We are currently in the middle of a series about the Wonder of Discernment. So far we’ve talked about the importance of taking time to slow down and spend with God to seek discernment and putting it into practice as well.  This week we will be talking about the value of training our discernment.

In Hebrews 5:12-14, the believers were being challenged about the maturity of their faith:

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”

The author of Hebrews was really chastising these Hebrew believers for their lack of spiritual maturity. He indicates that those who are mature in their faith have practiced training their senses with discernment. Discernment is kind of like a muscle. The more we exercise it the stronger it grows. While discernment can be a spiritual gift, meaning that some people have been spiritually gifted with stronger discernment muscles, it is something that all believers are called to exercise. We all need to be able to discern good and evil and be able to use discernment, but we get better at it through practice. We need to train ourselves.

When it comes to exercise, I know there are some people who really love to exercise. For many of us though, it’s not something we necessarily love to do. We may have learned to love the outcome and benefits. We may just know that it’s something that will benefit us. That knowledge might be enough to motivate us to put in the time and effort to exercise and train our muscles and body. The same might be said of training our discernment. It might not always be enjoyable at first, but we are called to do it. The more we understand the importance of discernment the more likely we are to begin to exercise it. Eventually, with consistent exercise we begin to actually experience the value of having strong discernment. This in turn can motivate us to exercise it more.

There is another important parallel in the example of exercising our muscles. When we put work into training and developing our muscles, we grow stronger and we need to be wise in how we put that strength to work. We can use our strength to help others or we can use our new found strength to hurt other people. Unfortunately the same can be true as we train and develop our discernment muscles. We can use our discernment to help others, or we can turn our discernment into something hurtful and condemning. It goes back to the idea that our discernment must be rooted and practiced in love.

So how do we train our discernment? To find the answer to that we can look back at the verses from Hebrews 5 and consider the milk versus solid food analogy. To train our discernment we need to be growing in the Word. Just like a baby goes from milk to soft foods like cereal and purees to increasingly solid foods, we must go from learning basic spiritual truths to deeper and more substantial study of God and His Word.

I also find it interesting that these verses start off with them being told that they should already be teachers instead of having someone “again” teach them the “elementary principles” of God. If all we are doing is going to church on Sunday morning expecting someone to “feed us” spiritual nourishment to last us for the week, we are not practicing our discernment or growing. Practicing discernment and getting to solid food means going deeper than any preacher can go in twenty to forty minutes on a Sunday. We need a steady diet of increasingly solid food.

Instead of still being continually fed the basics, they should have been teaching others by this point. While you need to have some discernment in place to be teaching, interestingly enough the act of teaching itself helps to train your discernment even more. There is a famous quote from Aristotle that says, “Teaching is the highest form of understanding.” When you teach others something you have learned, or are learning, it helps you to understand it even better. Last Thursday, we started a series on the importance of investing in others, especially the next generation. So often Christians are hesitant to share their faith or teach others, formally or informally. Yet, in these verses we see that at a certain point we should be doing exactly that. Instead of waiting to feel like we’re “ready” or “equipped” or “know enough” to be talking to, or teaching, others, at some point we need to just try it. We will never really grow our muscles of discernment until we begin using them.

When this website was started, I wrote an article explaining the meaning behind the name Discerning Wonder. If you haven’t had a chance to read that, you can find it here. In that article though, I mentioned that there were some other reasons behind the name besides the main one. Last month, I mentioned the connection to my Working Geniuses, but another one of those reasons has to do with the word Dwell.

As I was exploring names for this website, and was considering Discerning Wonder the initials “DW” really stood out at me, and made me immediately think of the word Dwell. I’ve never really been one to jump on the bandwagon of choosing a word for the year like so many do lately, but thanks to some things God was teaching me last fall I came into this year with the word Dwell heavy on my heart and mind. So each time I write down or notice the initials of Discerning Wonder it seems to point me back to that word, Dwell.

The importance of dwelling with God was something that He really began speaking to me about in the last year. It’s not that the concept of dwelling with Him was new to me. When I first asked Him to be my Savior and Lord at seven years old, I was taught the importance of spending time with God and remaining in Him. At a young age, I memorized John 15:5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” I’ve taught numerous lessons about this idea of remaining in Him. Yet, this past fall, God really called me to task that I was spending so much time dwelling in other things. Allowing other things, like my own to do lists, to guide and direct my steps, my thoughts, my energy, and my heart. He challenged me to really experience life dwelling in Him, and I have to say that it was a remarkable breath of fresh air. The peace, freedom, and rest that I experienced in dwelling in Him was incredible. It shouldn’t have been so surprising because I knew this in my head and had told others it was the case, but experiencing it on a deeper level than ever before was refreshing and wonderful.

