A Prayer for Discerning Love

A woman named Diana uh Diana West for the Washington Times uh column, she wrote a number of years ago a book that she called The Death of the Adult.

The death of the adult or the grown-up.

She wrote this book about the phenomenon we call adolescence in America.

And she showed how it's really an unprecedented sort of phenomenon that in in bygone days they didn't have this thing called adolescence.

But we sort of had this inserted into from childhood to then adolescence to adulthood.

And what she showed was that over time this adolescent period, this sort of in-between kind of stage, begin to grow and grow and grow.

So much so that she analyzed that there have been sociologists and theorists that have done studies to show that people don't really grow into full adulthood until the latest number is around 35 years old.

And that she shows this is something unprecedented in history.

She shows it as something that is actually detrimental to society at large as young people, especially in their 20s, begin to put off marriage and family.

And then, of course, it's harder to have children when you're in your 30s and 40s, and so you have all sorts of sequelli that fall after this, what she calls a disastrous trend in society.

You have adults that are reading uh teen novels that are geared towards teens.

You have um uh people that are delaying transition into adulthood, the putting off of family, the moving back in with parents into the basement for indefinite periods of time.

It's a time of adolescence in which it's unlikely that uh most people in our day are moving into adulthood in the same way that they did in the past.

And I think it's a parable for us as we think spiritually about what that can say about us as Christians as well, because we don't tend to be as rigorous in thinking through how God wants us to grow up.

And so this day, as we open our passage in Philippians chapter 1 and continue our sermon series there, we're gonna focus on a prayer of the Apostle Paul, where he literally prays for exactly this very thing.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

The Apostle Paul's gonna pray that we would move as believers in Jesus Christ beyond a spiritual adolescence into full adulthood in Jesus Christ.

And we find this in our text this morning in Philippians chapter 1, verses 3 through 11.

Philippians 1:3–11

I invite you to look at your Bible with me.

This passage can be broken down into two parts, verses 3 through 8, and then verses 9 through 11.

In verses 3 through 8, we see the Apostle Paul praising God for past grace.

In verse 6, which is one of the major verses in this passage, he says this He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Paul was rejoicing with every remembrance of the Philippians, although he was absent from them.

The epistles of Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians were written from Paul's uh Roman house arrest in the city of Rome.

And so he wasn't with them physically.

But as he remembered his time with them in Philippi, as we read about in Acts chapter 16, he remembered it fondly because he remembered that God had truly done a miraculous work of grace in their lives.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

And he was confident that the same God who began that work in them would bring it to completion at the day of Christ.

But it's based on this past and up to the present grace of God at work in them, for which he praises God, that he then issues in verses nine through eleven a prayer, a petition that God would bless them to grow in the future.

And we see this in verses nine through eleven, which is Paul's prayer for future growth.

We're going to spend the most of our time this morning unpacking this prayer of the Apostle Paul.

Let's read it together in verses nine through eleven.

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.

And all the people said, Amen.

So the central request of Paul's prayer here is pretty simple.

Namely, it's that their love would abound more and more.

But notice that he qualifies it with this word, with knowledge and all discernment.

So you have the main thing being love.

I'm praying that your love would abound yet more and more, but it's with a knowledge and a discernment.

The word knowledge Paul uses in his writing some 15 times, and nearly always he attaches this word knowledge, epignosis.

We've heard of Gnosticism, and uh, that's knowledge.

Epignosis is sort of like a hyper knowledge, it's a personal knowledge, a practical experiential knowledge.

And almost every time Paul uses it, he attaches it to some form of special revelation.

For example, he writes in other places about the knowledge of God, or the knowledge of God's will, or the knowledge of Jesus Christ, or knowledge of the truth, or knowledge of the gospel.

And so, based on how Paul qualifies this in other parts of his writings, we understand him to be praying that their love would abound and be informed by what God has revealed in his holy word.

But notice also he prays that their love would not just grow in knowledge, but in discernment.

We might think of this as wisdom.

Here he uses this word only once in his writings.

