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039 | Discernment v. Critical Spirit: What's the Difference?
540 Plays4 years ago
Looking at 1 John 4 and testing the spirits, we discuss a reader question about discernment, discernment "ministries", and how to discern biblically without giving into a fault-finding, judgmental spirit.
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Ask Anything Monday: Discernment vs. Critical Spirit
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back, friends. I am so excited for our first episode in the Ask Anything Monday series. And today we're going to be tackling a question about discernment and a critical spirit. These two things go hand in hand.
00:00:45
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hand today it seems, which is a bit unfortunate because in Scripture we see a clear distinction between biblical discernment, spirit-led discernment because all biblical discernment will be led by the Holy Spirit, and a critical and judgmental spirit. So how do we discern rightly
00:01:06
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while also walking in the spirit of love and kindness and truth. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So the question is, what is the difference between discernment
00:01:21
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and criticism or judgment. And I want to look at a couple definitions of discernment first and then we're going to look at 1 John 4 because I think that gives us a good glimpse of what this kind of biblical discernment is. So first, according to the dictionary, discernment is simply to judge well.
00:01:41
Speaker
If you look at it from a Christian perspective, which some dictionaries will actually have a Christian or spiritual definition, it is the ability to perceive or obtain guidance on spiritual matters. And basically what it is, is the ability to determine what is good and true and right, to embrace that, to seek that out, not just to determine what is bad and wrong and evil. That's an important distinction that
00:02:10
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the biblical discerner is looking for what is good, not just hunting down what is evil.
Biblical Discernment and 1 John 4
00:02:18
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And you guys have heard me use the term spiritual headhunter before to describe this kind of unhealthy discernment. My friend Lisa Whittle has been known to refer to it as spiritual vigilantes.
00:02:31
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people who are out looking for what is bad and evil, looking for the latest false teacher instead of concentrating on the gospel and how it shows us what is true. So we're going to talk about the difference between that biblical discernment and the critical or judgmental spirit in a second, but first let's look over at 1 John 4.
00:02:57
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which says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the Spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
00:03:21
Speaker
little children you are from God and have overcome them for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. Now we're going to break this down a little bit and I want to start with this reference to testing the spirits in some of the context for first John.
00:03:37
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So, at the time of writing, one of the major attacks on Christianity and the Gospel was Gnosticism.
Gnosticism and Early Christianity
00:03:44
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We talked about Gnosticism in past seasons, particularly in the Women's Issues series where we talked about body image and how the body and the soul are united in the Judeo-Christian ethic.
00:03:59
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And how important that is for debunking Gnosticism and its modern day equivalent, New Age ideology. So this Gnostic idea is present when John is writing and he's saying, test every spirit. Test the spirit of what is being spoken to you. Test the truth of it. Figure out what the core message is and figure out how you can discern whether that matches up with the gospel or not.
00:04:29
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And he then gives the criteria. He says, by this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. And if they do not confess that, they are not from God. So the core issue here was centering on the person of Jesus.
00:04:46
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coming in the flesh. And if you look at the Apostle's Creed and then the later Nicene Creed, you see that this concept of Jesus being the only begotten Son of God, not made, but begotten, was huge for the early church because Gnosticism taught that Jesus was either just a spirit, never a man, or that he was not begotten by God, but made by God as kind of like a sub-god, not unified with Father God.
The Spirit of the Antichrist in Modern Teachings
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And so he's confronting that ideology here. He's saying, look, if somebody tells you this, it's not true. And then he goes on to say that those who contradict the gospel in the nature of Jesus are speaking with the spirit of the antichrist. Now, if you have grown up with a premillennial eschatology, so like kind of a left behind kind of concept, then
00:05:37
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You are familiar with the term antichrist, but are probably thinking of this as a future person. Reality is that the antichrist, the spirit of the antichrist, is something that's present in the world today and has been from the beginning. It's the enemy. It's the accuser. That is who the antichrist is. And so even if there is a future antichrist that is indwelt by the spirit of the accuser,
00:06:03
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The spirit of the accuser is here today, and he is present in every true heresy, every false teaching. That is the spirit of the Antichrist. So he said, that's already here. It's happening. It's in these false teachings. But then he gives this awesome news. He says, little children, you are from God and have overcome them.