It was in this experience of dwelling in God that I was finally able to begin to recapture some of the wonder that had been missing in my life, or least begin to see the wonder that had always been around me. When I was spending more time dwelling in my to do list than dwelling in God, it was difficult to notice, let alone feel wonder. This connection, and the importance of dwelling in Him can be seen throughout Scripture. I particularly like how the psalmist expressed it in Psalm 27:4

This is week seven in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
  
Today’s Scripture passage is Hebrews 12:28 (NIRV)

This is week six in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
 
Today’s Scripture passage is Luke 5:26 (NLT)

This verse comes from the passage where Jesus was preaching to a room so crowded that the only way a group of men could get their paralyzed friend to Jesus for healing was to go up on the roof and lower their friend down into the middle of the crowd. Jesus then forgave the man’s sins and healed him. This verse, Luke 5:26, was the crowd’s response to what they had just seen.

They weren’t just quietly wondering. They were “gripped” with “great wonder and awe.” When was the last time that you were gripped with wonder and awe over something that God had done? That word “gripped” gives me a picture of wonder and awe closing in all around me, surrounding me, and making it impossible to ignore. When was the last time that you simply couldn’t ignore the wonder of God in a moment?

If it’s been awhile, is it because God doesn’t do wonderful and amazing things that often anymore or is because we’re just failing to be gripped? I fear that it’s become far to easy for us to evade this grip of wonder and awe. We’re busy and move right past it without looking or giving it time to grip us. We’re so focused on other things we miss the moments entirely, or maybe we’ve just come to expect those moments and take them for granted.

Maybe we need to slow down just a bit so we don’t miss or just brush past these opportunities to be gripped with wonder. You may be saying, “That sounds great, but you don’t know my schedules, the demands and responsibilities I have. I don’t have time to slow down.” Do you have time not to? If it’s been a while since you’ve been “gripped with great wonder and awe,” then I would wonder how your soul is doing? I know when I get caught in seasons that are so busy or stressful that I stop noticing the wonderful and amazing things that God is doing around me, whether I want to admit it or not, I feel it in my soul. Instead of wonder and awe and praise filling me, I find myself struggling with discouragement or discontent or envy or bitterness or even anger.

So I ask again, do we really have time not to slow down and take notice of the wonders that God is doing around us? In difficult times, it might start out with looking for the small everyday things that we have been missing: a sunrise, a sunset, a flower, a interesting cloud formation, something or anything that reminds us that God is good and still pretty amazing. It also might start with going back to John 3:16, Romans 5:8, or another favorite verse that reminds us how much God loves us and how truly wonderful He has been to us.

I would challenge you, and me, this week to start opening our eyes to the wonders around us and then respond as this crowd did by praising God and exclaiming to ourselves and others that “We have seen amazing things today!”

This is part of our Thursday series on the encounters that Risen Savior shared in the four gospels. Today’s encounter is shared with us by both Mark and Luke.

This encounter begins with two followers of Jesus walking down the seven mile stretch of road between Jerusalem and the village of Emmaus. Thanks to Luke we know that one of them was named Cleopas. He and the other traveler, possibly his wife or another disciple, were talking about everything that had happened. Luke describes what happened next like this in chapter 24 verses 15 through 17:

Luke goes on to tell how the two travelers began explaining about Jesus and their hopes that He would redeem Israel, but that He had been crucified. They also shared how the women had reported that He was alive. Then Luke says in verses 25-27 that Jesus “said to them, ‘O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.”

As they got to the village, the travelers asked Jesus to stay with them and in verses 30 through 35 Luke tells us that:

​So like Mary Magdalene, these two travelers didn’t recognize Jesus right away, but here we are specifically told that “their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him.” They were prevented the whole time they were traveling, but after arriving at their destination and sitting down to eat they saw Jesus break and bless the bread and then disappear. This is when their eyes were finally opened. This was probably a very familiar action that they had seen Jesus do before and it helped them recognize Him in that moment.


What are the things that you have seen Jesus do in your life? Are you keeping your eyes open for similar ways that He might be working, ways that might help you recognize His presence today? I pray that we would all have open eyes looking to encounter His presence in our lives today. Then when we do, let’s be like these two travelers who immediately turned back around and travelled seven more miles to go share about their encounter with the Risen Savior.

This is week five in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
  
Today’s Scripture passage is Luke 8:25 (KJV)

As we have been looking at examples of wonder in the Bible, we have seen a lot about wondering in awe at the works of God and our awe and wonder in remembering those works, but as we see in this verse sometimes we wonder out of perplexity and confusion instead of awe.