He uses a different word elsewhere, and it simply means to perceive.

To see, as it were, through the fog, to see past what can distract you, what can come between you and the truth, and to see through it and to discern the truth and discern the truth from error.

Pastor Tim Chales wrote a book and he defined, he wrote it on Christian contentment, and he defined Christian discernment, rather, like this.

Discernment is the skill of understanding and applying God's word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong.

I love how Chalice describes discernment as a skill.

It's not something that you're born with or born again with.

It's something that develops over time.

It's like learning to throw a baseball as a five-year-old, then as a six-year-old, and then by the time you're 15, then you're 18, maybe you go to the pros.

You see the skill develop over time, every year, throwing a little faster, a little more accurately.

And so we have here the skill of understanding and applying God's word.

That's how discernment's always paired with knowledge of God's word, so that we can separate truth from error, that is what we believe, and right from wrong, that is the choices we make.

And so, in these very opening lines of his letter to the Philippians, the apostle concerns himself with what we're going to find out is a twofold vulnerability of this young Philippian church.

We might describe it this way: the twofold vulnerability is that they have calloused hearts, that is an underdeveloped love, and they have naive minds and underdeveloped discernment.

And so the main idea of this passage is that Paul prays for growth in discerning love.

And that's my prayer for us this morning as well, that through this message and through subsequent workings of God in our lives, that we would be the kinds of people that are moving out of this adolescence into discerning love.

You may be wondering exactly how Paul's short prayer fits into the larger context of Philippians.

And what you'll find is you go through Philippians, starting in verse 27, and then into chapter 2, verses 1 through 11, and then certainly in chapter 4, where he addresses, he calls out some ladies in the church who were kind of feuding over some things, you're going to find that the theme emerges in Philippians that they had an issue with a lack of love.

They were callous towards one another.

They were looking out for number one, and that was me, not you.

And also they had an issue with unifying around the gospel.

They were naive in their thinking.

He warns them in chapter three about false teachers that were coming in and that were leading them astray.

So we have this twofold vulnerability that appears in this prayer.

They need to grow in love for one another and God, and they need to grow in discernment of the truth.

Now we can imagine in a church as diverse as theirs that they might have some issues with love.

If you remember last Sunday, um uh Jared preached for us from and he and he opened up with Acts chapter 16, the story of how the flipping church got its start.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

And there he showed that the first three members of this church plant were not exactly the people we would have put together.

Remember who they were?

You had a religious artisan named Lydia, who was sort of upper class, who was an entrepreneur who was very religious, and um uh she was converted to Jesus Christ.

So far, so good.

The next member of the church plant was a formerly demon-possessed slave girl who was screaming out profanities and such, and God and uh Paul cast out a demon out of her.

So that's an interesting pair.

The third church member was a hardened prison warden who beat Paul almost to death in Silas in prison until God converted him.

And he just had a family to feed, right?

And he led his family to the Lord, it seems.

Those are the first three members of this church.

You can imagine they might have some rough edges to sand off.

But that's exactly how God seems to work.

He seems to pull together under the same roof, people from different walks of life, united, not around a common skin color, not around a common ethic, not around a common upbringing, but around a common gospel.

And then God goes on to create something of a beautiful mess that highlights the transcultural power of the gospel.

How often have you gone to church and you thought, you know what, I don't really have a ton in common with people.

This may not be the right church for me.

I think that's a normal phenomenon for people and it's not a bad thing.

What I would ask you to do if you have that experience, if you come to this church, you're visiting here maybe, or maybe you're a member here and you're thinking, you know what, I feel like I'm the only one that really likes hockey around here.

Or whatever your thing is.

I want to encourage you to forget about all the things that you have not in common and to start focusing on building your relationship around the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Because that's obviously what united these people together.

That's what makes us distinct as the people of God.

Not because we all love the final four, not because we all used to love the reds, but because we all love Jesus Christ.

But this lack of love and this lack of discernment in the church at Philippi, this wasn't unique to them.

