I wrote before about the season when God taught me discernment, but I’ve since realized that many of us don’t actually know what discernment means.
A lot of people think discernment is just a gut instinct, or a vague feeling that something is “off,” but I think it goes deeper than that.
Biblically, discernment is about learning to recognize what is from God and what is not. It’s about testing what we hear, what we feel, what we’re taught, and even what we experience spiritually, instead of blindly accepting everything at face value.
For me, this became important during a season where things around me started to feel deeply supernatural, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I assumed many things were automatically dark or evil simply because they were unfamiliar, intense, or outside of my understanding.
But God had to teach me that fear is not discernment.
Discernment is not panic.
It is not suspicion of everything.
And it is not treating every strange moment like a spiritual attack.
It is learning to slow down enough to ask, “God, what are You saying about this?”
Some people describe hearing God through the “still small voice” you notice when you become quiet before Him. My old pastor used to ask, “What does your peace tell you?” based on Christ saying that His peace passes understanding and was given to us.
I think there’s wisdom in that, but I’ve also learned that our emotions and instincts alone are not always reliable. Fear can sound convincing. Trauma can sound convincing. Anxiety can sound convincing. Even excitement can sound convincing.
That’s why discernment has to be rooted in relationship with God, not just reaction.
Scripture tells us to “test the spirits,” which means believers are expected to use wisdom and spiritual maturity rather than assuming every spiritual experience is automatically from God simply because it feels powerful. But testing something also means we cannot immediately label everything unfamiliar as evil either.
That lesson humbled me deeply.
I had unknowingly created boxed-in criteria for what I thought God was allowed to sound like, look like, or move like. If something stepped outside of that framework, I assumed it had to be wrong. But throughout scripture, God consistently moved in ways people did not expect.
In the Old Testament, God appeared to Abraham while a dreadful darkness fell over him before speaking one of the greatest promises in scripture. The passage does not describe the darkness suddenly turning into visible light first. God simply spoke in the middle of something Abraham did not fully understand.
There are also difficult passages where God permits deceiving spirits as judgment against people who continually reject truth. One story describes many prophets confidently declaring victory in battle while a single prophet stood alone speaking the truth. The point of the story is not that God is deceptive by nature, but that the spiritual world is more serious and complex than many of us are comfortable admitting.
And I think that’s exactly why discernment matters.
Not so we can become obsessed with demons, hidden meanings, or spiritual paranoia, but so we can become people who know God closely enough to recognize His character, His voice, His wisdom, and His leading.
Real discernment should draw us deeper into humility, deeper into scripture, deeper into peace, and deeper into dependence on God, not deeper into fear.
At the end of the day, discernment is less about becoming spiritually suspicious of everything around you, and more about learning to place God’s voice above your own assumptions.
If what we call discernment constantly produces terror, suspicion, and isolation, something has gone wrong. True discernment should make us more loving, more peaceful, more wise, and more anchored in God’s character, not more fearful of the world around us.
It’s about relationship with God and the willingness to let His voice speak louder than our own reactions.
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