Article 4 Key Steps to Discernment

[Lori Jane]

Even tho this article isn't speaking of biblical discernment I thought it had lots of application. What do you think?

4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools - Stillness in the Storm

Best Quotes:

Be willing to be wrong, so you can learn how to be right.​

Key Point: All discernment works by comparing a map of knowledge to reality in some way. A claim, belief or theory, is itself a map of knowledge, whether it’s a personal claim you just intuited or deduced, or a claim coming from someone else, like a friend, a news agency, a scientific organization, or a government.

Avoid This: A Straw Man fallacy is when you improperly reconstruct a claim in your mind. If your friend said they were taken to Venus, but you thought they said Mars, you misunderstood their claim, you created a “straw man.” It’s easy to make this mistake. This is why being patient, humble, and open-minded is so important, we have to be willing to entertain things that might not feel true so we can form an accurate picture. Most of the problems people encounter with discernment are due to misconception or not properly reproducing a claim in their own mind. Don’t rush this step, it takes time and dedication, you need to be able to recognize when you’ve made a mistake and go back to fix it.

Key Point: Ideally, you should understand every element of a claim completely. If it relates to the rate at which ionized water vapor moves through a storm cell, and you don’t know anything about these things, you should spend some time learning about them. This means that the more knowledge you have about a great many things the more accurately you can understand a claim and thus, you’ll be better at discernment in general.

Key Point: When we can’t directly observe the territory or the phenomenon a claim describes, we can’t produce a definitive answer. We have to rely on likelihoods instead. No matter how much you might feel like a claim is accurate, proper discernment never assumes a definitive answer. If you try to force an answer, you’ll end up blinding yourself to greater truth beyond the limited scope of that answer. For example, it might feel to you like your friend just doesn’t like you anymore because they stopped calling you, but unless you courageously ask them what’s going on, you won’t know for sure—they might have lost service on their phone.

Key Point: Multidimensional thinking is extremely useful—we have to avoid dualistic black and white mindsets. Discernment rarely gives us clear answers of true or false. Discernment often gives us a host of possibilities that could be true, based on some body of evidence, assessed as a probability of likelihood via supportive evidence gathered during research.

 

[Diana S]

For seeking truth it is very useful.

The article mentions this as well:
In an age of deception, seeking the truth with wisdom is essential—it’s a survival skill.
Discernment requires honest truth-seeking.
You have to want to know the truth, even if it means letting go of a belief you’ve had for a long time.

After finding out the truth about the so called 'truth', I still wanted to know the truth about our Father, Jesus and the Bible.
I used to rely on the organization and their library for spiritual knowledge, but now, now, just by reading the Bible and ask for the Sprit to guide me, I learn things like:
John 1:14 says amongst other things that Jesus is full of truth.
The article also says: Because true knowledge is the master key to unlocking all our potentials—the ultimate problem solver is a mind guided by the truth. We need true knowledge to do things correctly in the world.

God's Word says in Col 2:2 that their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love, and gaining all riches of the full assurance of understanding, that they may know the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ, 3 in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. 4 Now I say this that no one may delude you with persuasiveness of speech.
Treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him, in Jesus.
Not everyone will find them and many will be deluded.
We need Jesus who asked the Father to send the Helper ( John 14:16, 17) Holy Spirit, not men who tell you what to belief.

I am starting to learn a lot more, amazing things sometimes. Just by reading the Word of God.
And I have to learn a lot more from reading and learn or learn how to regognize the feeling that the Spirit leaves within me.

 

[LeeB]

I view spiritual discernment as already knowing the truth and from there seeing the lie, no lie is of the truth. Gods spirit teaches us the truth and eliminates any need for a man. This is spiritual logic.
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