What Is Discernment?
In The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey plays Truman, a man who has—unbeknownst to him—lived his entire life as a reality TV star. Truman’s world is fabricated. Seahaven Island, his hometown, is actually a massive television set filled with hidden cameras and microphones. His friends, family, and neighbors are actors sustaining the fiction and ensuring Truman doesn’t look too closely at his reality. When asked why he believes Truman hasn’t discovered the true nature of his reality, Christof, the director of the reality show, responds, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”
Is Discernment Different from Reality?
It seems safe to assume that we don’t exist in a reality show; however, we are often presented with realities that skew our perception of reality. We come to believe the world “works” in a particular way, making some actions seem inevitable— “givens” we would be foolish to ignore. Unfortunately, such presentations of reality are incomplete. In part, such incompleteness is a function of our finite natures. We will always have more to learn—and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yet, that incompleteness also arises from our rejection of Christ’s authority. If we are trying to describe the world as if God is not present, as if he has not disclosed himself to us through His Son and His word, as if the Holy Spirit is not within and among us, we are sure to get the story wrong.
What, you might ask, does all of this have to do with discernment? Discernment is a way of knowing what to do in light of reality, particularly the reality of the Triune God. If we return to Truman for a moment, we can see why reality is so crucial to discernment. For example, had Truman known that everyone else on Seahaven Island was an actor, wouldn’t that have changed the way he interacted with them? When he finds out that his life isn’t what he thought it was, he chooses to leave the show—he makes a different choice. Because we know that Christ has been given “all authority on heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18), we commit to being and making disciples, pledging our allegiance to the Triune God in baptism and learning to follow the way of Christ.
Discernment decoupled from reality doesn’t have to be “evil” in the sense that people turn into deviant thieves and murderers. However, discernment decoupled from the reality of God as revealed in his Son and his word will always be misdirected and require a reorientation of attention. From the perspective of Christian theology discernment is an activity aligned—or trued—to the reality of the Triune God.
3 Steps to Develop Discernment
Discernment is the fruit of discipleship. Disciples learn to observe all Christ commanded (Matt 28:20). In learning to observe all Christ commanded, a discipled mind becomes increasingly capable of making everyday decisions that glorify God (click here to download a guide to Christian discernment). Discipleship, which aims to cultivate an unqualified devotion to the Lord, involves: (1) rightly ordering our loves, (2) reorienting our attention, and (3) responding faithfully to the Triune God.
1. Rightly Ordering Our Loves
When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5—love the Lord with all you are and have. We are to give our unqualified allegiance to the Lord. We are not to divide our loyalties. As Augustine writes,
“You are to concentrate all your thoughts, your whole life, and your whole intelligence upon Him from whom you derive all that you bring. For when He says, ‘With all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,’ He means that no part of our life is to be unoccupied, and to afford room, as it were, for the wish to enjoy some other object, but that whatever else may suggest itself to us as an object worthy of love is to be borne into the same channel in which the whole current of our affections flows.”
All of our other legitimate loves (of neighbors, nation, families, etc.) are to be immersed within and flow along the grain of our allegiance to God.
2. Reorienting Our Attention
Attention is a theological act—an intentional posture and position we adopt as we “shift our mindset so that the ‘worst case scenario’ we can see is failing to glorify the Lord” (“How Do We Reorient Our Attention”). Paying attention to the Lord means, in part, recognizing that he is always the most relevant actor and factor in any situation. God is not someone we should ignore or push to the margins of our lives. Attending to him indexes us to the true standard of our existence and reminds us of reality’s governing dynamics: we choose life through obedience and death through rebellion (Deut 30:19-20).
3. Responding Faithfully to the Triune God
Our basic response to God is obedience. As we obey God in the concrete circumstances of life, we create intentional spaces in which we may witness God’s presence.
Discernment emerges from discipleship, yet the relationship is not one way. As we learn and practice discernment, we deepen our participatory knowing—we know God through our experience. Discernment and discipleship reinforce one another. The one is not possible without the other.
4 Ways to Use Discernment as a High School Graduate
High School Graduation is as close to a rite of passage as we have in today’s world. Christian graduates move from high school to the workforce, military, or college often leaving—to some degree—the safety net of their parent’s home to being making decisions for themselves. In some sense, graduates begin to navigate the world’s ambiguities and challenges while leaning on their support systems in ways different than they did while attending high school.
So, how can graduates use and deepen their ability to discern after graduation? I would suggest the following:
1. Practice Spiritual Disciplines
Spiritual disciplines are not intended as coping mechanisms. They may well have beneficial effects on us, but the disciplines themselves are intended to help orient us to God’s presence. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, “These spiritual disciplines are us practicing the presence of God. When we hear that phrase, what it’s really saying is [that] we’re practicing recognizing how God moves in our lives—what God is doing in any given moment within our lives. That’s what we’re doing when we are practicing the spiritual disciplines.” Practicing spiritual disciplines will allow graduates to enhance their senses so that they look at the world with eyes that see and listen to the world with ears that hear.
2. Participate in a Local Congregation
While every believer is a member of the invisible body of Christ, every believer also needs to live under the authority of a local group of elders, be formed as a member of a local Christian community, and contribute their gifts in service to other members of the body of Christ and to a local community as a witness to Christ. Without this participation, graduates will lose an important anchoring point tethering them to a concrete assembly dedicated to discerning well together.
3. Think Well about the True, Good, and Beautiful
The true, good, and beautiful are known as the transcendentals. Humans don’t determine truth, goodness, or beauty. Instead, truth, goodness, and beauty are aspects of reality that we recognize, miss, ignore, or reject. As young Christians entering the world, graduates may experience a degree of confusion as they encounter truth, goodness, and beauty apart from Christ. My encouragement would be to encourage graduates to affirm truth, goodness, and beauty where they find it while, at the same time, pointing beyond these incomplete understandings of the true, good, and beautiful to the Triune God.
4. Cultivate Patience and Contentment
The world is a difficult place. It is, perhaps, getting more difficult by the day. As graduates set out to pursue their goals, it is important that they do so with patience, finding contentment with whatever they have in the moment. Their ambitions must be shaped and governed by the character of Christ. Pursue a career, but don’t compromise your testimony to Christ in doing so. Obey God and allow him to work through you. When we obey, we trust the God who is capable of doing abundantly more than we could ever ask or think (Eph 3:20).
As graduates move into a new stage of life, discernment can be buried under the weight of more pragmatic concerns. These four practices, while not exhaustive, are intended to help graduates remember that the best choice they can make in any situation is to follow the Lord. They provide a framework to graduates—and any other Christians—to relate to God (the spiritual disciplines), the body of Christ (Participate in a Local Congregation), the world (Think Well about the True, Good, and Beautiful), and their own hearts and circumstances (Cultivate Patience and Contentment).
Graduates enter a unique stage in life. The need for discernment is high, yet there is still room to make mistakes, repent, and begin again. One of the unique dangers graduates are likely to face is the temptation of complacency. As Jürgen Moltmann suggests,
“To be sure, it is usually said that sin in its original form is man’s wanting to be as God. But that is only one side of sin. The other side of such pride is hopelessness, resignation, inertia, and melancholy … Temptation then consists not so much in the titanic desire to be as God, but in weakness, timidity, weariness, not wanting to be what God requires of us.”
The temptation is heightened by the urgencies and emergencies that new responsibilities often bring. It will be important for graduates to realize early and often that following God with an unwavering allegiance won’t eliminate all of our problems, but it will open up new possibilities for them to participate with God as they build his kingdom.
Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/Annie Spratt
