Every day, we're bombarded with messages and ideas that vie for our attention and acceptance.

And with the internet and social media dominating so much of our lives, the need for spiritual discernment,

the ability to rightly evaluate those ideas through the lens of Scripture is critically important.

And yet it seems that many Christians, including many Christian

leaders, lack spiritual discernment, constantly falling prey to the latest trend and sucked

into the latest controversy. In our interview today, I'm talking with Tim Chalys 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. Tim is a well-known Christian blogger, an elder at

his church, and the author of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment from Crossway. Let's get started.

Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on the Crossplay podcast. Sure, it's my pleasure.

So you published your book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment in 2007. And in the 15 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? Yeah, it's very much a different world now than it was back then.

And in 2006, when I was writing 2007 when it was published, we're 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 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, and 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 folds small rather than wide. Yeah, 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 15 years ago. At least it seems

maybe it's more public or obvious today. Do you think that's in general because of discernment happening in a good way?

That's the fruit of good discernment, or is that the fruit of maybe a lack of discernment in some sense?

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