Spiritual Discernment

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

In the last article, we looked at how God designed your spirit with the innate ability to know intuitively. Building upon this idea, this article explains the importance of strengthening and developing your spirit so you can better discern His voice and leading.

Speaking from personal experience, when you don’t understand your spirit, it normally results in you having a strong soul and a weak spirit. This condition suppresses your spirit and stifles the indwelling life of Christ.

Nevertheless, spiritual Christians are alert, aware, and sensitive to what the indwelling Spirit speaks to their spirit. Spiritual Christians are actively waiting on the indwelling Spirit for direction, insight, and wisdom. Just as carnal Christians live by rational thoughts, fickle emotions, self-preferences, and the five senses of their unredeemed body.

If you want to live from your spirit, then your spirit must be strengthened by the power of the indwelling Spirit, which in turn, causes your spirit’s innate ability to know God’s thoughts, direction, insight, and revelation. This enables your spirit to know intuitively apart from reasoning, and you begin to discern all things (1 Cor. 2:15).

As your spirit grows stronger through your intimate relationship with the Lord and by God’s inward power, your intuition grows sharper, giving you the ability to know God deeper, discern His will and ways more accurately, and grow in spiritual understanding.

After I realized the indwelling Spirit often communicates directly to my spirit, I now try to pay much closer attention to my spirit, waiting on the indwelling Spirit to speak using spiritual thoughts and spiritual words. Focusing my attention on my spirit helps me recognize the Spirit’s thoughts and whispers quicker.

I have learned the hard way that if I fail to do this, it’s easy to neglect His leadership due to a dull spirit. That’s why I spend more time in prayer ensuring that my spirit is strong, sharp, active, alert, and aware. I don’t want to miss the Spirit’s direction and wisdom.

Receiving Revelation of the Depths of God

Paul taught the Corinthians about receiving the indwelling Spirit’s thoughts in their spirits. He began his discourse talking about things that eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and what has not entered the heart of men and women (see 1 Cor. 2:9). This isn’t new revelation. It’s a deeper understanding of what God has revealed to us in His Word, a deeper revelation of Him.

Many Christians believe this type of mystical revelation is unattainable in the here and now. They think it is something you can’t experience until you die and go to heaven. Yet Paul said just the opposite, stating, “For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10).

Because of the indwelling Spirit, who knows and searches the depths of God in heaven, you can receive revelation right now.

How does the indwelling Spirit reveal these deep things of God to you? Paul said, “Not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” (1 Cor. 2:13).

The Lord communicates to you through your spirit-to-Spirit union with Christ. This causes you to know immediately what He is saying, unaided by conscious reasoning.

If your spirit is strong and your intuition sharp, you can immediately detect His thoughts and whispers. You can instantly know what He is saying to you.

Praying for a Spirit of Revelation

What food is to the body and rational thoughts are to the soul, so revelation is to the spirit. If you want to live from your spirit, living by revelation is essential.

Paul prayed for the Ephesians to have “a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him” (Eph. 1:17). Notice carefully spirit is lowercase, referring to your human spirit.

To live from your spirit, you need a spirit of wisdom and a spirit of revelation. You could also say it like this. Your spirit needs a regular transmission of the indwelling Spirit’s wisdom and revelation. Your spirit needs the indwelling Spirit to frequently express His thoughts, wisdom, ways, nature, and truth, causing you to know intuitively what He is communicating. This is how you receive spiritual wisdom and revelation.

Paul said, “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Revelation is like light shining within you, enabling you to know something immediately and to see something instantly.

Revelation is the indwelling Spirit communicating Christ, His Word, and His ways to your spirit. And then, in an instant, light shines into your heart, creating faith, and light illumines your mind, giving you spiritual wisdom and understanding.

You were once in darkness about who God is, what He is like, or a certain truth about His ways. And then, like a flash of divine light, you knew the truth instantly in your spirit, causing your heart to be enlightened and your mind to understand.

A Soulish Christian Can’t Discern God’s Thoughts

Paul said, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him” (1 Cor. 2:14).

