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Podcast: Why Discernment Today Is So Needed Yet So Neglected (Tim Challies)

November 28, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Evaluating Ideas through the Lens of Scripture

In today’s episode, Tim Challies talks about what spiritual discernment actually looks like, why it’s so important for the mature Christian, and how to cultivate it in our own lives.

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

Tim Challies

Scriptural principles are practically applied to help Christians not only develop and define day-to-day spiritual discernment but regard it as an essential practice.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:55 - How Things Have Changed in Evangelicalism

Matt Tully
Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Tim Challies
Sure, it’s my pleasure.

Matt Tully
You published your book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment in 2007, and in the fifteen years since that time a lot has changed in the world, including within evangelicalism and the landscape around us in the church. Do you sense that when it comes to just the broad trends, but then even in particular, issues related to discernment?

Tim Challies
Yeah, it’s very much a different world now than it was back then. In 2006 when I was writing and in 2007 when it was published, we were very much in a period of gathering Christians together around common theology. And so I think this book was part of that. It was trying to say, Here are the keys to discernment, and if we are agreed on these foundations of the Christian faith, there’s much we can do together. Fifteen years on, it seems we’re sort of in the reverse process of now doing more partitioning than gathering. Discernment has now become, I think, almost the opposite in pushing people away—in a sense, using discernment to drive people off and keep the fold small rather than wide.

Matt Tully
I was going to ask about that because it does seem like the church is more fractured, more divided, there’s more controversial disagreement about issues today than there maybe was fifteen years ago. At least it seems that way. Maybe it’s more public or obvious today. Do you think that’s, in general, because of discernment happening in a good way (the fruit of good discernment) or is that the fruit of maybe a lack of discernment in some sense?

Tim Challies
Probably both in a sense, but there was this period where we were really trying to draw together around those theological foundations that we had in common. And that was a really neat time. Now, we might have been a little idealistic about it and cast our net too wide.

Matt Tully
Do you think that you did that? Can you look back at things that you wrote or said where you feel like, I wasn’t really seeing the whole picture?

Tim Challies
I think in that context I was in a period of transition myself. I think I was going into writing the book a little bit of a pill when it came to discernment. But at that time, we were dealing with the emerging church and we were dealing with big box evangelicalism. And so we were looking at those things and saying, We, as people who are part of this New Calvinism, we’re pulling away from that and forming this own thing. We were drawing Reformed Baptist and Presbyterians.

Matt Tully
There was a coalescing among those in that circle, but there was also some distinctions.

Tim Challies
Right. We were defining ourselves against some of these other movements. Really, there was the church growth movement, and I think out of that came two things: the emerging church movement and the New Calvinism. Those two movements pulled out, one of which really focused on orthodoxy, and the other really focused on freshness or something. The New Calvinism was looking back in church history and drawing from that; the emerging church was trying to create this new thing. Over time the emerging church sort of faded away. The seeds of its destruction were sown right right into it from the get go. But the Reformed movement survived as an offshoot or a reaction to the church growth movement.

Matt Tully
But some today would say that with the Reformed movement, today we’re seeing some of the disintegration of that movement.

Tim Challies
Right. What happened, possibly, was too many people drew into that movement too quickly without really thinking through the issues. You had some people who clearly shouldn’t have been part of it. I think there was an idealism where we drew in people who were probably pragmatically attached to Reformed theology, not convictionally attached to Reformed theology. They were following the trend, and they followed the trend in and probably followed the trend right out. But definitely something’s changed in the last few years where I think other influences from outside the church have come in and fragmented the Reformed movement.

Matt Tully
It’s hard to talk about this issue and the changes that we’ve seen in evangelicalism over the last decade or so without talking about social media and the Internet. It’s remarkable to me that in 2006, the year before the book was released and when you were actually writing it, is when we saw Twitter first launch, we saw Facebook go public, in terms of people can sign up outside of a school or college context. What impact has the rise of social media had on where we’re at today in terms of these issues?

Tim Challies
When I wrote the book, blogs were social media. That’s what social media was. And blogs were very interactive back then. We don’t realize that today, but one person would write an article, other people would respond to it, and there would be links from one to the other. And so it was a conversational medium. There were some bad actors in there. There were some grouchy people and we were sometimes not so kind to one another, but generally the idea was to have these interactive engagements between different writers. I think there was a sweet spot there where that was really an enjoyable time.

Matt Tully
And you were, I would say, a leading figure in terms of the Christian Reformed space. You’ve been blogging since, how long?

Tim Challies
Since about 2001.

Matt Tully
So you’ve been there from the very beginning.

