Greetings!
God did not engineer your salvation only for the purpose of cleansing you of sin, but also for the purpose of filling you with Himself. The work He is doing — the cleansing, the crucifying, the breaking — all has one purpose.
To prepare His chosen dwelling place for His presence. “‘I will show the holiness of my great name. . . . Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I show myself holy through you before their eyes’” (Ezekiel 36:23). Do you see what the Lord is saying? He will show His holiness through you. His holiness is being reproduced in you. You will display His holiness to the world.
Do you find it to be true that the more you know of God’s truth, the more you truly desire it? The more you understand His ways, the more you long to be free of the ways of flesh? “I gain understanding from your precepts; therefore I hate every wrong path” (Psalm 119:104).
“I am your servant; give me discernment that I may understand your statutes” (Psalm 119:125).
Discernment means to separate out, to look into, distinguish between. Understanding is the goal of discernment. God wants you to understand Him, His ways, and His Word. Through His Word, God intends to reveal Himself to us. He means for us to know what is available and what He is willing and able to put into our lives. It is not His plan to keep us in the dark, but instead He wants to bring us into His inner circle where He can tell us His secrets. Listen to Jesus say this to you right now: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15–16). “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us” (1 Corinthians 2:12).
Understanding takes knowledge one step further. For example, I may know a mathematical equation such as (insert symbol for pi here)r2 because I have memorized it. I may know how to say it; I may know how to write it; I may know how to use it to answer the question, “How do you find the area of a circle?” But I may still not understand it. I may know it and yet it still has no meaning to me.
A discerning heart can turn knowledge into understanding because it is the dwelling place for the Spirit of God, who understands the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10). Remember that to discern means to take apart and to sift. In your spirit, you take apart the truths of God and look into their mystery. Then you put them back together into a form that your intellect can recognize and assign meaning to. You know their inner workings.
Compare this process with the way your physical brain reaches understanding from the stimuli it receives from your environment. When, for example, your brain receives visual stimuli — your eyes look at an object — signals are sent to the visual cortex, where there are layers of cells with specialized functions. Some sense colors. Some sense shapes.
Some sense depth. Some are so specialized that they detect two lines that connect to form an angle and nothing else. It’s as if the visual cortex consisted of billions of highly trained, exquisitely specialized observers, each of whom is responsible for one thing and one thing only, no matter what the overall scene being viewed. Put all these specialized mini-pictures together and you have a splendidly detailed, beautifully colored picture.
The incoming information is processed and refined so that all the data about the object being viewed — its size, distance, shape, color, location, relationship to the background — are assembled into one coherent image.
Then this information is sent to another part of the brain (hippocampus), the memory storage area, where the new information is checked against the stored data. Then, in a matter of milliseconds, the information is transmitted to other brain areas where decisions are made as to its meaning and what, if any, action should be taken in response to it. Amazing, isn’t it?
The amazing way that God created your brain is only an inadequate picture of how your spirit, transfused with the life of Jesus, turns spiritual knowledge into understanding. When you respond from Spirit, not from your flesh, to the Word of God and the truths of the spiritual realm, your spirit dissects that information, sifts it, looks into it; your spirit turns it upside down and inside out and then puts it all back together into a form that your intellect recognizes. The discerning heart has an understanding of
the things of God. What happens when we understand the things of God?
“Give me understanding, and I will keep your law and obey it with all my heart” (Psalm 119:34). When I understand a law, I naturally obey it. For example, I do not jump off of cliffs because I understand the law of gravity. As God gives you deep understanding, obedience becomes your natural reaction. I understand what He teaches me. “I have not departed from your laws, for you yourself have taught me. . . . I gain understanding from your precepts; therefore I hate every wrong path” (Psalm 119:102, 104).
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Jennifer Kennedy Dean 2019© | Legacy Writings
