I want to open with a question. How many of you regret some of your past decisions? If we are honest with ourselves, we have all made decisions that we have come to regret even on a daily basis, whether it is the restaurant we choose, the menu item that we pick. It could be something as major as a job we pick, a college, or that sort of thing. The reality is that every single day we are confronted with a myriad of choices that we have to evaluate to determine which choice is best. That is what we are talking about when we talk about this idea of discernment: evaluating different choices to determine what is best. Fortunately, for most of us, the choices we make are not always life-or-death situations. If we do choose the wrong restaurant, within 24 hours we probably will have forgotten about it. But occasionally what happens sometimes is we hit a major fork in the road where we have to make a major choice in a given situation. Maybe we have to choose a mate or leave a mate or choose a job or decide whether or not we are going to leave and move across the country or something like that. It is during those times where this practice of discernment really comes in. Unfortunately, for the most part, we haven’t been trained on how to sharpen our skills of discernment. This is especially true for the younger generation. In defense of the younger generation, they have not really developed the life experience to always make the best decisions. I think I have said it before that between the ages of 17 and 25, I made the bulk of my bad decisions in life. I suspect that if I were to talk to some of you, you might say something very similar. We know that making poor choices in life has little to do with age or other demographics. No one is immune from poor choices in any given day or any given life. But the good news is that through Jesus Christ we know that the poor choices of our past can be redeemed by God. Even so, we as Christians are supposed to strive to be different. We are supposed to strive to make good choices. We are to strive to practice discernment.
Before I go on, keep in mind when I speak of discernment, I am not speaking of discernment the way the world might speak of discernment. They might think it is about evaluating the pros and cons of different decisions, looking at the history, and trying to determine what is the right choice to make in any given situation. It is kind of like that, but really what we are talking about is spiritual discernment. It is the ability to make choices in life that are in line with the will of God. We have been going through this series called Philippians. It is about a nine-week series. Last week, we opened up and had four people read through the entire book of Philippians. Today, we are going to focus on three passages, chapter 1:9-11. As we mentioned last week, the book of Philippians is actually a letter written by the pastor named Paul to the church that he planted in Philippi. As we mentioned last week, the letter to the Philippians is a little bit different than some of his other letters. A little bit less sarcastic. A little bit less negative. It really is what we would consider a letter of friendship. In this particular letter, Paul seems to be encouraging the people to stay strong in their faith in the midst of the pressures they are feeling around them. He gives them advice on how to handle situations between different members. But he also uses it as an opportunity, as we saw in these original verses, to pray for his people. Passage 9 and 10 go on to say “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.” Another question: did anybody pray for anybody this week? Good. Did anybody pray this prayer for anybody? This is kind of a strange prayer. To pray that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best. I haven’t prayed that prayer I don’t think ever. But this is a prayer of Paul. When we read through the letter of Philippians, it is easy to skip over this passage and just see it as some sort of formality or nicety that Paul just inserts in his letters. A nice prayer.
But to do that is really to miss out on really what I would say is the secret of learning to make choices that are in line with the very will of God. Paul just points out some very good things here. He really emphasizes a few things. First, he emphasizes that our love should abound and abound more and more. We are talking about the loving of God through Jesus Christ and through the power of the Spirit. Our love should not ever become stagnant. We should never get to a place where we feel like I have loved God enough and now I am going to put it in cruise control. I am not going to love any more. We know that would be silly because it would be like telling our spouse that I love you but I really hit my capacity to love you. I can’t love you anymore. We know it is silly. It is faulty thinking. If you have ever had an experience of losing a loved one or having more than one child, you know that God has given us this phenomenal capacity to love. We can never stop loving. There is always sufficient love. So he wants us to know that our love should not be stagnant. Our love should continue to abound and abound and really to abound more and more and then he goes on to say in knowledge. To abound more and more in knowledge. This is where it gets a little bit difficult to understand what he is talking about. We don’t usually connect the word love and the word knowledge together, so it is difficult to understand unless we understand that Paul is not talking about head knowledge. He is not talking about intellectual knowledge. What he is talking about is experiential knowledge. That is a different kind of knowledge. The experiential knowledge that you get by spending time with someone. When we think about knowledge, there are at least two types. There is the head knowledge that you get through reading books and attending seminars and that type of thing. There is also the experiential knowledge that comes by spending time with somebody or in a situation.
As a side note, when I graduated from college back in the 80s, I graduated with a business degree. I had a pretty good GPA. I got out and actually passed the CPA exam. But the first job I found myself on, I was clueless. I didn’t know anything because all I did was have a bunch of head knowledge. I didn’t have the practical experience of working for a company. Likewise, about 11 years ago, I also graduated from seminary. I had a lot of book knowledge and arrived here and was clueless. I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, there was a lot of grace at that time and they worked with me. Over time, I began to have that experiential knowledge. What Paul is talking about here is not head knowledge but experiential knowledge. Then he goes on and says not only more and more knowledge, but he says depth of insight. Here again what I read this to mean is he is talking about knowledge applied to a situation in the right way. He is talking about insight into a situation. He is trying to get the people to have the sight of God. To be able to see things as God sees them. To see a person, to see a situation as God would see it. We know that Jesus had this insight. He had this discernment. There are several places in the gospel where we could bring up examples. The one that came to mind was you might recall when Jesus was telling his disciples that he was about to be arrested and crucified by the chief priest and the Pharisees. Peter stood up, challenged Jesus, and said no way. I am never going to let this happen to you. What did Jesus do? He turned to Peter and said “Get behind me, Satan!” It’s like whoa, what happened here? “Get behind me, Satan! Because you do not have the things of God in mind, but rather you have the things of men.” In other words, you have not God’s agenda in mind, but you have man’s agenda in mind. Jesus was able to discern that situation and make a right call about it.
