Discernment Part 2 🤍🦋

Healing changes what you can tolerate.

Things you once ignored start to feel heavy. Conversations you once entertained start to feel draining. Patterns you once accepted start to feel misaligned. That’s not you becoming difficult. That’s discernment.

God will often increase your awareness before He changes your environment. Pay attention to what your spirit is recognizing. It may be protecting the healing He’s doing in you.

Day 18— Discernment 🤍

#HealingJourney

#ChristianHealing

#FaithTok

#Discernment

#SpiritualGrowth

#InnerHealing

#TraumaHealing

#SelfAwareness

#MentalHealthMatters

#PersonalGrowth

#WholenessJourney

#BeautifulMe

#HealingWithGod

#PurposeDrivenLife

#40DaysToWholeness

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Heavenly Father, we come before your presence this morning with thanksgiving in our hearts, and our lips, oh God, are filled with praise, Daddy. Thank you, thank you, oh God, for keeping us. Thank you, oh God, for who you are. You are a faithful father, friend. Thank you for your love. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for your mercies. Thank you for your grace. Your grace that has lifted us, mighty God. Hallelujah. There were so many moments, oh God, along the weekend, or even in the week that has just passed, when so many of us may have felt like giving up, may have felt like throwing in the towel, mighty God. But I want to thank you this morning, Abba Father, for giving us the strength and the courage and the boldness, mighty God. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for wrapping us in your arms, for loving on us. Father, this morning we come before you with open hearts to the season, oh God, that you are ushering us into. Your word declares that we should enlarge the place of our tent, stretch our curtains wide, do not hold back. And so today, God, we align ourselves with your invitation, mighty God, to expand. Lord, we surrender every mindset of limitations in the name of Jesus. We release the fears that have caused us to shrink back. Where disappointment once made us cautious, God, fill us with renewed courage and faith. Father, enlarge our vision so we can see beyond what we have experienced before. Stretch our capacity to carry the blessings, responsibilities, and opportunities that you are releasing. Father, strengthen the foundations of our lives so that when expansion comes, we will stand firmly rooted in you. God, we pray that every barrenness will give way to fruitfulness. Where there has been delay, Father, release divine acceleration. Where there has been discouragement, Daddy, we ask you to release hope. Lord, remove every barrier that has restricted growth, whether internal or external. Heal the wounds that have limited our confidence and replace them with the assurance of your promises. Teach us, God, to trust you and not only to trust you, God, but to also trust your timing and to prepare for what you are bringing. Help us, oh God, to expand not out of ambition but out of obedience to your calling. May our lives grow in ways that bring glory to you and blessing to others. Let the increase you bring extend beyond our personal lives and touch families and communities and generations. Today we declare that the season of shrinking has ended, a season of expansion has begun, and we receive your promise that we will spread out to the right and to the left, and that the legacy you establish through us will bring life and restoration in Jesus' name. I pray, hallelujah, amen. Good morning, good morning, good morning, family. How are you doing? I hope you had an amazing weekend. Uh, God is so good. Yesterday I went to church, and the song that this amazing woman of God she sang was a song that says, You are too faithful to fail me. Hallelujah! You're too loving to leave me. When I felt so broken, when I felt so unloved, when I felt like giving up, but God, through his faithfulness, has kept me, raised me up, hallelujah, loved on me. And yesterday I shared on my gratitude check on TikTok, and I was just, you know, saying to persons who maybe you're feeling so unloved and unwanted, you might be feeling discarded and unworthy. And I was saying to them, just ask the Holy Spirit to love on you. He is such a gentleman, he's not gonna force himself on you, but just simply ask him. I've done it. I say, Holy Spirit, just love on me, just hold me, and like I will say to him, like, I seriously want to feel you, I seriously want to feel you, just hugging on me and just loving me, and he does. So, this morning, as you wake up, if you're in a place of lodibar, this is your wake-up call to get out of that place. Just know that God is faithful, He is true, He's a loving God, and He is there for you. He He never leaves you, He never seek He never leaves you nor forsake you, and just ask the Holy Spirit. I ask the Holy Spirit, even in this moment, to just wrap you in his loving arms and allow you to feel his warmth, to feel his love, and I speak life even now into you, into every area of your life right now where you feel dead. I speak life in the name of Jesus. Hallelujah, amen. Today we continue on our 40-day journey of sanctification to wholeness, and we continue on the topic of discernment, learning to recognize what aligns with your healing. We touched briefly on it the other day, and I'll just do a recap. So, we talked about something that happens when healing begins, your awareness changes, things that once felt normal begin to feel different. Conversations that once seemed harmless may now feel draining, environments that once felt familiar may now feel heavy. Patterns you once tolerated may now feel misaligned with the person you are becoming, and many people sometimes they