Tim Challies
Yeah, because blogs really came along around 2000. That was when they started to gain traction through a few well known figures in the mainstream world, and then some Christians picked it up. I started writing I think before I’d even heard the term “blog.” I was just writing on the Internet, as one did. And so I think what I was doing was, in a sense, writing myself out of the church growth movement, which I had been embedded in for some time. I grew up with deep Reformed roots, but left that to get into mainstream evangelicalism, and then through some of The Purpose Driven Life and other products that were coming out in the early 200s that were really big, I essentially wrote myself back into the Reformed space through the blog as I was just thinking about—

Matt Tully
You were processing through that writing.

Tim Challies
Yeah, I was externally processing. And then what happened is other people were searching around for information about these books, about the movie The Passion of the Christ, and about some of the other books that were coming out at that time. We were using this new technology of search engines like AltaVista and all that. Even Google people weren’t really using back then. It was still new technology, and people found it and latched onto it and started reading it. And the blog just sort of grew organically as one of the early expressions of the New Calvinism.

07:14 - Defining Discernment

Matt Tully
Let’s take a big step back for a minute. How would you define discernment? I think that’s a word that we hear a lot today in different contexts, and we’re going to get into some of those things in a minute, but how would you define discernment? How would you define spiritual discernment as a next step?

Tim Challies
Discernment is really a separation. It’s separating good from bad. The root is very much in pulling two things apart and separating them out. When it comes to spiritual discernment, you’re talking about separating truth from error and right from wrong. And, as I think it was Charles Spurgeon who said, “Almost right from right.” Things that seem really close to the truth, but actually are just aimed one or two degrees wrong, which eventually will lead you far away.

Matt Tully
Why is that worth highlighting—the almost truth category?

Tim Challies
Just because we have to be very careful. And even as we are drawing people together around discernment, we’re separating and now we’re pulling people together who believe the same thing. I think we have to be careful that we understand that just a little bit of error in certain directions—if you believe just a few things wrong about the Trinity—eventually you’re still going to end up far away from the truth. And so just being very careful. You don’t always have to be completely pedantic, and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing in the world today is a lot of separation over issues that aren’t primary issues. And they’re actually very peripheral issues.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that. In the book you reference Al Mohler and his concept of theological triage, something that we’ve talked about on this show before with others. How does—

Tim Challies
Which I should say was, at the time, he had just written that article. It was a relatively new article. You find his triage quoted all over the place now, but it was still relatively fresh back then, and I think a lot of people, myself included, think, Man, this is so helpful and fresh.

Matt Tully
How does that inform the discussion about discernment?

Tim Challies
What Mueller did was he used the illustration of medical triage, bringing people out from a disaster or something and deciding which people are the most critical and giving attention to them first. And so he broke down theology according to doctrines that are absolutely essential to the Christian faith, and then doctrines that are essential to unity within the local church, and then doctrines that really don’t matter all that much to Christian unity. It is just a really helpful way of thinking things through. And so you can’t have any unity with anyone if you don’t believe in the Trinity. You can’t be a Christian at all. And so that’s that first bucket. The second bucket might be something like gifts of the Holy Spirit. If one person really wants to practice those gifts in the worship of the local church, and somebody else is saying, I do not believe those gifts continue, you can affirm one another’s faith, but you probably can’t be part of the same local church. And so that’s a good secondary issue. And a third level issue would be things that just don’t really impact your unity at all. I can believe what I believe, you can believe what you believe, and we can still be perfectly united.

Matt Tully
One of the issues that kind of arises from that that I’ve seen sometimes is people will often take maybe a secondary, or even a tertiary type of issue, and they can kind of construct a logical chain from one doctrine to another. Eventually they get back to some really huge central issue. And then they kind of say, See? That’s why this is so important. How do you think about that? It seems like sometimes there are connections if you follow things through, but that person might not actually be saying that final thing that you are worried about.

Tim Challies
I think one of the unhelpful terms that got introduced into the lexicon over the last few years was “gospel issue”, because there are some issues that are absolutely fundamental to the gospel. If you take that issue away—like penal substitutionary atonement. If you take that away, the gospel collapses.

Matt Tully
Yeah. Bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Tim Challies
Sure. Exactly. You have no gospel, you have nothing to save us anymore. You’ve destroyed the Christian faith. But the problem with that term is that every issue at some level touches the gospel. And so at some point someone will say every issue is a gospel issue, and they could prove that it’s connected to the gospel. Social justice is one lately where people are saying that is a gospel issue, or that is not a gospel issue. Well, It depends how you’re defining the term. It depends what you mean by it. I think what happened over time is instead of looking for what can draw us together around the gospel, it was starting to be pedantic about these things and saying, Look, I can draw this connection from this issue to the gospel. And f you don’t believe what I believe, even all the way back on this third level, then you’re eventually going to erode the gospel. And so I think we better distance ourselves rather than draw together.

