Christian DiscernmentSample

A poor counselor 

Because of the world’s spiritual condition outside of Christ, it is a poor counselor to the church when it comes to setting the church’s agenda. And because God made human beings in His image, even people without Christ can recognize certain things about what is right and wrong. 

People have no real access—outside of Christ—to godly answers. Almost always, the way they evaluate a situation and solve problems lacks God’s perspective and wisdom. It is only in Christ that we gain perspective and experience wisdom from God. 

Ephesians 4:17–18 describes our lives before the Lord saved us, and where most of humanity is right now: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their hearts.”

Think about the stacking up of terms there: their thoughts are described as futile, vain, misguided, and empty. They are darkened in their understanding and alienated from God because of their ignorance. 

There is a considerable contrast between what we have in Jesus now and what we had before we were in Him, where most of the world is now. Darkness, ignorance, futility, hardness of heart characterizes the world; why would the church adopt such a counselor? Why would we want to walk in the thinking that we knew, that proved to be futile, before we knew Christ? 

I say the church is misguided when we begin to speak as the world communicates, think as the world thinks, or address problems as the world does because then we are operating in the wrong wisdom. We have a problem when the church is willing to reevaluate what it has long believed in response to the social consciousness and moral outrage of the world—the world that has proven it has no conscience nor respect for what is truly moral according to Scripture.