When we first started talking about wonder, we looked at the following definition:

Wonder - a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.

There is another definition for wonder though. Sometimes wonder means:

Wonder - feel doubt.

The storm they were experiencing led them to wonder. They wondered what was going to happen to them. They wondered why Jesus was sleeping. They doubted their safety. Jesus recognized this as He asked them where their faith was. Like the disciples, we have times where our wonder comes from a place of doubting too. We wonder why He is doing what He is doing, or why He is allowing something, or why He won’t do something. Like the disciples we find ourselves in the middle of a storm, scared, confused, and wondering in doubt.

The storm got pretty bad before the disciples went to Jesus with their doubts and concerns. We often do the same thing. We’re so focused on the storm and maybe wondering why God isn’t already doing something about it. We try to handle it on our own or conceal our doubts, but like the disciples finally did we need to take our doubts and concerns to Him, and let Him help us through it.

There’s one more important definition for wonder:

Wonder - Desire or be curious to know something

Sometimes the doubting type of wonder leads to amazed wonder which leads to this curious type of wonder. The disciples took their doubts and concerns to Jesus and then saw Him do something amazing. He spoke a word and calmed the wind and the waves. There was definitely surprise from something unexpected and inexplicable, but there was also curiosity over something. They were curious how He calmed the storm. This was not normal human behavior, so they wondered who He was and how it was possible. Sometimes we see God working and we wonder in amazement and it also drives us to wonder more about Him. This can lead to a deeper faith and a deeper relationship with Him which is always a good thing.

So if you are finding yourself in the middle of a storm or a season of storms, it’s okay to have doubts and concerns, but take them to God. Let Him help you through it until He brings you to the point that you can look at what He did in amazement and longingly desire to know Him more.

Each year as we celebrate Easter, we often lead up to it by detailing the account of the Passion or Holy Week going all the way to the empty tomb. We celebrate the fact that “He is Risen” on Easter morning and then move on to focusing on other parts of Scripture.

It can be easy for us to lose sight of the fact that Jesus continued appearing to people after His resurrection for 40 days before He ascended to Heaven. What do we know about those days and appearances, and what can we learn from those encounters with the Risen Savior?

During the next few weeks, each Thursday we are going to take a look at one of the post-resurrection encounters with Jesus that are mentioned in the four gospels. Today we are going to start with the one we may have heard about on Easter Sunday: the women at the tomb.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all begin their accounts of the resurrection indicating that Mary Magdalene and some of the other women following Jesus headed to the tomb to finish properly preparing Jesus’s body for burial. When they arrived at the tomb, they found that the stone had been rolled away and an angel gave them that great message so famously quoted from Matthew 28:6 “He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying.” The women were then instructed to go tell the disciples.

After this happened, Matthew tells us that Jesus appeared to the women and they worshipped Him and went to tell the disciples. Mark and John single out Mary Magdalene and tell about her encounter with Jesus after His resurrection. John describes it this way in chapter 20 verses 14 though 18:

As we look at these encounters with the Risen Savior during the next few weeks, we will see that Mary was not alone in not immediately recognizing Jesus after the resurrection. Clearly He no longer looked the same. Even when He first spoke there was not an immediate recognition, but when He said her name something changed.

We don’t know exactly what it was about that that made her realize who He was. Maybe it was just that He didn’t give her ears to hear until that moment. Maybe she was too distracted by her grief until that moment. Maybe it was the familiarity of His voice speaking her name that finally broke through. Maybe He spoke her name with such care and compassion that she realized it could only be Him.

This makes me wonder: Do I listen to Him that carefully? Do I recognize His voice as clearly as Mary eventually did? Or do I fail to recognize His voice like Mary first did because I am distracted with my own thoughts and a difference focus?

My prayer today for me and for you is that He will open my ears and hear Jesus clearly. I pray that we don’t miss out on anything He is saying to us because we are too distracted to recognize His voice. Then when we hear His voice, let us be like Mary and boldly be able to tell others “I have seen the Lord.”

This is week four in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.

​Today's Scripture passage is Daniel 4:3 (NASB).
​

In a previous article in this series, we talked about the importance of recognizing God’s wonders. This verse from Daniel starts off in much the same way, but those last two lines are different than other verses we’ve looked at about wonder. They remind us that these amazing wonders are a part of God’s everlasting kingdom which has gone and will continue to go from generation to generation. And we get to be a part of that!

