Exercising Faith II – Discernment

To draw the lens in just a tiny bit, I want to look more closely at discernment as a spiritual gift. I’ve been preoccupied with having a retreat day soon, but last night I was asking myself what agenda I have in seeking a retreat.

First, let me say that I do try to practice the discipline of retreat once in a while. Spiritual disciplines are an entirely different topic, but I need to give you some context for this one. The discipline of retreat is one that is not practiced nearly enough, in my opinion. We live in a world possessed of such incredibly diverse and seductive means of distraction from the Lord that I believe retreat to be essential, but I find, like many, that I’m just not sure how to go about it. Oh, I have some means – going ‘up the mountain’ literally is just one, long walks another – but what to do on days when you have to remain indoors or simply have no inner room into which you can retreat? And what defines a retreat?

Digression aside, I find that I’m in need of retreat in order to refocus myself, to find out where I should be directing my attentions and abilities, and to simply withdraw from things for a while.  The reason for this?  I’ve become unsure of things, as we all do and as we all must overcome.

Where this leads me, however, is to this:  Is a retreat going to be serving my purposes or God’s?  Or, in other words, what expectations must I have in order to retreat for the purposes of discernment?  Certainly, I have questions that I want to pray about, but am I praying with an expectation to hear what God has to say or what I want Him to say?

Discernment, I think, works the same way.  I think discernment, in its most relevant sense, is finding the will of the Lord in the circumstances which He has engineered for you.  If you are gifted in discernment, I think you have the ability to do this without thinking too much about it.  You can test and approve very easily, and Christ-mindedness comes more naturally to you.  I could be wrong; probably am, when it comes to gifts.  But that’s where I think discernment operates in retreat.  The difficult point is to come out of retreat, or away from a decision where discernment is required ready to act on what you’ve learned.  And I think this is one of the central purposes of prayer, as well; or at least, prayer for guidance.  We have a responsibility to do what we’re told, and not to simply toss it aside.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Exercising Faith I – Supernatural Gifts

Jesus rebuked his disciples for having little faith, and I wonder if we should not take that a little more seriously. I have a dear friend whose contention is that the faith which we profess is that faith which allows for the use of the same supernatural powers as Jesus Christ in all believers, and I happen to have some issues with such a broad categorization. In fact, I come from a background that seems to hold that the supernatural gifts displayed in the Bible by Jesus Christ and later his disciples passed away from the world with those disciples. I’m not sure where I stand on the gifts of the Spirit in their supernatural form. I’ve heard too many testimonies about healing and prophecy to entirely discount the possibility, but at the same time I can’t say that I’ve had the opportunity to witness supernatural gifts in action. Let me just preface this discourse by putting that out there.

What I’m thinking about is how people recognize the reality of God’s supernatural presence in their lives, and how they can be influenced in different ways by their own perceptions of that supernatural presence. You see, I find that I can give names to traits and abilities that I see in people, believers and non-believers alike, by referring to spiritual gifts. Is it possible, do you think, to exercise the gifts of the Spirit or to be given gifts of the Spirit as a non-believer? My answer would have to be no. People have gifts, yes. Even secularists don’t deny that. But from whence do those gifts come? And to what purpose are they to be used? In non-believers, I’d have to say that the gifts are designed to be deceptive, to entrap people by giving them a sense of the use of spiritual gifts as something produced of their own abilities. In believers, the issue becomes trickier. Because false teachers exist (and I’m going to go on a tear about false teachers before too long), so too do false uses of spiritual gifts, or uses of spiritual gifts that propagate satanic (and here I’m using the word to connote selfishness) teachings. The trouble lies in discernment, and in false discernment contention arises between those who claim to be brethren. So I say God forgive us for contention about the ways You choose to manifest yourself, and give us discernment about what You want to accomplish with Your gifts.

Here are some links to older posts I’ve done on the subject of supernatural gifts:

Christ: Supernatural 1 – Miracles

Christ: Supernatural 1 – Gifts

Christ: Supernatural 1 – Holy Spirit

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

A World Apart – Teaching With Authority

There’s one verse in the culmination of what’s called the Sermon on the Mount, at least in the Gospel of Matthew version, that I want to begin with. It’s in Matthew 7:28-29, and it reads like this:

“And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”

What does it mean to teach with authority, and not as a scribe? Simply put, what it means is that the power of the Holy Spirit is in the teaching. You may have heard different terms for it, such as an ‘anointing’ to speak, or the gift of teaching, or the empowered Word, but what it essentially speaks about is the awareness of the Spirit of God in the preaching being delivered. Very few are truly gifted in the preaching of the Word, but Jesus was, and it’s with this understanding that I approach the topic of Christ preaching, or, as I was itching to put in the title, Preaching Christ, though this time to be taken in a different way, with the focus shifted to the subject/noun rather than the verb. Thus, it could be understood as [The] Preaching Christ. Anyway, forgive an literature guy’s conceits. What I really want to talk about is what happens when Christ preaches.

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ longest recorded public statement and teaching, and it’s mind-blowing. We just finished a few months of it in the Bible study I attend, and there’s a lot in there. A lot to think about. I could spend several posts on meditations regarding the sermon, but I’m going to leave it at one thing today…Christ is living and active in the pages of the Bible, and his teaching through it is real. It sounds incredibly weird, but it’s true. To the Christian, the Bible is intended to be the living word of God, the revelation He has chosen to use to communicate with His people. It ’speaks’ to the soul. So, too, does Christ. It’s no coincidence that John is the gospel I most like to return to, because it includes so much of what Christ says to His disciples, his friends. To know Christ is to talk to Him as a friend, and to have Him talk to us as a friend. He comforts, instructs, rebukes, and holds you to who you say you are. And his teaching as recorded in Matthew is only one case of it. I think I’ll spend a post on the Bible as hypertext, next time, and talk a bit about what happens when we ‘hear’ Christ preach from the Word and can then refer to the places in the Bible he’s teaching from.

Until then;

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.