How To Spiritually Discern Something....

All of this is taken from a message that Beth Moore gave back in Jan of 2012. It was a series she did on Spiritual Discernment; and because I don't want to leave one word out, this is basically word-for-word what she said. So I cannot take any credit for what you are about to read. These are all Beth's words the Lord spoke through her. I simply am wanting to share them with you, because I think this message is of utmost importance--especially in today's world! 

The entire message can be found if you go to www.lifetoday.com (Wednesday's with Beth) and type in Spiritual Discernment. She opens with reading (1 Cor 2: 6-14), but everything from here on out is all Ms. Beth Moore. If you're like me...you may want to grab a journal of some kind and a pen and take notes. This is some good stuff! ;) 

Love and Blessings, 

Brittney 

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.  However, as it is written:

“What no eye has seen,
    what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
    the things God has prepared for those who love him—

 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."- (1 Cor 2:6-14)

How can I know if I am thinking in the spirit, if I'm thinking with the activated mind of Christ here or if I'm just rationalizing in a way that is not God at all. How can we determine is this of the flesh or is this of the spirit?

We have the ability through the spirit of Christ and the activated mind of Christ in us to know what we could not possibly know in human terms. 

So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take you through a four-point self checklist -- a four point self checklist. Here is what we're going to see. We're going to see -- we're going to have four questions.  I'm going to present to you four different questions and here's going to be the way it will work. Four no's is going to bring you one yes. If you can answer no to all four of these questions in any given situation... so if you're up against this in a week, if you're up against it in six months, if you're up against it in six years where you're trying to determine am I thinking in the spirit here or is this just my flesh? How can I determine is this discernment or is this just my own carnal thinking here? Is this God or is it just me? Then ask yourself, I'm going to ask myself these four questions.  And if I can answer all four with a no, I've got myself a yes. In other words, I'm onto something and it is probably God speaking and not just me making it up. Is that fair?

So here we go. Four questions and it is going to be four no's to make a yes. 

So the number one question is this:

 1) Am I a critical or suspicious person by nature? 

In other words, if you have sizable trust issues, then you can't always trust what your gut is telling you because you're already going to assume that no one can be trusted. Is that fair to say? Because we just want to be obvious here, that if we got such a big trust issue that we never trust anyone and we're suspicious of everyone, if we are suspicious of people all the time, we're going to be right some of the time. Does that make sense? So we're just going to just assume, you know what? I was right about so-and-so.  Well, you know what? You said it about all of them! 

Is that fair? So if I got trust issues and I can really speak to this one because boy, have I had some trust issues. Very early on in life had key people that were perpetrators of harm toward me instead of protection. So those boundaries were down very early on. I can't even remember the very first time that I was sexually abused, it began so early. So anybody that has a got a background like mine or so many other kind of betrayals, we begin to develop our belief system based on those experiences and we grow into people who don't trust anyone! So we've got to grow out of that.  We can't trust people to be God but we can trust some people to be really good fine people.

If you haven't come upon some people that are really good fine people you are not getting out enough because everybody in your life is not to be distrusted. Is that okay to say? Again, we've got to trust that they won't be God for us but there is some fine people out there. And if we have just a suspicious nature, then we're already going to have to question ourselves.

It doesn't mean -- let me say this carefully -- it doesn't mean we're necessarily wrong, it means we better go to the next question because we better settle that issue. We don't want to be distrusting people. We don't want to be suspicious of everybody we come in contact with. We don't want to get a new worship leader at our church and immediately go, "You know what? I can already tell this is not going to go well!"

Does anybody know anybody like that besides me? They assume from the very beginning. Somebody will be in the pulpit. I mean the first moment, "There is something wrong there. I just feel it in my spirit. Something is wrong." It is because they're critical and suspicious by nature -- just by nature.

Here's the obvious here, if we distrust everybody we're always going to be right about somebody. There is going to be somebody that is going to come along that is going give us credence to think, I know I'm right about this. Remember so-and-so. How many so-and-so's were we wrong about? Are we suspicious or critical by nature?

Number two is this:

2) Am I jealous or do I feel threatened? 

If I think I've got something inside of me and what we're going to call in our terminology here, if something inside of me is flagging; something in my spirit is jumping over a situation or an encounter or over a relationship or over a person, okay, I've had to ask myself the question, am I just distrusting them by nature?  Am I just critical by nature? I need a "no" to that. I need a "no." I've got to settle that with God. Is that just me? Is that just my own flesh?  But then I come to that second question, am I jealous or do I feel threatened by them? Because listen, any person we're jealous of, we will be very quick to find something wrong with if somehow we're threatened by them.  If they're somehow threatening our position or our place, somehow dislodging us from something we feel like we own, we are immediately going to go on the defensive and we're going to get a feeling in our stomach but it may not be God. Is that fair to say? Do I feel jealous or threatened?

I want to show you something, you're right here in First Corinthians two. Look down at First Corinthians chapter three and verse three. I love this! I love this wording here. This is still the Apostle Paul talking in our same context with spiritual discernment to the church of Corinth. He says this:

Are you not acting like mere men?  Now stay with me here because to me, this shows us the difference in being mere people or spirit-filled, spirit-discerning people.  Because the Word of God says we can just walk around like mere people, I can go around in my natural man, operate in my natural impulses, get irritated and annoyed easily, be suspicious of everybody. I can walk around as a mere person or I can walk around empowered by the Holy Spirit of the living God and get somewhere with some spiritual discernment.

