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Discerning Within Yourself
As you grow in your dealings with the Holy Spirit in prayer and disciplines, you'll come to see more clearly how the Spirit at work in day-to-day life. Since the reborn New You has a supernatural nature, the supernatural begins to feel quite natural. As we allow ourselves to live in tune with God's gifts, it becomes easier to see where the supernatural is making things happen in our natural lives. In doing that, our faith deepens. The more we (appropriately) use the gifts we're given, the better we get at what we use the gifts for. The Spirit not only gives, the Spirit also teaches and trains. A skill develops to go with the gift.
The spiritualists of Luther's day, like Muntzer and Karlstadt, were dualists, drawing hard lines between good and evil, and relying strongly on the inner voice. They treated salvation as if it were a process of making ourselves ever more like God. That is synergism, a form of 'works righteousness' that conveys what a person senses is happening, but does not convey what is actually happening.
Luther knew that there is only one Lord, and he rules over all of life. The Spirit doesn't give a dispassionate 'power' so we can fully imitate Christ. The Spirit works to give us Christ Himself, so that, as Paul put it, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20).
Conscience can sometimes be a useful guide, at least according to Paul. But then, maybe we listen more to Jiminy Cricket and trust it too much and too often. A conscience needs to be formed and shaped, otherwise it just oozes around like a glob of goo, confused or going in conflicting directions. Or maybe, not going anywhere at all. (It can still be of much use, but not any part of what it can be.) The modern world inflicts great damage on the conscience, so it gets twisted up and can't do its job rightly, or worse, can't do it at all.
The Spirit uses earthly tools (Christian education, Scripture, and various ways of discernment, and so on) to reshape us and our conscience. This re-formed conscience gets set into a context of prayer, fellowship and the spiritual disciplines. It is only this re-formed conscience that becomes a (fairly) trustworthy guide. This re-shaped conscience senses when we are or aren't living in harmony with the truths that God has written into our new selves, and it aims us upward.
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Uncovering Bogus Gifts and Deeds
The letter to Timothy warns that some will be led to follow deceiving spirits. Those spirits can be from beyond the Christian faith, such as the seeking of wealth or fame or magical power. But most of it will be where it can do the most damage : within the Christian community.
There are some markers by which we can tell the spiritual counterfeits :
* the lack of love they show. (It's no accident that Paul puts into the middle of his powerful writings on gifts (1 Corinthians 12 and 14) his earth-shaking chapter on love (1 Corinthians 13).)
* one person's authority is held beyond question;
* someone or something is in the place that Christ and His good news should be.
Noone, on their own authority, can 'send' the Spirit into others, and certainly not :
* chucking into them like a spear or
* shooting into them like an arrow.
* doing a countdown (like that of a rocket launch) to the arrival of the Spirit
(No kidding -- such stuff is really being done in some circles.)
Doing such things is like a satire on God's gift-giving, a joke at God's expense. The Spirit follows no human's cue as to where or when to act. The Holy Spirit acts to draw attention to Christ, not to lift up an evangelist or preacher or ministry or movement.
Who makes counterfeit gifts? Mostly the human mind of the faker, through learning how to trick people or to draw them into dependent relationships. Sometimes there is power which comes from the Chief Deceiver himself, the Devil. Whatever the source, there's a lot of it going around. Where the frauds show up, they must be called for what they are.
Scripture provides us with some rules on discernment of spiritual gifts. Paul's rules on gifts is that they are there to be used to build up the gathered believers and further the Gospel witness, in any specific situation. He also says they are to be used with a sense of good order.
When the pastor and leaders teach, preach, and model good discernment, it creates a good atmosphere for it. The members wouldn't look at someone who raised hard questions as if they're weird. Fewer folks would say "that's not how we do things around here". Their leaders could show them that if they are to follow Christ, then seeking the Spirit's leading is the way things are done in the Church.
The spiritual fruit are to be found not in the moment of a miracle, but in life after the miracle.
Rise up O saints of God
Trust God
"The basic decision, after all, is to let God be God, to say "yes" to the work of the Lord, which goes before the church's ability to understand or even perceive it."
Luke Timothy Johnson, *Scripture and Discernment*
The fact that I can write a long piece on discernment and just scratch the surface tells us how foggy our human vision is. We can use all the means of discernment at hand, act on what it leads us to believe is direction from the Spirit, and still do a belly-flop and look like a jerk. We all need to keep in mind that it's okay to be mistaken. Our God is a God of grace. The Church's role is to be there with a hand to help you back up and to get you moving in a steadier way. If the church doesn't do it, God will, somehow. God rewards spiritual diligence.
It may take a while to see through the fog of life. That's why we need to keep discerning. Keep at it, and the Lord's light will burn away most of the fog.
"I believe in the Spirit's guidance just as surely as I believe in God."
--- Fredrik Wisloff, *I Believe In the Holy Spirit* (Augsburg).
Many blessings to you,Kathy Hamilton(MARTIN)
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