Discernment is based on an objective standard, the Word of God—not a subjective feeling or experience. It encompasses everything that can be classified as good or evil, including our beliefs regarding truth and error and our actions as being either righteous or unrighteous.

In 1 John 4:1, the apostle gives us an exhortation to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”

This verse speaks of a significant topic found throughout the Old and New Testaments, namely, the topic of spiritual discernment.

It is painfully obvious everywhere we look today that the church has largely abandoned using any sort of discernment. All too often, we see pastors, who have been exposed as charlatans and frauds (men who have disqualified themselves from pastoral ministry through deception, arrogance, sexual infidelity, or other sins that prevent them from being above reproach), lay low for a while, pick up and move to a new city, and start a new church and instantly gain a new following. While some of this may be willful defiance of God’s Word, much of it is also due to a failure of believers to be discerning.

The lack of discernment in Christianity is tragic but not surprising, because the truth is that many believers do not know what discernment is. If we look at how Christians define discernment in the church today, we typically find something along the lines of “the ability to perceive something spiritual with the mind and the senses.” Other Christians view discernment as the ability to make good choices in life.

Because of the lack of clarity on the meaning of discernment, we need to lay out a biblical definition of this vital term for our Christian living: Discernment is the Spirit-empowered skill of using God’s Word to distinguish between truth and error and right and wrong. Each phrase in this definition is important to understand.

First, discernment is a Spirit-empowered skill.

Discernment, like so much else in the Christian life, is mysterious in the sense that it has both a divine and human element to it. The fact that discernment is Spirit-empowered indicates this is not something the unbeliever can do. Believers, though, have discernment, and can also develop and use it.

In Romans 1:31, we find Paul describing humanity in its condition of having rejected God and His Word. Paul lists several examples of what a depraved mind looks like, one being ‘without understanding.’ That term is the Greek equivalent of what we often find in the book of Proverbs when it talks about having discernment. The unbeliever who has rejected God to serve idols is without discernment. Their view of right and wrong is relative; ‘It’s right if I do it to you, but it’s wrong if you do it to me.’ We see, then, that the natural man cannot exercise discernment because it is a Spirit-empowered skill.

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