Another incident came to mind. You might recall in Acts chapter 16 when they first arrived in the city of Philippi, Paul and his buddy Silas decided to go out on the road and do some evangelism. They met up with this slave girl who happened to be a fortune teller. She followed them around all through the town. She started saying things. She kept repeating over and over “These men are men of the Most High God, and they are telling you how to be saved.” You would think they would have liked that because really it sounded like she was promoting their cause. But Paul knew differently. He knew her heart. He knew that she had within her an evil spirit. So he commanded the spirit to get out of her and to stop. He did that because he knew that what she was saying, even though it was true, it was coming from the wrong spirit. It was actually a distraction to their cause. So again we see that Jesus had the gift of discernment. Paul had the gift of discernment. And we see in this letter to the Philippians that Paul’s desire is that the whole congregation would have the ability to discern. They needed that discernment. The first century church was a rough place to be. It was a risky place to be. They were always facing all sorts of obstacles. They were facing obstacles from the Jewish people because the Jewish people were trying to get them to go back to their old legalistic ways, but being a Roman colony, they were also getting harassed by the pagan worshippers or the emperor worshippers. They were really struggling with how to figure out what is going on here. Who should I listen to? Who should I not? So Paul’s prayer is that they would have this knowledge and depth of insight so that they would be able to discern what is best and be pure and blameless into the day of Christ.
Although our culture is different and obviously we live in a different century, we all need this gift of discernment probably more than ever in today’s world. We need to have that experiential knowledge of God. We need to have that depth of insight. That coupled with would give us the ability to discern what is right in a given situation. Some of you say I believe it but what does it look like in practice? The reality is when I thought about it, it is not as difficult as it seems. The analogy I give is some of you know that Debbie and I met on the internet. We were like the pioneers of internet dating. Did anybody ever do internet dating? When you first go on there you have to fill out a profile. You have to tell a little bit about yourself. Being a person who likes to share a lot of things, I dumped a whole lot of information on there. Debbie put three lines. Whatever the case, you put that information there for one reason. So the other person gets to know you a little bit better. You are reading every single line and word. You are looking at every picture. You are doing it because they are trying to give you an opportunity to know the person and know a little bit of information about the person. But as much as you study that profile, you don’t really know the person until you meet the person and until you spend some time with the person. I ended up spending a summer up in Cleveland with Debbie just so I would get to know her and she would get to know me. We got to know each other pretty well; the good, the bad, and the ugly. But we did really get to know each other in a way that was different than what we saw just on the profile.
Getting to know God is very similar to that. You know what God’s profile looks like? It is the Bible. That is really God’s profile. As you read through the Bible you are creating perceptions in your mind about God based on the experiences, based on the history, based on what the person says, and based on what the person does. You are creating this profile in your head of God, but you never really get to know God until you learn to experience God. That is the first step in spiritual discernment. Even though it is the first step, like many first steps it is the most difficult step because what it requires is for you to slow down your life enough where you begin to notice where God is working in your life and in the world. I would say that most of us believe that God is at work in the world. In fact, if a non-Christian would ask you is God still alive? Is he still at work in the world? I would imagine most of us would say yes. Amen. He is working all over the place. What if they said prove it? Give me some concrete examples. Show me how God is alive in this ISIS situation. Show me how God is alive in all this racial tension that is going on. Show me how God is alive in all this weather weirdness and economy up and down and all this kind of stuff. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we would be hard pressed to do it. It would be very difficult for us to give very practical examples of how God is present in the world. It really goes back to again we don’t take the time to get to know him on an experiential level. I suspect that a good number of you get up in the morning, do your quiet time, read a devotional, maybe the Daily Bread, read a few scriptures, and you are off. You might go through the entire day without giving God another thought. In some cases, people can go entire weeks without giving it another thought. Imagine if I was at home and got up in the morning and greeted Debbie and said good morning, how are you doing. And then I didn’t speak to her, I didn’t consider her, I didn’t think about her for 24 hours until the next morning. How do you think that would go over? Or think about if I didn’t think about her or talk to her for weeks? But don’t many of us do the same thing? So we never really get to know God at all. We know him by his profile but we don’t know him experiential.