This verse is actually spoken by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as he is giving credit to God after a very challenging season and time of learning. If you aren’t familiar with the story, I highly encourage you to read all of Daniel chapter 4, but understand that Nebuchadnezzar was greatly humbled before he learned to fully appreciate not just God’s wonders but His sovereignty as well. Like Nebuchadnezzar, pride can often keep us from recognizing God, His wonders, and his dominion in our lives and in the world. If we take time to humble ourselves before God, then maybe He won’t need to humble us like He did the king.

Pride makes us think or act like everything is about us or because of us or for us. Pride makes us think that we’re the main character in the story. When we humble ourselves before God, we remember that He is the main character of the story. We simply get to be a part of one chapter, or one page or maybe just one paragraph of His everlasting story.

But think about that for a moment. We get to be a part of the story of the King of kings, Creator of the Universe, Lord of lords, and Savior. We get to see and experience His wonders. At times we even get to be a part of His wonders. We’re not a part because of our timing or coincidence or just because we accidentally stumbled into His great story. We get to be a part of it because He chose for us to be a part. We get to be a part of it because He loves us. What an amazing perspective!

So what’s your viewpoint today? Are you frustrated with your story and focused on yourself? Or are you wondering over the fact that God loves you and chose you to be a part of His everlasting kingdom story?

This is week three in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
  
Today’s Scripture passage is Habakkuk 1:5 (NASB)

​God is “doing something in your days” something we wouldn’t believe. Do you really believe that statement?

For those of us in ministry, isn’t that at least part of why we got into ministry in the first place? We wanted to be a part of what God was doing. And you definitely don’t have to be in full-time ministry to feel that way.

But as the home page of this website says, sometimes in the busyness of our lives and ministry we start to lose sight of the fact that God is doing things, astonishing, wonderful things all around us. And at times He is even doing those things in or through us.

So why is it so easy for us to lose sight of this? Why does it become so easy to read that verse and hear a small voice in our head saying: Really? Even now? Even in…whatever mess, craziness, challenge or trial we find ourselves in at the moment?

Is it possible that we’ve stopped looking and observing? Is it possible that we might be a little like Peter who stepped out of the boat with his eyes fully on Jesus only to find himself sinking like a rock when his focus shifted back to the storm? I don’t know about you, but all too often I find myself feeling this way. Those storms around us can be really distracting. We feel like they need our attention. We’re adults. We’re leaders. We have responsibilities. We can’t ignore the storms. Was Peter ignoring the storm while His eyes were on Jesus or was He trusting Jesus to  help him in the midst of the storm?

Why do we feel like keeping our eyes, attention, and focus on Jesus means we’ll end up missing something or neglecting what we’re supposed to do in the midst of the storm? As I ask myself that question, any answer that I come up with ultimately seems to come back to a lack of trust: being afraid I’ll miss something important, being afraid that something will catch me off guard, being afraid that people will think I’m shirking my responsibilities. All of those are ultimately a lack of trust that Jesus will walk me through the storm as I focus on Him.

So my challenge, and am I guessing yours, is to stop giving so much of our focus and attention to the tasks and trials around us and trust to Jesus to walk us through as we look at Him and observe what He is doing. In our astonishment and wonder at what He is doing in our day, we might just be reminded of the joy that comes from joining Him along the way.

This is week two in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
  
Today’s Scripture passage is Psalm 77:11-15 (NASB)
“I shall remember the deeds of the Lord;
Surely I will remember Your wonders of old.
I will meditate on all Your work
And muse on Your deeds.
Your way, O God, is holy;
What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders;
You have made known Your strength among the peoples.
You have by Your power redeemed Your people,
The sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah.”

“You are the God who works wonders.”
Do you really believe that? What are some of the wonders you have seen God do?

I hope that some things immediately came to mind. If not, I would sincerely recommend taking some time to reflect on that further. Life is tough and the psalmist understood that remembering these wonders from God can help us in those tough times. In fact, in the New American Standard Bible the heading at the top of Psalm 77 says, “Comfort in Trouble from Recalling God’s Mighty Deeds.”

Why is this so important? In life and in ministry, tough times will happen. In fact Jesus Himself promised us that in John 16:33: “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

Like the psalmist describes in these verses from Psalm 77, remembering the wonders we’ve seen and even the ones recounted for us in Scripture and then meditating and musing on focusing and dwelling on them help us through these tough times. It helps us remember how great and powerful God truly is. Remembering that and focusing on Him helps us to put our current difficulties in better perspective. Our problems don’t disappear, but we remember that we aren’t alone. The God who works wonders is with us.

So are you struggling with things in your life? Are you dealing with struggles and difficulties in your ministry? Take time to remember the wonders that God has done. Take time to remember the God who works wonders. Remember that He is Holy. Remember that He is great. Remember that He is strong and powerful. Remember that He redeems.