Spiritual DiscernmentSample

Discernment and Separation

In the beginning, God. Everything started with God. God has existed eternally, outside of time. God is spirit, and order is important: the spiritual comes before the natural. God’s original intended patterns and order are vital and cannot be altered.

The first thing God did in the creation of the heavens and earth was that God created light—and He said it was good. But immediately after that, God did something interesting—He separated the light from the darkness. He is a God of separation and distinction. Because God is holy, He cannot have any fellowship with anything that is unholy. Because God is light, there is no darkness in Him.

To discern spiritually is to recognize the SEPARATION of good and evil.

We see this theme of separation running throughout scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. Even when the word discern or distinguish isn’t specifically used, there are regular references to the difference between right and wrong, holy and unholy, righteous and wicked, pure and impure, wise and foolish, and light and darkness. The separation between good and evil is inherent to God’s kingdom and is very clear throughout the Word.

As believers, cultivating spiritual discernment requires us to recognize this separation. And this includes an awareness that for everything God has created that is good, the enemy tries to counterfeit with the opposite. Satan will always seek to blur and contaminate every distinction between good and evil. He has done this since the beginning because he is a liar. The result of this is that many things that are evil are now called "good," and things that are of God are called "evil."

The wonderful news is that even though the enemy is a liar and a thief, God is a God of abundance, and He comes to give us life in its fullest measure! Through the precious blood of Jesus Christ, we have been redeemed, and we have been called out of darkness into His wonderful light.