get confused when this happens and they start asking themselves, Why does this bother me now? Why does this feel uncomfortable now? Why can't I just ignore this like I used to? But the truth is, nothing is wrong with you, you are becoming aware. I shared even about my dressing, how God has totally changed the way how I carry myself, how I dress, and that is awareness, healing sharpens your internal compass, and as God renews your mind, purifies your heart, and restores your identity, your sensitivity to what nurtures your growth, increases what once felt normal, may have only felt felt normal because you were accustomed to it, because you were living in survival mode, what you had to become to survive because of the trauma that you've experienced. But as healing happens, your spirit begins to recognize what aligns with peace and what quietly disrupts it, and that awareness is called discernment. Discernment is the ability to recognize what is healthy for your spirit, your mind, and your growth. It helps you to identify what nurtures healing and what slowly undermines it. It's a it it discernment is not about becoming critical of everything, and I always pray and I ask the Lord to heighten my spirit of discernment because I want to be able to recognize times and seasons, right? Sometimes discernment shows up as peace, right? So discernment is becoming clear about what aligns with who you are becoming. Sometimes it shows up as a quiet discomfort you can't explain. Sometimes it shows up as a realization that something you once accepted is no longer sustainable. And I've prayed and I've asked God to change my appetite as it relates to so many things, and I see where He has done so. Discernment helps you recognize all of these signals. Hallelujah. So I want to journey with you now, or want you to journey with me and the Holy Spirit as we look at the biblical side of um discernment. So Hebrews 5, verse 14 says, but solid food is for the mature who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. This scripture speaks directly to spiritual maturity and discernment. The writer of Hebrews is addressing believers who had been following Christ for some time, yet many were still functioning spiritually as infants. And so he used the metaphor milk and solid food. Milk represents basic spiritual understanding, you know, the foundational teachings of faith, and then solid food represents deeper spiritual maturity, so the ability to apply wisdom and discernment in real life situation, spiritual maturity develops discernment. The Bible says the said verse by constant use they have trained themselves. So discernment does not appear automatically, it develops through patience and experience, and as believers grow in their relationship with God, they begin to recognize what aligns with truth and what does not. And again, this did not just happen overnight. There was a point in time when yeah, I was the infant sucking the milk, but now I have upgraded, still upgrading. I haven't arrived, you know, but I'm eating solid food now, and so I'm grateful for my relationship with the Holy Spirit where I can have communication and I can express my weakness. I my brain, I always say to God, I said, Listen, God, my head tough in Jamaican language terms, my head tough, right? So you have to break down the thing so I can understand the thing, right? So uh, and it's it it's it's over time, and it's through practice and experience, and I've seen where my discernment, God is sharpening my discernment, and I'm so grateful as believers grow again in relationship with God, you realize and you recognize that you begin to rec realize what aligns with truth and what does not, and this happens, like I said, it doesn't happen overnight, you have to put in the work, right? There's a popular saying that we do our part and God does the rest, so it means then that you have to be studying the scripture, you have to be walking with the Holy Spirit, activate the Holy Spirit. I mean, the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, but if you don't communicate with him, if you don't talk to him, that's why he's there you know, he wants to talk to us, he wants to commune with us. So in the mornings when I wake up, I say, Good morning, Holy Spirit. I acknowledge your sweet, awesome presence. Invite the Holy Spirit, come now, Holy Spirit. You are welcome in this place. Invite, activate the Holy Spirit, and then learning from past experience, you take the lessons from your past experiences, so we're not saying to discard your past or forget about your past, we're saying don't live in the past, but learn from the experience. You will mess up, you will make mistakes. But the important thing is that we are learning from these experiences and these mistakes, and then we're applying wisdom in daily decisions. And I, like Solomon, I ask God for wisdom. Hallelujah. So over time, when we are employing these spiritual disciplines, we realize that our spiritual senses become sharper, just like physical senses can be trained, the spiritual life develops sensitivity through consistent use. You can't just um it's not all about showing up to church on Sundays. You have to be actively involved in your spiritual growth seven days per week, and that is why the Bible tells us that the pray without ceasing, and he's not saying that we should spend time and pray these long, elaborate prayers. He just means as you go throughout your day, God, I'm grateful, Daddy. I love you, Father. Um, I ask for guidance and protection as I go to work. You're going in your office, Father. Go before me, seal my office, daddy. Cover the children. You're going in your car in the midday, and you know, we say our midday prayer, Lord, thank you for this