Spiritual Discernment Quotes & Sayings

If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea.
You have to get out past the harbor into the great dephts of God, and begin to know things for yourself ... beg in to have spiritual discernment.
Beware of paying attention or going back to what you once were, when God wants you to be something that you have never been. — Oswald Chambers

There is an automatic assumption that negative is realistic and positive is unrealistic. — Susan Jeffers

Fear of shadows was petty. Real fears lived outside the door. — A. Lynn

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Love wasn't something you decided. It was thrust upon you at the most inopportune times in your life. You didn't choose when or who to love, love chose you. — Holly Hood

He went farther into the shadows to exchange his pants for the leather breeches. Too bad. When he emerged again, he looked pretty good even though it wasn't his style. And he was lucky there were no tights, after all. He tilted his head.
'You like it.'
'Shut up.' I blushed. I hated vampire extrasensory perception. It wasn't fair that he could hear my heartbeat or smell my skin or what ever.
'Girls are so weird.'
Kieran snorted. 'No kidding.'
'Please, you two were fighting ten minutes ago, and now you're the best of friends?' I said witheringly. 'Guys are weird. — Alyxandra Harvey

He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, and stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him. — Dashiell Hammett

If you believe in Jesus, you are not to spend all your time in the calm waters just inside the harbor, full of joy, but always tied to the dock. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, and begin to know things for yourself - begin to have spiritual discernment. — Oswald Chambers

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. — James Hillman

It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil. — Gerald G. May

But as the word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way. Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one of his greatest assets. And it was born of his shyness: I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth. — Susan Cain

The Christian should never have to put others down in order to feel good about himself. Instead, he can simply check out the media's insistent portrayal of Christianity and feel grateful that he isn't as deceived as the masses who really swallow the garbage. Ignorance is ultimately how people put themselves down, and the mere Christian who knows what entails the mere Christian is ultimately free from such. — Criss Jami

Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life. It is the journey from spiritual blindness (not seeing God anywhere or seeing him only where we expect to see him) to spiritual sight (finding God everywhere, especially where we least expect it). — Ruth Haley Barton

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family. — George Jones

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control.
But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). — Luke Timothy Johnson

The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness. — Eugene H. Peterson

Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it'll help, you'll find out. — John Ashbery

Gardening can become a spiritual exercise, teaching us discernment as we eliminate the weeds from our lives, giving what we value room to grow. — Diane Dreher

One of the first things we learn from our teachers is discernment: the ability to tell truth from fiction, to know when we have lost our center and how to find it again. Discernment is also one of the last things we learn, when we feel our paths diverge and we must separate from our mentors in order to stay true to ourselves. — Anne Hill

A duke's son MUST know about poisons. It's the way of our times. — Frank Herbert

We only know a person's intentions through awareness.

The mind is easily influenced by the suggestions and emotions of others. We are either manipulated into serving others, or willingly surrendering to assist them. One is our choice, the other is theirs.

Fear makes us slaves, while love sets us free to serve and surrender to a greater good.

Discernment is needed for us to see which we are: slave, or servant? — Robert S. Cosmar

My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing. — Pope Francis

There is need for careful discernment here. The evidence of earnestness, sincerity, and effort is considerable. The Christian's lifestyle is pious, proper, and correct. What's missing? He or she has not surrendered to the Christ of grace. The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth. Complacency then replaces sheer delight in God's unconditional love. Our doing becomes the very undoing of the ragamuffin gospel. — Brennan Manning

Our wives, our families, and our churches need godly men who have discernment
discernment to deal with life and life-issues on a spiritual level. — Jim George

To summarize, then, it appears that Christian holiness is a number of things together. It has both outward and inward aspects. Holiness is a matter of both action and motivation, conduct and character, divine grace and human effort, obedience and creativity, submission and initiative, consecration to God and commitment to people, self-discipline and self-giving, righteousness and love. It is a matter of Spirit-led law-keeping, a walk, or course of life, in the Spirit that displays the fruit of the Spirit (Christlikeness of attitude and disposition). It is a matter of seeking to imitate Jesus' way of behaving, through depending on Jesus for deliverance from carnal self-absorption and for discernment of spiritual needs and possibilities. — J.I. Packer

