The voice is for you

A series on discernment - part 1

Photo by Miguel Alcântara on Unsplash

There’s an intriguing story in the gospel of John that provides a helpful entry into discernment. In chapter 12, there are Greeks worshipping in Jerusalem who ask two of Jesus’ disciples: “we would like to see Jesus.” They name the longing that’s at the heart of Christian discernment - to see and know Jesus.

We don’t know if Jesus responded directly to them but something in Jesus is triggered. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” Jesus says; it’s time for more of his true nature to be revealed. He now begins to hint at and speak of the cross. You find Jesus disturbed by this realization and he prays, “Father, glorify your name.”

Then a peculiar event unfolds - a voice from heaven responds to the prayer of Jesus. “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again,” the voice says. But here’s a fascinating detail — John notes that “the crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.”

A shared experience happened but all those present perceived it differently — and not all accurately. Jesus heard the voice of his Father, to whom he was just praying, but then notes, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine.” There was a communication from God that was intended for those gathered around Jesus. Yet the surrounding crowd perceived something different; they thought it was a natural occurrence — thunder. Others thought an angel. But the voice was neither.

This story highlights two key parts in discernment. First, God communicates. There is an immediate witness of God that is available to us. This is obvious, a foundational but sometimes unacknowledged reality (some would limit God’s communications only to scripture).

Second, there is a necessary perceptual capacity to receive that witness of God. However, this ability is not always developed well enough for one to know/perceive whether what is experienced is the voice of God or the funky chicken eaten last night. Jesus was able to clearly perceive this, some others got a little closer, sensing a voice, the presence of more than vibrating sound waves, while still others perceived only a natural occurrence.

This story haunts me — how much of God’s voice have I completely missed in the course of a day? How much of God’s communication have I ignored or attributed to something other when in fact the Lord of all things was speaking?

We badly need discernment because God speaks. Frederick Buechner observes, “However faintly we may hear him, God is speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling.”¹

Because it is recoverable, we can attend to the voice of the Living God; because it is precious beyond telling, we must.

Discernment is the capacity to perceive and distinguish the voice, presence and activity of God from the many other voices vying for our attention (we’ll explore more definitions later but let’s work with this for now). This is a foundational ability of any follower of Jesus. “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me,” Jesus says in John 10. Or the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” There is an immediate witness of God - one congruent with and shaped by scripture, but one not mediated by the text of scripture. It is the living voice of the Good Shepherd.

Discernment is rooted in a capacity that theologians call the sensus divinitatis. It’s a term John Calvin coined in his Institutes: “That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity [the Latin sensus divinitatis], we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead.” Calvin goes on to say that this sense or awareness of the Divine is an entirely human capacity, which makes discernment a vital part of being fully human.

Discernment is both a grace and a skill, involving a witness of the Spirit and a wisdom to be gained. Discernment is a response to God’s prior activity so it always begins in grace. But it is a skill to be learned and developed, the sharpened perceptual capacity to see, hear or sense God’s presence and activity in the world.

So let’s explore this beautiful wonder of discernment. I’m interested in exploring this because I teach a course in Christian Discernment in Tyndale Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program, so I’m regularly interacting with students about discernment and wanting to better understand and develop this (I’m looking forward to hearing about and learning from your adventures in discernment). But I often find there is fuzziness around the use of the term discernment. I hear it used in different circles but I keep having this Inigo Montoya (Princess Bride) moment: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” So I’m hoping we might come to better clarity about what discernment is and involves.

But back to the ‘why’. Discernment may be the disciple’s most necessary skill for the times we find ourselves in. One significant feature in our day is the last gasps of empirical rationalism as the privileged mode of knowing. Our culture is going through a meaning crisis, banging up against the limits of the modernist understanding of reality, left asking “Is that all there is?” Having held a funeral for God and placed our trust in science alone, we’re finding ourselves not so sure we want a world without God, without a sacredness to life and living.

But we can’t stay in this vacuum for long - something will fill it. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character describes well what’s unfolding around us: “It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition … It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are.”² Into the vacuum left by secularity, the old gods of paganism are making a comeback. Zeus and Mars, Aphrodite and Bacchus, Thor and Odin. And some new one’s too. You might not recognize the forms of their appearing, though; they shape-shift and masquerade. So how do we discern well?

Add into this mix the deluge of information and opinion, a daily torrent of blogs and Substack newsletters (the irony is not lost on me. I did wonder, does the world really need one more newsletter?) With infinitely more data and opinion than we can humanly sift and digest, we unwittingly outsource discernment to algorithms which now curate all that is worthy of our attention. It leaves you lamenting with T.S. Eliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Layered over top is the viral spread of disinformation. We’ve become so gullible, falling for what seems inconceivable. With diminished skills to discern, echo chambers catechize with the false comfort of un-interrogated convictions. Every age has its ship of fools but doesn’t it seem we float among an armada of idiocy?

I’m not placing myself above this but within it all, prone to the blinding distractions and deceptions of our age. It only heightens for me the ache for the wise fruit of discernment.

Mostly, though, we need discernment because it is a foundational capacity for our mission as God’s people, who are meant to embody God’s own wisdom. In Deuteronomy 4, Moses calls the people of Israel to observe God’s ways and laws. Why? It will display “your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” (Deut. 4:6-7).

Don’t you long for the church to rise up to this calling? For a watching world to see God’s people and say, “This is a wise and understanding people.”

This is, after all, our calling because it is our end. The apostle Paul, writing to that Corinthian rabble caught in fractious forms of folly, says “do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world?” He then repeats it in the next verse, “Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!”

There is too much to tease out here but I’m struck by Paul’s astonishment at the unawareness of this calling. Twice he says “Do you not know?” Can we press that question to the church today? Do we not know this is who we are? Do we not know this is our calling? Do Christians today not realize the role God has made us for, the role we will play in the new creation?

Paul then shifts from our high calling in the new creation to life today. If this is God’s intended aim for humans, this dominion first conferred in Genesis, then how much more should we be growing in and displaying that necessary wisdom today, exercising a rare kind of discernment in the disputes and complexities we face today. How are we learning to discern, preparing to exercise the astonishing dominion God invites us into?

Keen reason and strategic thinking have so much to offer — but God give us wise discernment.

1. F. Buechner, Now and then, p. 3.

2. G.K. Chesterton, The Oracle of the Dog.