Spiritual Discernment Series

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.