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.

Genesis 32 contains one of the most unique encounters with God that we see in all of Scripture. To be fair, most encounters with God in Scripture are each unique in their own ways, but this interaction between God and Jacob is definitely an original.

Jacob, his family, and his livestock had just fled his uncle Laban’s household, and he was about to see his brother Esau for the first time in a couple of decades. This is the same Esau whose blessing Jacob stole by deceiving their father, Isaac. Esau had threatened to kill Jacob because of this, and now Jacob was about to come face to face with him, and he was fearful.

Maybe you can relate to some of these family dynamics, or maybe it makes you appreciate that even though your family has it’s own share of dysfunction you’re not quite this bad. Either way, we can all relate to tough relationships, difficult dynamics, and past regrets. We’ve all experienced having to face awkward and even fearful meetings with people.

Jacob prayed. He confessed His unworthiness, recognized God’s faithfulness, and asked for God’s help. Then while spending the night on his own after sending the others ahead, Jacob had this unusual encounter:

There is so much that we see happening in these verses, but it struck me that Jacob walked away blessed, but scarred. He wrestled with God and was blessed by God, but walked away with a limp. So often it seems like the scars and the blessings really do come together. It can be out of some of the most difficult, challenging things in our life that we also end up receiving the greatest blessings.

In those difficult, scarring situations that we face in life, it seems like we always have a choice. We can allow the situation to stop us and make us give up, or like Jacob we can keeping going to seek God’s blessing. If we stop we’re just left with the pain, but if we persist in seeking God’s blessing in the pain then like Jacob we might be able to walk away with not just the scars, but also the blessing.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we always have to stay in the situation that is causing the pain, as we seek God’s blessing we also need to seek His wise guidance. There may be times he asks us to stay in something, but at other times that is clearly not what He wants for us. Even if we leave a scarring situation though, we are still carrying the scars with us as we go. The question becomes, will we carry painful, tender scars that still hurt when bumped, or will we carry healed scars that remind us not just of the pain but of God’s blessing?

Wrestling through the pain and seeking God’s blessing in the midst of it is not easy. We all want the blessing without the limps and scars that remain behind, but the growth and new understanding of who we are that comes from wrestling through these things with God are priceless.

So if you are in the midst of a challenging situation or season, be persistent in wrestling through it with God. In obedience, seek His blessing and the growth comes from it, letting the scars remind you of His faithfulness.