequently leads destruction is when we identify people as good fellow Christians just because they said so, and yet the alarm bells are going off when we hear them talk or when we're around them or we see how they treat people.

Speaker 1 8:51

What's another question we can ask ourselves in this evaluation process Is this the type of person I would trust myself to? Now, granted, usually in life you don't just have to meet someone on the spot and determine whether you'll trust your life to them. You don't just meet someone and give them your life savings or jump off a cliff because they promised they were going to throw you a lifeline, but just asking yourself the simple question like do I trust this person? What would I trust this person with? Would you trust them as a business partner? Would you trust them as a deacon? Would you trust them as a deacon? Would you trust them as any type of spiritual counselor? Would you trust your children with them? Would you recommend them to your friends?

Living by Principles Minimizes Trouble

Speaker 1 9:35

We have that saying. I don't trust them farther than I can throw them. That's not very far, but as we evaluate somebody, we tend to form an opinion about whether they're trustworthy or not. Those are just two questions. You can't tuck away in your pocket to begin that consideration Now you're walking around much more aware, your eyes are open because, on the human and the spiritual level, you're really tuned in, you're vigilant. And again, will that prevent you from being swindled, cheated on, fooled, being taken for a ride? No, not 100%, it won't. But I can promise you this people that live according to these principles avoid a lot of trouble. Principles avoid a lot of trouble and when they run into trouble, people that live by these principles minimize the impact, the damage of that trouble and they tend to learn from it and not repeat running into that same trouble.