When God moves, everybody will be blessed. If something is of the flesh, everybody will have a sick feeling. And if something is of the devil, it seems like the hair will stand up on your neck. That's a simple way everyone can judge, whether they've got any spiritual discernment or not. — Kenneth E. Hagin

Let me be on my guard when the world puts on a loving face, for it will, if possible, betray me as it did my Master, with a kiss. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When people talk about destiny, they tend to forget that it isn't deprived from free will, free will to both accept it or destroy it. If you were meant to find love and then hurt the person that loves you back, you've just exercised your free will against destiny, and that destiny, that brought that person to you, will now use the exact same force to pull such person away from you. You cannot violate the spiritual laws of the universe. You will always pay a heavy price for being ignorant about this fact. You have the free will to do whatever you wish in the paradise of life, but only as long as you don't violate the sacred rules, when eating the fruit of selfishness, the tree of good and evil. That need to explore discernment will cost you your happiness, and expel you from the paradise destined to you. — Robin Sacredfire

When we have rejected the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, we allow Christians to depend on things other than the Bible as their guide to matters of life and faith. In particular, people begin to depend upon mysticism, upon ways of supposedly knowing God apart from the Bible. They look inward for intrinsic wisdom rather than outward to the Bible for its extrinsic wisdom. They forsake biblical reason in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for spiritual discernment must be founded upon God's objective revelation of himself in Scripture. We can only judge between what is wrong and what is right when we know what God says to be true. We can know this only from Scripture. — Tim Challies

We have truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, and the Spirit to guard us. We have the Word of God to battle for us. Through it all we pray to the Spirit to protect and guide us against the schemes of the devil. In this way we can fight against and overcome the spiritual forces that are set against us and committed to our downfall. We can wage war against and defeat the spiritual forces that seek to lead us away from discernment by offering a clever and subtle counterfeit of the truth. — Tim Challies

Goodwill is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy. — Ludwig Borne

The fourth paradigm forces us at every point to discern between the creationally valid and the sinfully perverse and thus confronts us with a never-ending task which requires not only competence but also spiritual discernment. Yet this is precisely the task which we must assume, even at the risk of being vague on specifics. The alternative is to compromise basic themes of authentic Christianity. — Albert M. Wolters

The word of wisdom is missing," he continued. "We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is not ability to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power of spiritual penetration and interpretation, the ability to appraise the religious scene as viewed from God's position, and to tell us what is actually going on — A.W. Tozer

Love always seeks for betterment, for ways of making life more workable, joyful, whole, and beautiful. Love examines every option available to bring about an improvement in life. This kind of discernment is an act of decency, not an act of judgment. Rigid philosophies of judgment will seek to establish structure as a substitute for decency, control as a substitute for trust, and the mind as a substitute for higher awareness. — Glenda Green

The Bible places great emphasis on spiritual maturity because, like children, immature believers are prone to sample anything. They are attracted to what looks good to their untrained eyes. Only as they grow in maturity are they able to differentiate between what pleases God and what does not. Because of this there can be no growth without discernment. — Tim Challies

Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

My vision for Scotland is one in which we fight together for the values we are care about: equality, fairness and social justice. Those values are the same whether you live in Dumfries or Carlisle. — Douglas Alexander

God is our final say in who and what's negative and who and what's positive in our lives. It is best not to have this so over-simplified as the illusioned superstitionists have it; an infinite being's tests may not always be so flowery, and the things we may see as positive are in many cases simply desires of our sinful nature. We are to protect our spirit without falling into the narcissistic mistake of trying to protect our selfish emotions, which the latter, in turn, is more than unlikely to bring peace and happiness. But rather guilt and emptiness. When one walks around constantly, in his mind, attempting to separate positive versus negative people, he is already controlled by something even worse than those he calls the 'negative people', and that is before he spots it soon enough to avoid it as he hypocritically tries to avoid them. — Criss Jami

Try to think of your thoughts as boomerangs - that is actually what they are - except that our thoughts multiply and each returns to us with a brood like itself. — Margery Wilson