Understanding a Critical Spirit
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You have overcome these spirits because the one who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.
00:06:30
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And the reason I read you this whole passage because oftentimes when people are talking about discernment,
00:06:36
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They tend to take this verse, test the spirits, look for the false prophets, focus on that first portion, and they forget verse 4, which says that we are overcomers in Christ. We discern and test the spirits from a standpoint of victory and confidence. We do not test the spirits from a standpoint of fear, anxiety, and criticism.
00:07:03
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there is a difference. And that brings us to the critical spirit. So for those of us who have critical thinking minds, and I hope that would be all of us or that we'd be growing in that regard, the weakness, the difficulty for us is to not fall into a critical spirit.
00:07:20
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a way of speaking, a way of thinking that is looking for what is bad, looking for what is negative, nitpicking, finding fault. That's what a critical spirit is. A few more attributes of this. They do not tend to believe, now they may in word, but in action, they do not tend to believe in the Holy Spirit's work.
00:07:44
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The critical spirit has stopped believing that the Holy Spirit is at work in the people around them. They believe that's their job, their job to find what's wrong. Secondly, a critical spirit exalts man's wisdom above God's wisdom.
00:07:58
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I know that's a pretty big statement. We oftentimes hear from these very discernment ministries that they are pointing out ideologies that exalt man's wisdom. But when they fall into a critical, fault-finding spirit, especially about other believers, they are exalting their own wisdom above God, and they have lost the spirit of biblical discernment by becoming tone-deaf and cruel in how they talk about it.
00:08:27
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They take on the Holy Spirit's role of convicting people instead of trusting him to convict, instead of spending just as much time in prayer over the people that they're trying to reach, using an angry or forceful tone, losing sight of nuance when it comes to secondary issues or slight differences in theology, not on core issues, but on these more fringe issues like spiritual gifts or gender roles and things like that.
00:08:57
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and they lose sight of the core issue. This results in division in the body over those secondary issues.
00:09:07
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other characteristics include looking for opportunities to find flaws in other believers, making lists of people who can't be trusted, and advertising those lists to people without context, without giving footnoted sources, just naming names and not giving a fully-orbed, gently-spoken study on why those people can't be trusted.
00:09:31
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These are all signs of a critical spirit, and you are going to see them in today's Christian culture, in the frenzied online world that we have that is telling us we must speak up at every single opportunity. And let me tell you something. Accounts like these will get followers because negative news always travels faster than good news does.
00:09:52
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negative news, hopping on the latest thing, always having something to say, it will travel faster, it will gain more followers because humans love drama.
Discernment with Trust and Rest
00:10:02
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But what we have to ask is, is this how God wants me to test the spirits? Is this the kind of behavior of
00:10:07
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someone who is discerning out of a state of rest and confidence that Christ has overcome the world, that Christ has overcome these ideologies.
Promoting Deeper Spiritual Life and Book Launch
00:10:17
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Because if Christ has overcome them, we discern out of that place of trust, of rest, of confidence in Him.
00:10:26
Speaker
I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true. But it's not the whole truth. The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women.
00:10:45
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So if you're tired of hearing the watered down Christian teaching and you're hungry for a deeper spiritual life, I have something for you. It's my brand new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful, Finding Soul Deep Strength in a Skin Deep World. Stop Calling Me Beautiful is a book about going deeper with God.
00:11:02
Speaker
I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon, or for more information, head to my website FeliciaMasonheimer.com and click the book tab.