food that we're about to eat. Make it nourishment to our bodies, and you talk with the Holy Spirit and you say, Holy Spirit, listen, let me tell you something, Lord. Have mercy. You know, I want you to help me through this. You know, Holy Spirit, I thought about this. Uh, am I on the right track? You invite him in your day, pray without ceasing, communicating. You turn on some worship music when you go in your car, when you come home, you turn on your worship music, or you turn on the scripture, and just just keep keep just keep listening, keep activating, right? And you will realize over time how much you have grown. Sometimes I think about it and I'm like, when did this happen? When did they when did all of this happen? Discernment goes beyond obvious sin. Many people think discernment is only about recognizing clear, right, and wrong, but spiritual maturity goes deeper. Discernment helps us recognize what is helpful versus what is harmful, what nurtures growth versus what quietly disrupts it, what aligns with God's purpose versus what distracts us from it, and sometimes the challenge is not choosing between good and evil, sometimes it's choosing between what is acceptable and what is wise. Mature believers learn to recognize these subtle differences, and you know how sometimes, even when we ask God for things, or we're we we ask for miracles, or we're we're asking God to move, or even sometimes persons will say, I can't hear God's voice. God is very subtle, you know, he's not brawling and loud, I mean him going with himself sometimes, you know, because we serve a very big God, so like when he wants to show up, you know, in our lives, him show up and him going with himself, but you know, he he shows up in very subtle ways, even as it relates to discernment and the way he answers our prayers, even the way he speaks to us, it's this still small voice, right? And as mature believers, as we grow in Christ, then we're able to recognize these subtle differences, and trust me, sometimes it's it's oh my god, sometimes I'm processing something, and it's like something just pop up, it it's the unexpected things and the unexpected ways, and in that moment, I'm like, Okay, god, I see you like a seal right over there, and it is so exciting when you get to that place where when you can recognize these social differences, right? When a person develops discernment, you begin to evaluate the influences around you more clearly, you become aware of how certain environments affect your spirit, you recognize when certain conversations or habits weaken your focus, and you learn to choose what strengthens your faith and supports your healing. Discernment is a protective tool, it helps to guard your heart and maintain spiritual health, right? And discernment is a sign of growth. Hebrews 5 verse 14 shows that discernment is not just knowledge, it is evidence of maturity. Immaturity reacts without reflection, but maturity pauses and elevates and responds wisely. You know, they have this popular one again where uh it's a meme, I think, or some quote that says, you know, that moment when you start replying to the um the message, the text message, or the email, and the Holy Spirit have you delete all of it, that is maturity. So you pause before you respond and you evaluate, and sometimes you don't even respond at all. And as believers, when we begin to recognize these patterns, sometimes like it's just so amazing. Some of these patterns that once went on went unnoticed, you start recognizing them, you develop that awareness that and got guided by scripture and the Holy Spirit, and that's why we need to activate the Holy Spirit. He is teacher, he is helper, he is comforter, he is teacher, he is friend. Listen, listen, we are equipped, hallelujah. And when we're aware, this awareness helps us to make choices that supports our continued transformation. So on the journey toward wholeness, discernment is essential. Healing changes our perspective, it helps us to recognize what aligns with the person God is shaping us to be or to become. And so discernment is critical, it's important because it allows us to protect our peace, to choose environments that nurture our growth, to recognize patterns that reopen old wounds. And as maturity grows, so does the ability to distinguish what leads towards life and what leads away from it. And as Hebrew 5 verse 14 reminds us, that this ability is part of spiritual development, and it is acquired through consistent practice and dependence on God. And in so doing, our discernment will become stronger, and that discernment will help to guide us towards a life that reflects the wholeness that daddy is producing in our lives. Hallelujah. My God, God is good. I'm learning. I don't know about you, but I am learning. And so I want to thank you for tuning in today. And I pray again that you will have an amazing week in the Lord. Just remember to activate the Holy Spirit, have conversation with him as you go throughout the day. All right? Hallelujah. Father, we thank you for increasing our awareness. And we ask you to help us to recognize what aligns with the healing you're producing in our lives. Teach us, God, to listen to the wisdom you place in our heart and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Give us the courage to follow discernment even when it requires change. Continue making us whole in Jesus' name. Amen. Just remember that healing brings awareness, and awareness leads to discernment, and discernment protects the wholeness God is building in you. Tomorrow we continue learning how to walk confidently in life, in the life God is restoring. Of course, I'm your host Monique, wishing you an amazing day. Just remember that I love you, but God loves you even more.