Matt Tully
So why do you call discernment a discipline?

Tim Challies
It’s a discipline because God calls us to do it. We have to do it. We’re not allowed to be undiscerning. We have to discipline ourselves to grow our spiritual muscle, in a sense, to grow our minds, to grow our knowledge.

Matt Tully
Because that’s what’s underlying that I think is interesting. When you call it a discipline, it sort of implies that it’s something that you can grow in, that you can practice and become stronger in. It’s not necessarily something that, just by virtue of being a Spirita-indwelt Christian you’re going to be good at.

Tim Challies
Right. You definitely have to grow at it. And some people are better at it than others, and so I think I put a call in the book to rely on others who may have more developed discernment as well. But again, remember the context of the book was a lot of people really getting weary of the church growth movement. Everything had to be big, big, bigger. We were trying to create movements. We were trying to change the world in a very short period of time, and there was just all this energy toward these big goals, this big growth. But people are getting tired of it because it wasn’t working. We were growing big churches that were shallow churches. Lots of people coming in the front door, tons of people pouring out the back door. And people reading just some scandalously awful books and really not understanding that these are truly terrible books. People were just lapping up stuff that was just silly and just nonsense. And so I think I was trying to call people to discipline your mind to evaluate things. A lot of people had no idea that just because a book is published by someone who claims to be a Christian and by a publisher that claims to be Christian, it could be a really wrong book.

Matt Tully
You tell the story of people coming to you saying, Hey, what do you think about this book or this book? And you would actually read it and would be surprised that they would think that was helpful material.

Tim Challies
Right. Because people hadn’t developed their discernment to really evaluate. They didn’t even know they were supposed to evaluate. They assumed discernment happened upstream at the level of the publisher or the level of the pastor. They didn’t know they themselves were responsible before God to evaluate everything, including the messages they’re hearing and the sermons they’re hearing from their own local church. This is what Christians do is like noble Bereans, we’re opening our Bible and we’re saying, Is this so? I once wrote a review of one of the most huge books—mega sellers—and somebody sent me a note and said, I can just imagine it’s like you’re reading this book in one hand and holding your Bible in the other hand. And I said, Exactly! That’s the best insult I’ve ever gotten! It’s exactly what I do. And that’s what we’re all supposed to do is just compare these things to the Bible and say, If this is falling short of the Scriptural standards, it’s gone. It’s junk.

14:30 - Am I Being Discerning or Judgy?

Matt Tully
One common response to this kind of thinking, from both Christians and non-Christians alike, would often be something like, Judge not, lest you be judged. And in saying that, they’re quoting Jesus himself from the Gospels. How would you respond to that?

Tim Challies
You can pull out a verse anywhere you want in the Bible and use it to kind of slam people, to call them away from what they’re calling you too. And I should say, that’s what a lot of churches, especially in this era, were doing. This was the kind of sermon people were hearing. You take a verse completely removed from its context, from its natural meaning, and you just apply it to a situation. But we need to take verses in context. Understand what was happening around that verse, what was happening in that time, who was he speaking to, and so on. And so you can’t just take a verse like that, slam it down, and say, Judge not. For every verse that says judge not, we’re told about the brains that I just mentioned—a group of people who are hearing from the apostles, hearing from God’s ordained servants, and were commended for checking all their words against Scripture. And if that’s what they were doing, how much more we?

Matt Tully
What’s the difference between being discerning and being judgy?

Tim Challies
Discernment is just saying, What does God’s word say? Is this true? Does this line up? Is this consistent with God’s word? Being judgmental is applying a different standard to it. It’s probably a standard I myself have created and am now holding something to that standard. I have no right to hold your book to my standard, but I have every right and responsibility to hold your book to God’s standard.

Matt Tully
That’s another facet of discernment that we need to keep in mind. We tend to think of people who lack discernment as being too permissive; they don’t hold people to a high enough standard based on the Bible. It seems like there’s another category of people who are holding people to a higher standard than the Bible, and they’re, in turn, being too judgmental. Is that true?