In fact, it's still alive and well today.

Our story goes along with this as well.

Here's our story.

We ourselves discern without loving.

Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get a double.

Why am I using these baseball analogies?

I love baseball.

It's time of year.

You get a double, you're doing well in the discernment department, but then you just whiff when it comes to love.

I think that's something we do often.

That is, we we sometimes prioritize learning that does not lead to loving.

We at Sacred Mission strive to be a church that is rooted deeply in biblical Christianity, not cultural Christianity, not what the latest trend of what churches are doing across the world, but biblical, apostolic Christianity from the pages of Scripture.

And we also find ourselves deeply rooted in the Reformed tradition.

And by this I mean to say that we want to consciously, every week, week in, week out, practice and model a high view of Scripture, to proclaim an exalted view of God in his inestimable greatness, to talk about his unconditional love that is rooted not in our irresistible loveliness, but in his unassailable eternal decrees.

We want to seek to be rooted in our lives in a doctrine of meticulous providence of God's working in our lives and not us being at the uh the mercy of chance or superstitious beliefs in this or that or fate.

We want to be a people who trust in God's benevolent goodness, who praise his righteous judgments, who fear his fierce wrath against sin, and who hope in his mercy in Jesus Christ.

And because of these doctrines, and many others I haven't mentioned that are amazing and glorious, we ourselves, as reformed believers who are very conscious about what we believe and what we pray and what we sing, we can often tend to call out what we see as false doctrine.

We can tend to want to call out psychologically based or philosophically based doctrines that are not rigorously drawn from Scripture but merely read into Scripture.

And that's the right thing to do if you read the Apostle Paul.

He was constantly doing that.

But with such an emphasis on discerning truth from error in our lives and in our church, we can tend to be a little arrogant sometimes.

We can tend to be dismissive of where people have gone.

And we think if they're not exactly where we are in this moment, then we don't even want them around, forgetting that we weren't ten years ago where we are today.

That God is in the process of refining our understanding of Scripture, that we need to be patient and kind.

It's been pointed out by Reformed pastors, it's no secret, that because the doctrines of grace, because Calvinism, because Reformed theology is so, is such a robust system and so rigorously drawn from Scripture that it can actually attract intellectual bullies.

You have people, especially that are in their basement typing on the computer, leaving troll remarks in blogs and stuff, just calling people out left and right for this or that and making mountains out of molehills, it can actually attract those kind of people.

And so we need to guard ourselves that we're not being discerning but not being loving.

It's possible to discern doctrinal truth and error and yet fail to love God or people at all.

It's possible to be unsaved and to be attracted to the doctrines of grace because they're just kind of fun to talk about.

It's fun to win arguments, but you don't have to be saved to win arguments.

The Apostle Paul cuts at the root of such a diseased tree of all this discernment, but no love for God or people.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 13, when he says this, he says, If I have prophetic powers, if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but I have not love, I am what?

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

Nothing.

None of us even has close to the knowledge he's talking about here.

All mysteries, all knowledge.

But we don't even come close to that.

So how much less are we nothing if we don't exercise love?

Knowledge, in fact, when paired with spiritual immaturity, it often produces pride.

This is why in chapter 14 of 1 Corinthians he says, knowledge puffs up.

If you just focus on knowledge, you're gonna turn into a proud person, an intolerant person, a person you don't even want to be around.

It has to be tempered with love that he describes in chapter 13.

This is why in 1 Timothy chapter 3, whenever he's talking about the qualifications for an elder, he says, don't suddenly lay your hands on a novice.

1 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

Even if they have tons of knowledge, give them time.

Because knowledge paired with the maturity puffs up.

He says it'll make the, it'll lead them into a snare of the devil.

We too often discern without loving.

But there's the other side of this, right?

Sometimes we love without discerning.

Our story is that we sometimes love without discerning.

There may be some of you here today that don't particularly feel guilty of uh being unloving to people in your your mad pursuit of truth.

But if you're honest, you may have to say you really don't have much ambition to grow in a deep knowledge of God's word at all.

