All of us move in discernment. This might appear to contradict the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 when he says that “some” have been given the spiritual gift of discerning of spirits, but the discernment we move in is not spiritual but physical. More specifically it is emotional discernment, what we like or dislike, what makes us feel comfortable or uncomfortable. We do not realise we are moving in discernment because we are so used to doing it. We also do not realise that we are moving in discernment because we call what we are doing by other names, in particular “intuition”.
In her book “Murder at the Vicarage” Agatha Christie, speaking through the character Miss Jane Marple, says the following about intuition. “Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before”.
In her solving of murders, in the village of St Mary Mead and beyond, Miss Marple goes beyond recognising words. She looks for things that remind her of other people and situations and applies these to find the answers to crimes that the police officers, especially Inspector Slack, miss. While we are not solving crimes, we do just what Miss Marple does. We classify people because of what we have experienced, hopefully, learning by mistakes. We often do this without thought, picking up signals and signs which we do not realise we are sensing. We might not know why we are uncomfortable with a situation or person, yet if things go wrong we admit that the signs were there – we just ignored them. The “heroine” of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s show “Tell Me on a Sunday” is wrong when she states that she ignored the signs about her partner’s unfaithfulness and “just closed my eyes, like only a woman can”. Men are just as capable as women at closing their eyes to the signals and not wanting to know. While we are talking of intuition, this is a sense. Some people call it our “sixth sense”. This is not some form of psychic ability, but intuition. We speak of feelings, that something felt wrong or right, just as we do with our sense of touch. Intuition, and its close relation common sense, need to be recognised and embraced as a wonderful part of creation.
While a major form of physical discernment we move in is emotional intuition, there are other ways we move in physical discernment. We taste, we touch, we hear, we see, we smell. In the previous post I spoke of wine experts whose sense of taste and smell has been trained to distinguish one grape and vineyard from another. From birth we learn to physically discern. What we like to eat and drink comes from that discernment, and can be manipulated by companies adding sugar or salt to increase the pleasure. We choose music by what we hear, but there are those whose aural discernment is greater than others. Trained musicians and singers, whether they have perfect pitch or not, can tell when an instrument is out of tune or if, during a concert, someone hits a note slightly sharp or flat when most would not notice anything. Proof readers are trained to spot mistakes in page upon page of writing, formula, or picture when most of us would miss the wrong letter. A doctor looking at the results of an x-ray, CT Scan, ultrasound or MRI Scan know what a normal scan would look like so know what is out of place where others would not know one blob from another. In 2017 I was on an archaeological dig and was walking to the site with someone who specialises in prehistoric flint tools. Suddenly we both bent down to pick something up. My main interest is medieval and post medieval, especially pottery. I picked up part of a Georgian clay pipe, my friend picked up a flint arrowhead. Neither of us had seen what the other had seen because our eyes have been trained to see specific things.
Just as we can train our physical senses not only to spot things, we train them to filter things out. We are so used to noises, smells and sights we ignore them. Something must be very “strange” for us to notice them. In the Father Brown story “The Invisible Man”, C K Chesterton plays on the point that we are so used to seeing postmen and the like they become invisible to us. A night in a hotel or camping can be anything but restful as we are hearing sounds that are not what we are used to, what our brains are used to filtering out whether that is the buzz of an electric light or the passing traffic.
As we are so capable of moving in physical discernment it is easy for us to put that forward as spiritual discernment. This is a mistake. Just as we have physical senses, so we have spiritual senses. In his book “The Discerner” James Goll takes us through our physical senses (sight, taste, hearing, smell, touch, and intuition) then explains how there mirror our spiritual senses. To many this may seem like nonsense, but the Bible is full of examples where physical senses are used to speak of spiritual experiences.
Paul prays that the Ephesians’ “eyes of their hearts” will be opened so that they may know the fullness of Christ. Jesus tells the church in Laodecia that they are spiritually blind and need to come to Him to have their sight restored. The Psalmist tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. David also declares, in Psalm 119, that the word of the Lord is “sweeter than honey” and a “light to our feet and a light to our path”. But in all these cases, and more, the senses being used are spiritual not physical. While related to spiritual discernment, physical discernment is not the spiritual gift – it is part of what we do as human.
The problem comes when we allow our physical discernment to be the basis of spiritual discernment or allow it to motivate how we minister in prophecy, healing, words of knowledge or similar. God can use our physical discernment, but we must allow God to take us beyond the physical to show us how the physical is mirroring the spiritual. If we do not do that, then we are allowing unsanctified emotions and senses to dictate our spiritual ministry.
In his books “God’s Secrets” and “Translating God” Shawn Bolz speaks of “negative discernment. This is becoming a common trend, but Shawn writes of physical not spiritual discernment. He looks at how we discern through our physical senses, and our emotions. Like many authors Shawn fails to distinguish between physical and spiritual discernment. This said, Shawn’s writings contain some of the best explanations of why we must be careful of ministering from our emotions. As many people have seen with moves of God that have gone wrong in some way, that it felt good is no litmus test of whether things were from God or not. This does not mean that spiritual discernment is always clear and uncluttered. The same experiences that cloud our physical discernment can cloud our spiritual discernment. Abusive relationships, especially with male authority figures, can prevent us seeing God as a loving father. Failures and disappointments leave us with an image of a god who does not answer, not the One of the Bible who hears our voice and promises that we can hear His. We need to see sozo, healing, wholeness, and salvation, brought into these memories and hurts to allow us to discern clearly.
Another mistake being made with the recognition of the importance of spiritual senses is the correlating of the Gift of Discernment with being a Seer. While a revelatory gift, discerning of spirits is not prophecy. As we see in the story of Samuel, as well as the ministries of Gad, Ezekiel and others being a Seer is more than discerning a situation, but involves God revealing truths and events, whether current, past or future, from a heavenly perspective. I agree with Jonathon Welton, Jamie Galloway, Jim Driscoll, and others that the Seer anointing involves the use of all our spiritual senses (both Ezekiel and the Apostle John were given things to taste spiritually, many heard things in the spirit), but I disagree that Paul is referring to the Seer anointing when he writes about the gift of discernment. One reason for this is the reality that Words of Knowledge can come through a person’s senses. If the use of senses refers only to the seer anointing, people getting words of knowledge through hearing sounds, feeling pain, tasting something or seeing an image would make those situations “spiritual discernment” not words of knowledge.
If we want to learn to exercise our spiritual senses, whether to move in the seer aspect of the prophetic or words of knowledge, then the works of the authors mentioned (listed at the end of this blog series) are a superb place to start.