So much of Christian culture today is about shortcuts. It used to be that books would say 21 days to a better prayer life. Now the numbers have gotten smaller: 7 steps to a better marriage, 3 tools that will transform your church. While some of those might work, I will say right now there are no shortcuts to discernment.
A lot of you are reading the bible in a year, and I am sure many of you have felt this at some point these last 2 months, “Well nothing’s really sticking, I don’t think I’m getting anything”. Of course comparatively reading the bible for yourself is not going to as easy or as exciting as sitting through a sermon at first. In a sermon, someone has gone through the trouble of digesting and researching and cross-referencing things for you, and everything comes to you in fast food Mc-Nugget form that is tasty and easy to get down. It does not help with discernment though. Think of it this way, getting someone else to cook for you when you are hungry certainly solves the hunger problem for a while, but it does not do anything for your inability to cook does it?
So you might have a hard time discerning what God wants to say, through scripture, QT, etc. You will inevitably have questions that you want answered, or things that you do not understand, and yes, you can find some middle-aged caucasian gentleman on Youtube that will give you answers for your issue. It feels good to have some answers, but in the long run if all you do is gather rumours, regardless or how trustworthy or substantiated, your discernment is never going to grow.
Discernment requires chewing on unchewed food, unchewed food requires patience, and real patience requires the humility to say that some things are too big for me to chew on right now.
John 16:12 I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
Jesus was saying this to his disciples, guys who have spent three whole years with Jesus in the flesh! Would it be such a stretch to think that maybe God does not want to tell us certain things for our sakes? Or could it be the more frequent response I get nowadays, “Ken could you read the next couple of chapters before you come pounding at me about it? Perhaps could you read the whole bible once before we take this up? At the risk of sounding too demanding, if you don’t mind, could you read the bible 2-3 times over before we get to talking about this?” And our answer usually is NO, I don’t want to wait that long, or read that much, I WANT MY ANSWER NOW! And then we go on Youtube, find the middle-aged caucasian gentleman who will tell us what to believe, and listen to him instead. Meanwhile God is thinking, “Really? Not that he’s bad, but I thought we were going to talk about this. I was looking forward to our time together before I revealed more to you.”
We are so quick to forget that God’s goal for scripture is not just knowledge, it is also intimacy. It is also about character, of which patience is severely lacking in most of us nowadays.
I have only tracked it this year but I have read the bible heavily in the last 2-3 years. Only now, probably 6-7 times through the NT am I remembering enough of scriptures for the Holy Spirit to be able to make connections for me. For you first time readers, I would be lying if I said to expect major nuances/insights on your first read through. You are really just trying to get in some raw material for the Holy Spirit to work with and bring to mind later. You will see connections begin to build more and more in subsequent reads through your entire lifetime as God begins to reveal to you His grand narrative out of this cloud of scripture in your head.
Yes, in the mean time you will not sound as smart as other kids who heard something amazing over the weekend service, which they will likely forget two weeks later, but yet will likely look at you like why do you not know these things. So what? Who are we trying to impress here? Will you be patient in your relationship with God, or will you tell Him you will tell me what I want to know or I am going to listen to someone else?
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