Maybe you're you're quite comfortable letting pastors and other doctrinal geeks let your uh do your thinking for you.

And you just love people.

Some of us love without being discerning.

It could be that many of us, some of us at least, are dangerously casual about developing a robust biblical worldview.

What's a biblical worldview?

A worldview is basically your understanding of the world and everything in it.

A biblical worldview is a view of the world that is informed by, governed by what God has said about everything in the world.

Some of us would rather treat a biblical worldview development like a Saturday morning stroll through a flea market.

You know, you walk past the tables and you look at this or that, you pick it up, and it's pretty good, you drop it in the basket, and you get a you end up with a hodgepodge of random facts and figures and things that often are unbiblical and that are often contradictory to each other.

That's not a good robust biblical worldview.

We need to be rooting those kinds of things out of our worldview and informing ourselves to see life as God sees it.

Too many of us are dangerously casual, even careless, about developing a biblical view of all of life.

The fact is, all of us have a worldview.

If I were to ask you about, you know, what constitutes a just war, whether you've thought about it or not, you're in the moment going to be like, well, I think this or that or whatever.

What constitutes uh social justice?

What constitutes a church's responsibility towards the indigent?

What constitutes a legitimate church?

What constitutes the gospel?

Where do you depart from the gospel with the addition of this or the subtraction of that?

These are things that have to do with the biblical worldview, and often we don't even think about those things.

But you have an opinion on them.

The question is, is it is it biblical?

Every year around this time, we have fawns in our backyard, you know, baby deer.

Who doesn't love a baby deer?

Coyotes love baby deers.

Anyways, we saw this little baby deer last week.

Brandy called me to the window, she's like, Tim, come here, come here.

So I came to the Christian window and uh the kitchen window and I looked out there, and there was this little baby deer, probably a week old, kind of wobbly, just a tiny little skinny thing, nursing on his mother.

It was a beautiful sight.

And it reminded me as I was actually preparing this text how vulnerable little fawns are for a week, two weeks until they can run next to their mother.

It doesn't take them too long to learn how to run.

It's pretty impressive.

My dog in the past would uh would try to chase him down and they were pretty fast.

But there is a period of vulnerability in the life of a fawn when it drops and the mother leaves it there and it's curled up in the leaves and little spots on its back that God gave them to blend in with the leaves and the sun coming through.

But they're vulnerable.

And actually, um, wildlife reports show that as much as as many as 55% of fawns that drop every year don't survive.

That's a little over half of fawns that are born don't survive.

Whether it's from pneumonia because there's too much rain or mostly because of predation and coyotes and animals that happen upon them.

So about half of them survive.

They're an incredibly vulnerable little animal.

But biblically speaking, spiritual immaturity, spiritual infancy in our doctrine, in our cultural discernment is just as vulnerable.

It puts us just as much at risk as that baby deer with cowades.

A believer who only casually or haphazardly consumes truth from God's word is like a wobbly fawn walking through the woods, bleeding for its mother, oblivious to the predators that are about to pounce.

Maybe a little more nice, in Ephesians chapter 4, where he comments that God has given believers, apostles and prophets and pastors and teachers, leaders in the church that all have to do with teaching God's word.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

And he gave it to us for this purpose.

Ephesians chapter 4, verse 12.

Ephesians 4:12

To equip the saints for the ministry, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith, there's that discernment, and the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood.

That is being adults in our thinking, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Why is this the case, Paul?

So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

Did you notice the imagery Paul uses there?

For us as believers to remain uninformed, immature in our cultural and doctrinal discernment of truth and error, it leaves us like a group of children on a raft in a hurricane.

It's not going to end well.

Tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.

The Apostle Paul had seen time and time again, young believers, and I'm talking about age here, I'm talking about spiritual discernment and maturity.

They, they, that God saves them.

They join the church, they become a part of the church, but then they're just washed back and forth during this period of vulnerability.