The word natural means “soulish,” so it is saying the soulish person who lives from self-life in the soul does not accept the things of the Spirit. Those who live by the soul’s mind, even born-again Christians, often look at the work and revelation of the Holy Spirit as foolishness. Why? Because the soulish “cannot understand them” (1 Cor. 2:14).

If you try to comprehend the Lord with your natural mind, you will never be able to understand Him, for He is Spirit and He communicates Spirit to spirit.

A Spiritual Christian Discerns God’s Thoughts

Though the soulish Christian views the things of the Spirit as foolishness, the spiritual Christian accurately discerns what originates from the Holy Spirit and what has its origins in the soul or the flesh.

Paul continued, “The one who is spiritual discerns all things” (1 Cor. 2:15, NASB20).

Spiritual discernment and evaluation are intuitive. This sixth sense of your spirit, when sharpened by use and a strong spirit, perceives and knows things unknowable by the natural mind. Again, this is drastically different from knowledge you acquire by your body’s five senses or your soul’s mind, will, and emotions.

This is why Paul said, “He who is spiritual appraises all things” (1 Cor. 2:15).

Those who are spiritual—frequently receiving the Spirit’s thoughts in their spirit and knowing His thoughts immediately by intuition—have the ability to judge (NKJV), evaluate (NLT), discern (NASB20), and appraise (NASB95) all things.

Focusing On Where God Communicates

Since the Lord is infinitely higher than your finite brain’s ability to comprehend Him, living by revelation is essential to knowing Him. As Isaiah said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9).

When the Lord speaks to you inwardly, the indwelling Spirit does not reveal Himself directly to your rational mind. As Paul made clear in 1 Corinthians 2, the indwelling Spirit communicates Spirit to spirit, not Spirit to soul or Spirit to body (see 1 Cor. 2:9, 13).

This means you can’t know Him by reasoning or logical deduction. Rather, you grow in knowledge of Him, His Word, and His ways by revelation, communicated by the Spirit directly to your spirit.

It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have from a university or seminary. It doesn’t matter how learned you are in mathematics, physics, chemistry, literature, or history. The transcendent God of holiness and majesty is known by the Spirit communicating directly to your spirit.

Again, this does not undervalue intelligence or minimize the mind serving the spirit. This pinpoints where you can expect God to speak to you and reveal Himself and His Word to you.

If you don’t have revelation of Christ, His Word, and His ways, all you have is mere human wisdom. And don’t forget—human wisdom crucified Jesus Christ (see 1 Cor. 2:8).

You can never know God through human wisdom and intelligence. Living from the mind always keeps you alienated from God’s truth, ways, wisdom, and voice (see Eph. 4:17). And if you try to build your faith upon human wisdom, you will crash when storms blow. You will be overcome when fiery trials test the authenticity of your faith.

Comprehending the part of your where God communicates with you helps tremendously, for it directs your attention to your spirit so you can quickly discern the Spirit’s thoughts.

The more you pay attention to and heed your spirit’s intuition, the more you will live from the spirit and thus apprehend God’s heart and mind.

You Can’t Force It

Even though you have the mind of Christ and can expect the indwelling Spirit to transfer His thoughts to you regularly, this is not something you can make happen.

You can’t simply turn this on or off like a light switch.

The Lord yearns to communicate with you far more than you want to communicate with Him. But this is not something you can activate whenever you feel like hearing from God.

Like every other form of spiritual communication, Spirit-to-spirit thought transference requires actively waiting on Him to speak. Remaining alert in your spirit, tuned into your spirit’s intuition, so you can recognize the Spirit’s faintest thoughts and whispers.

And even though you should always expect Him to speak, there are days and even seasons when the Lord is silent.

Knowing this upfront keeps your heart from discouragement when you go through a dry spell.

It doesn’t mean the Lord is mad at you or doesn’t want to speak to you. He is just doing something new and different in your heart and soul.

More Information

Your spirit was designed to commune with Christ spirit to Spirit. If you would like to learn more about this, I recommend my teaching called Your Sixth Sense and you can also purchase my latest book Indwelling Life.

Bryan Kessler