So really the requirement of trying to first practice discernment is to first practice noticing God. That is actually what some people call a spiritual discipline. The practice of noticing God. It sounds so easy but it is probably one of the most difficult disciplines in the world because it forces you to slow down and try to see God in your day-to-day activities. There is a great little prayer. I call it the prayer of looking backwards that you can do to see how well you are doing in this area. The first part of the morning or late at night when you are lying in bed, you can go through this exercise. It is really simple. Just mentally go through the past 24 hours and see if you can identify all the places where God may have shown up or at least tried to show up. In order to do this, you have to first slow down your life enough to even pay attention to life. As boring as some of you may think your lives are, they are still full of all sorts of activities throughout the week. What you do in this prayer of looking back is you go through and examine and mentally think about all the things that you experience in a day from the moment you got up. The emails you received. The emails you sent. The phone calls you may have made. The people and places. The friends and family that you interacted with. The customers that you interacted with. The random strangers that you interacted with throughout the day. The situations that happened at work or home or the community. Paying attention to what is going on outside in creation or even what is going on in the news. When you train your mind to be able to pay attention to life, you actually can begin to see where God may be working. If you find yourself stumped in this activity as far as seeing where God may be working, just simply think about the places where you were expected to give by God some sort of a kingdom response. In other words, you were supposed to respond in alignment with one of the values that you should know in the Bible. Whether it is compassion, humility, service, and those types of things. What you will find is God will use those interactions through the day to prune those parts of you that don’t look like Jesus. You go through those mentally. You see the places. I have had a problem with busyness and I can tell that in this situation right here God was trying to teach me to slow down and experience quiet or Sabbath or solitude. Or I have a problem with making sure everybody knows when I am serving somebody else or doing something nice. Maybe this was a situation where he was saying why don’t you just experience the discipline of secrecy. Maybe you need to learn to do service in secret. Maybe you have an issue of pride and he is trying to teach you humility through the place that he showed up during the day. As you practice this discipline of noticing, what you find is that the same things keep being repeated. You may get them wrong again but over time what happens is you get pretty good at it or you get better at it. Through those responses that you give, you begin to actually know the will of God in all those little bitty things that come out during the day. When you experience those big forks in the road, those big decisions in life, they don’t look as big anymore because basically you already understand the will of God. You are already responding in the way that God would expect you to respond. You are responding in accordance with his kingdom values. This seems impossible, but it is really not. It is really again just attempting to have ongoing interaction with God and then responding in obedience.
There was a guy named Frank Laubach who wrote this little book. He journaled his desire to be in God’s presence 24 hours a day. He writes “My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to his will to make this hour gloriously rich. This seems to be all I need to think about.” That was his goal. We talked about your presence. We sang a song, which was a good song that I didn’t even know Debbie was going to pick it. But we talked about wanting to be in God’s presence. Frank Laubach wanted that. He wanted it every hour of the day. Brother Lawrence, if you are familiar with The Practice of the Presence of God, it is the same thing. These are people that did the best they could do to be in the continued presence of God. They did it through constant conversation throughout the day. Not just in the morning, not just in the evening, but throughout the day. When they did that, as he would say here, you begin to respond perfectly. You get better at responding perfectly. The reality is when you first start out you are going to be horrible at it. You are going to think I am terrible about responding according to God’s will. I blew it five times in this day. You will. Trust me. It will be the little things that will drive you nuts. Something as little as sat down at dinner and I allowed myself to be served when I felt that maybe I should serve that time. Little things like that. Those are the little things that creep up on you. You might have got the unction to serve somebody but for some reason something inside of you said no I don’t think so. It was God trying to teach you service. So you need to go through the day and you are going to find your average is going to be pretty low at first. But over time, your average is going to increase. You are going to respond more and more to the will of God. I said it before, baseball players who hit .333 are paid millions of dollars. That is considered a good average. Hitting a baseball one out of three times is a good average. Likewise, if you are able to constantly respond to the will of God one out of three times, I guarantee you are doing a pretty good job at it.
I had a lot more I could say about this. I was going to get into all sorts of areas, but I decided I am not because I gave you a lot of stuff to think about already. Really, I think I gave you the most important things. If you are someone who really wants to read more about and if you want to read more about this concept of hearing from God or discernment, I can point you to all sorts of resources. But I suspect that some of you may be glad that I am cutting the sermon short. A few of you might be disappointed because I think maybe you were looking at some sort of three steps to understanding the will of God. Just give me the three things that I need to know so the next time I am in a situation I can just pull them out of my head and do them. My answer to that is there are no shortcuts. There are absolutely no shortcuts. You can’t just have three things in your pocket that you pull out when you need to expect to hear from God. He doesn’t operate like that. He operates by way of relationship. He wants a relationship with each of us. He wants us to have that ongoing daily conversation with him so that when we encounter these little opportunities throughout the day to respond with a kingdom value or two, we respond appropriately. Then, over time, we get good at it. Like any other practice, we get good at it. Pretty soon when the major forks in the road occur, we can respond confidently because we understand the will of God. When we do that, we are actually able to conclude this passage. It goes on to say in verse 11 that when we do these things “we may discern what is best and be pure and blameless until the day of Christ Jesus, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Christ Jesus – to the glory and praise of God.” The fruit of righteousness, which basically means good attitudes, good actions, and good choices. We do this not for our benefit but the benefit of God. For the praise and glory of God. Let us pray.
