Wind & Waves – “by practice you are trained to discern” – Hebrews 5:14
A Call to Discernment Part V
A banker isn’t trained to detect counterfeit money. Rather, he is trained to become so thoroughly familiar with real money that he can immediately detect the fake. Christians should be so thoroughly familiar with the Word of God that they can immediately identify false teaching, no matter how subtle. Hebrews 5:11-14 says “You have become dull of hearing. By this time you should be teachers, but instead you need to relearn the basics of God’s Word. You need milk, not solid food. You are inexperienced with the Righteous Word and still a baby. Solid food is for the mature, whose senses have been trained by practice to discern good from evil.” The writer said they had “become” dull of hearing – pointing to a retrogression – a slow drift away from thoroughly knowing the Scriptures – like the drip, drip, drip of a slow leaky faucet; it may take days, but eventually the sink will fill with water and then you have a problem on your hands! Notice that the problem is not with the difficulty of the Scriptures, but with the reader of the Scriptures. These readers had stopped “practicing” – applying the Truth that they did know to their lives in obedience, and so there spiritual sharpness had become dull over time. Their problem wasn’t that they couldn’t understand, but that they had chosen to become “dull of hearing.” “Dull” is a combination of two words: “no” + “push or thrust.” They had “no push or thrust.” Hebrews 6:12 translates it as “sluggish.” Proverbs 22:29 uses the same word to mean “slothful” instead of diligent. The idea is that a person is “sluggish, indolent, lazy, or slow.” Literally we could say these people were “lazy-eared.” This condition of being “heavy in the head” comes from a failure to take advantage of available Truth by putting it to work in daily living. We must work diligently to keep our spiritual senses of discernment sharp by striving to obey the commands of Jesus as revealed in the Bible. When we stop obeying Jesus as Lord, we risk becoming spiritually dull and then we are susceptible to false teaching. The key is obedience to what we already know, not more knowledge. What can you do? Review the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5 and identify the one in which you are weakest, and formulate a daily plan of how you will nurture that fruit in your life. Read Romans 7-8, and learn what Paul meant by “crucifying the sinful flesh with its desires,” and identify sin in your life that needs to be eliminated; formulate a daily plan of how to expunge it. Or read Ephesians 4-6 and Colossians 3-4 and take note of Paul’s “put off and put on principle,” and identify not only the sin that needs to be “put off,” but also identify the thoughts and behaviors that are pleasing to God that need to be “put on.” A detailed, attainable, daily plan is urgently important, not just leaving it to the wind. To ward off dullness, we must strive for sharpness.