00:11:28
Speaker
And so I want to give a couple verses that can guide us in discerning biblically without giving into that critical spirit. And I want to remind you that as I talk about this, I talk about this from a place of utter dependence on the Lord that I do not give into that critical spirit. It is so easy for me to be critical of myself, of others. It is my natural bent and it is
00:11:54
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utterly essential that I rely on the Lord in order to reject that behavior and choose instead to walk in the fruit of the Spirit. And so I want to look at Ephesians. We're going to look at Ephesians 4.15. You guys know this verse, but I think it's important to revisit
00:12:13
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And let's back up a little bit to 13, where Paul is saying that his heart for the church is that we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.
00:12:37
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Rather, so rather than being carried around by every wind of doctrine, rather than being undiscerning, we speak the truth in love and we grow up in every way into Him who is the head, who is Christ.
00:12:55
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So God's goal for us is to grow up in our knowledge, to become mature. But His goal is not for us to use that maturity, that knowledge that we grow into, to bash and to destroy and to divide.
00:13:11
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It's unity. The whole point of this particular passage in Ephesians 4 is unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. So you cannot separate unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. They go together. We also cannot separate maturity from speaking the truth in love. And to be honest, what I have seen in today's Christian world online, especially Instagram right now,
00:13:35
Speaker
is an immaturity when it comes to speaking truth and love, a spiritual immaturity that results in people either only speaking love with no truth or only speaking truth with no love and no grace. That's a sign of spiritual immaturity, and that should be a red flag to you. If someone's tone does not reflect
00:13:57
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what we see in scripture as the guiding principles for someone who adheres to the gospel, then we should have a check in our hearts when we listen to them.
Self-Assessment and True Discernment
00:14:06
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Now everyone is on a growth with the Lord. I myself am someone who has grown over the last five years in what I've been writing, what I've been doing, and as I have grown I have become more and more aware of the importance
00:14:19
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importance of my tone and submitting that to the Lord, allowing him to work in me and change how I speak and how I relay information. So, you know, we have to give grace for that journey, but I think we also need to be aware of who we're listening to because people who are angry
00:14:40
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and in how they discern and how they present that information, disciple their people to be angry to. And it's one of the reasons that we see the church fracturing and we see people being sent into the deconstruction camp because of Christians who cannot grasp Evasions 4.15. I want to also look at Colossians 4.6
00:15:02
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Colossians 4-6 which says, conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. I think it's unique in this passage that Paul is saying that you might not know how to answer, that you're going to have to wait to answer until you seek the Spirit and he shows you how to talk graciously.
00:15:30
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how to talk graciously. And he also indicates in the context here how you ought to answer each person might mean you're not supposed to say anything, that we should be silent. And I think that's something we should really consider as well. So when we're speaking the truth, when we are discerning a couple takeaways or next steps, I want you guys to be thinking about
00:15:51
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Let's ask ourselves, am I putting myself in the role of the Holy Spirit, or have I decided that I'm better at discerning than He is? Am I listening to people who are creating in me a critical spirit, who are creating
00:16:06
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a pattern of judgment and fault finding in me. This doesn't mean that you don't look for what is truly false teaching, but that you make sure that you're varying who you're listening to, that you're checking what they're saying against the word and against the standard for discernment and truth speaking.
00:16:23
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Lastly, let's ask ourselves, am I making excuses for my own sin? For the way I talk? Am I making excuses for sarcasm? Am I making excuses for how I present the gospel? Am I using personality tests as a cover for sinful behaviors?
00:16:39
Speaker
saying that, well, you know, I'm just an Enneagram 3 or an Enneagram 8, and that's just who I am. And so I can talk this way because it's just my personality. When you are a Christian, everything in your personality is submitted to the Lord God. And so we need to be looking at scripture and saying, Lord, who do you want me to be? How do you want me to
Conclusion and Call to Action
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talk? And when we do that, we will be able to discern what is true and right, but we will also be able to reject a critical spirit.
00:17:07
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Thanks for joining me today, you guys. Next week, we'll be taking another question in our Ask Anything Monday series. Can't wait to get into the word with you and dive into how the Lord is leading us to live our lives for Him. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.