What he is saying here is this, any time you and I -- remember we're trying to figure out with our checklist, is this me or is this God? Is this the flesh or is this the spirit? If jealousy is involved, it is always the flesh. Because it says that when jealousy is involved we're not in the spirit, we're acting as those who are worldly, we're acting like mere women or mere men. So we can already -- again, I want to say clearly, it doesn't mean you're always wrong. It doesn't mean I'm always wrong.

In other words, because I've got a feeling of jealousy, I gave you an example about feeling like Keith might have a situation at work where a woman had strong feelings toward him or those that were inappropriate for a married man. Yes, I also could have felt some jealousy with that had time gone on and had seen more than I saw. But I will tell you this, I might have still been right but I wouldn't have known if I was or not because any time I'm working out of the realm of jealousy or just because I feel threatened then I'm still operating in the flesh. So I can't trust my feeling because it could just be my own human instinct having a reaction to it. Am I jealous or do I feel threatened?  Because people we feel threatened by, we always want to be quick to judge. We're wanting to tear them down. We're wanting to pull them off of the pedestal in front of us because we feel like somehow they've threatened our position. So that’s suspect every time.

The third question is this: From this I mean from being right. 

3)Do I have anything selfish to gain from being right about what I feel? 

Now, it might be something literal. It might be something like, yes, I have something to gain. I have that promotion to gain if they don't get it. Yes, I have that position at church if they don't get it. Yes, I would have that opportunity if they don't get it. In other words, that's something very specific that we have selfishly to gain from being right about something about someone we think something is wrong with. So something selfish to gain.  But it can even be psychological satisfaction. In other words, it is just like, really, really thrills us to be right about something being wrong with someone. There is something psychological that we're gaining from it, something that gives us a sense of superiority.

If we can honestly say, "No, I have absolutely nothing selfish to gain from this; I don't even want to be right. I don't want to be right about this." Then we're usually getting on to something. We've got some questions to ask ourselves where we might come up with enough no's to make a yes because if we can determine I'm not critical or suspicious by nature toward this person. No, I don't feel jealous or threatened by them. No, I can't think of anything that I have to gain by being right about them being wrong.

So we continue on from that point asking ourselves a fourth question. I want to stop on this third one though and talk to you about it a second. Every single one of the spiritual gifts that God give us has a fleshly counterfeit to it. I don't care what it is.  You name a particular spiritual gift and you can come up with some way that that could be twisted off or perverted or counterfeited in the fleshly realm. Prophesy could be just making up stuff. Teaching could be used as a format to just give a personal opinion and draw attention to self. The gift, what we would call "the gift of faith" in its counterfeit could be gullibility and unstudied. All of them have some kind of counterfeit in the flesh.

There is discernment that is for everyone. God wants every single one of us to have discernment. But the Word of God also speaks of a gifting; that some people just have a gift of discernment. They are important in a body of believers. They're important in a church. I can't tell you, there is no estimating the cost where we don't have somebody operating in that body of believers that has the gift of discernment.  The gift of discernment, if that happens to be you, where you're kind of the one, you're one of the ones that gets a feel for stuff, and you're one of the ones that has some influence in your body of believers or in your household where you've got the gift of discernment, one of the ways it twists and counterfeits is in a critical spirit.

In other words, just because its been right enough and I say "it" by just talking about the gifting itself but then there is a superiority that goes with it; that there is something psychological that we get from being right.  And those are questions we have to answer constantly. Is it discernment or do I just have a critical spirit? Am I wanting somehow to gain a superior position by being right over this person being wrong?

 The fourth one is this:And this is a big one and we're going to sit on this one for a little while: 

4) Are my emotions clouding my discernment? 

Huge! Jot that one down. In other words, am I getting all emotionally entangled in this thing because that's what's going to make my spiritual discernment very suspect; what I'm calling that. What may not be that, may be that I have such strong feelings about it that I cannot tell what God is saying to me because I know what I want because I want this so badly or I do not want it so badly; it might be one or the other when we're looking at it and we're so emotionally charged where it is concerned.

Melissa was telling me something the other day. I was asking her how a friend of hers was and she said, "You know, Mom, she has a real high E.Q." It just killed me because I knew she was talking about. She's like "Not I.Q. but emotional quotient." She is just like very emotionally charged. Everything is big. Every feeling is huge. I'm kind of like that. When I feel it, I feel it! When we do, when we got our emotional entanglement in a situation, it can begin clouding what's true. It can overtake the sense of what God is telling us deep down in the underside of our hearts.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples and I want to take you to some scriptures to see it, but I want to throw this out to you when I'm trying to determine what is God and what is me, especially if I'm trying to determine if I'm supposed to take on this particular area of ministry or this particular area of work.

When I begin to hear about an opportunity, I think everything sounds great. If it is a God thing, then I love it! I love it! There are so many wonderful things we could be doing, so many wonderful things to give your time to. But you know you've got this one life God's given you and a calling in a specific way he wants you to serve him in this season.  And what he's taught me to do through the years is wait until that emotional charge begins to wane and see if I still feel like it is what I'm supposed to do. After I sleep on it for a couple of nights or maybe sleep on it for a couple of weeks, get some of the emotion out of it. That sounds like the funnest thing I've ever done in all my life. Wait 'til that goes away and see then if under the emotions is it still right? Does it still feel like it is the will of God? Then that's something to take notice of.