Tim Challies
Yeah, I think so. And we need to be careful. No book is going to be perfect, and nobody’s beliefs are going to fully line up with our own. At some level we all diverge a little bit, even in just some of the fine details. So I think we can read other books optimistically, and we can read them and say, I appreciated this part, but not that part. And that’s okay. We have to be careful when the author is clearly not a Christian, I think, but if we can affirm that person’s a believer and writing out of a desire to love the Lord and serve the church, I think we can read it hopefully and optimistically and glean from it. But there’s nothing wrong with then saying, But only to this point. And after this, I think he’s wrong. But we don’t need to cast him out of the kingdom because of that.

17:11 - What Christian Voices Can I Trust?

Matt Tully
So the Internet has given rise to social media influencers. Many of these people are Christians. They claim to be Christians who purport to teach what the Bible teaches and what is true. And yet, as we both know, many times things that are taught are not always faithful to the Bible. They’re not always sound in terms of their theology. What advice do you offer to young people, people who are active on Instagram and Twitter? What advice do you offer to your own kids when it comes to discerning what Christian voices to listen to in this digital, disembodied, distant age that we live in?

Tim Challies
That’s hard, and I admit I don’t follow influencers very much. I don’t spend much time on social media. It’s not really of interest to me and doesn’t really do much to build me up or edify me. So I don’t spend much time there. But I would hope your foremost spiritual influencer is the pastor in your local church. That’s the person you know. And there’s something so important about knowing somebody. Not just seeing somebody in a packaged up presentation they want you to see on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, but really knowing that person. Seeing the way his family relates to him, seeing the way his fellow elders relate to him, and so on. If you can really know that person, you know whether that person’s authentic or not. And then I think you maybe just build out from there. Who is influencing that person? If he is trustworthy and you’re willing to allow him to shepherd your soul, who is influencing him? And maybe you can look at those people as well. But I don’t think there’s often a tremendous need to branch way out into the spiritual influencer world.

Matt Tully
So how would you help young people in your own church to change how they think, perhaps, and think about you as one of their pastors or the other pastors as those primary influences? I think we want to do that, but often it feels like how are you going to break the spell, so to speak, of this online celebrity type person who they’re just in their ear and in their pocket all the time?

Tim Challies
I spoke to somebody at my church not too long ago, a young man who fell down a rabbit hole of following some of those spiritual discernment influencers, and he found some that were talking about me and saying very negative things about me. And so he had this moment where he was thinking, Okay, I know this pastor, and I know he loves me and cares for me, and I know I trust him, and yet these people are saying this about him. And he said for a while it was really hard for him. It was really tormenting him. Eventually, he had to realize, No, I know this guy. I don’t know these people. This pastor loves me. He’s expressed that to me, and so I’m going to stop listening to these other voices and focus on the one I know. So again, I think build out from who you really know, people who are really showing love to you, modeling Christian character. It is so easy to put on airs out there through social media. That’s what we do. I just think about fashion influencers and everything, how they tweak their pictures, how they look perfect. They don’t look perfect in real life, but that’s the presentation they put out there. The same is true in spiritual influencers. They only let you see what they want you to see. They put out a put together package. But your pastor in your local church, you’ll see him when his kids misbehave, or you’ll see him when he is having a bad day. You’ll see him when his heart is broken by some tragedy. That’s who that person really is, and you can hopefully then trust that person and build out from there.

Matt Tully
Maybe a last question. As you think about the spiritual influences on your life—the men or women who have made the biggest impact on you—who would you say is a great example of someone who was spiritually discerning?

Tim Challies
I’ve had the benefit of being raised around a lot of people who are, and living my life in front of a lot of people who are spiritually discerning. So it’s been very helpful to me. I think my close friend, Paul, who pastors our church as well. I think he really puts a lot of emphasis on that. But he’s not a pill about it. He’s not standing in judgment of other people, but just constantly saying, What does the Bible say? And why am I not already doing it? That’s sort of the way we try to look at life together, and that’s just a good way to think about life. You come across what somebody else is saying or what somebody else is writing and you ask, Well, what does the Bible say about that? And is what this person’s saying consistent with what the Bible says about that?

Matt Tully
And that presupposes that we need to know the Bible to then know what it says about an issue.

Tim Challies
Absolutely. You gotta know your Bible. You can’t be discerning if you’re not familiar with this source of truth. Have a good Bible-reading plan that’s taking you through the Bible both fast and slow. So maybe one year you’re reading the whole thing in a year, and the next year you’re focusing on a book or two. You just get to know your Bible. And be patient with yourself, because it takes a long time to really know your Bible—many, many years usually. It’s a big book with lots to learn, lots to meditate on. Allowing yourself over time to grow in that ability is so important.

Matt Tully
Tim, thank you so much for taking some time today to talk with us about this important—urgently important—issue of spiritual discernment.

Tim Challies
You’re very welcome.

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