Spiritual Discernment
Who could have imagined, ten years ago, the speed of the moral and social meltdown taking place within our nation today? How could evil have become good and good, evil,
so quickly and continue to accelerate toward total confusion?
It is a spiritual problem of the greatest magnitude that fuels the fire. The Apostle Paul wrote, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting” (Romans 1:28). As the knowledge of God and therefore the reverence of God increasingly disappears, chaos increases.
Apart from God, sound mindedness- knowing the difference between good and evil- disappears. ““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” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Physical discernment does not disappear, but spiritual discernment does. Without the holy spirit, we can discern whether it is hot or cold outside and if we are hungry or not, but it does not enter the spiritual realm.
Spiritual discernment enables us to discern between the holy and the unholy and between the clean and the unclean. It is the element that is needed to resist the magnetic pull of the evil around us. We cannot afford for a second to be naïve about the danger of dropping our spiritual guard.
We are in a spiritual war right now, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3–5). Apart from God, anything that can be thought about can become a stronghold to draw us into the spiritual meltdown around us. Unchecked spiritual impulses are the fuel feeding the fire.
We need to be spiritually discerning and ask ourself, “Does what I’m thinking add fuel to the fire or put it out?”
Marshall Stiver