He says we need to we need to be dedicated to, urgent, in developing a biblical grasp of doctrine and of an understanding of the culture so that we're not like those children getting tossed about, but we're like the seasoned sailor manning the oar and you know on the sailboat or something with the weather beaten face.

The guy I want to be on the storms of life.

He's been there.

He's done that.

He's got a plan.

He knows the truth.

I'm going to give us just a sampling of some ideas, some claims, some assumptions that we encounter inside the church sometimes, outside the church, often when we turn on the TV, when we listen to the news, when we hear celebrities talk.

That's always adventurous.

Maybe you recognize some of these.

How about ideas that undermine absolute truth?

That there actually is truth out there that is objective and that truth is knowable.

Here's one phrase.

Yeah, that's true for you, but not for me.

The Jesus thing works for you, but you know it doesn't really work for me, and that's fine because you have your truth and I have my truth.

You ever heard that?

Of course we have, right?

It's called relativism.

It's saying that there really is no absolute truth.

Truth is sort of defined by what works for us.

So it's like a relativistic pragmatism.

As if there weren't a God who revealed what truth is for us.

Or how about another, a softer form of this, as sometimes we see in the church, you hear someone say, you know, very smart people disagree on both sides, so who am I to have an opinion?

Right?

The experts say this, and my pastor says this, so I mean, I don't know.

It's basically a way of saying, yeah, maybe there's truth out there on the issue, but it's not knowable.

This is a form of agnosticism.

I remember reading on a on a billboard in the English department back in college, uh someone had handwritten and plugged it on this little board.

It says, um, if God has, uh if God did communicate truth to us, um uh he didn't use our language.

In other words, maybe there is truth, maybe God is there, maybe he did say something, but we it's been lost in translation.

In other words, we're agnostic to what truth really is.

Or how about the phrase, you know, it doesn't really matter what you believe as long as you're sincere.

Right?

We can disagree, it's okay.

As long as you're sincere in your beliefs, that's all that really matters.

This is a denial of the fact that God has spoken, He has revealed it adequately in Scripture for our understanding.

Or how about slogans that undermine the authority of Scripture?

You hear people say, you know, the Bible was written by humans but inspired by God, but because of the human element, it's not exactly fully trustworthy.

It's still technically a human document, and so we have to take the good and leave the bad.

Sort of like Thomas Jefferson, a deist who literally famously took a regular Bible, a standard Bible, and he cut out pages from stories in the gospels where like Jesus healed people and maybe where Jesus rose from the dead, because he said these things couldn't have really happened.

And so he had his own Bible, the sort of a redacted version of the Bible, denying the real authority and inerrancy of scripture.

Another way this happens, a little softer version of this, is you know, you can't really read the Bible literally.

Only extremists and fundamentalists, we're not fundamentalists, only fundamentalists read the Bible literally.

So when you read the story of Jonah and the whale, and it says that Jonah swallowed the whale, no, it says that the whale swallowed Jonah.

If you believe the Bible, that this is actually an accurate account of what happened.

This God prepared a huge fish that that when Jonah was going in the opposite direction from Nineveh, God prepared, maybe he created this fish on the spot.

And because there's no fish that we know of big enough in the Mediterranean Sea to swallow a man, well, who's to say God, when it says he prepared a fish, didn't prepare a fish for that very purpose for that very day, goes, swallows Jonah, carries him underwater, sort of submarine, to the shores of Nineveh and spits him up.

There are those who would say, yeah, that story, I mean, he probably got him there some, maybe there was a raft or something, but maybe there were some whales that were circling the raft the whole time.

Who knows?

But we can't take the Bible really literally.

This is an undermining of the authority of Scripture, and we hear these kind of things all the time.

Or about the Red Sea.

You know, the Red Sea was parted.

Well, it wasn't the Red Sea.

Actually, that what they meant was the Reed Sea.

The Reed Sea was like a little bit of an outcropping of the Red Sea.

It was only about knee deep, so Israel passed on dry ground, right, in the Reed Sea, because during that time of year it had abated.

What's amazing about that is that little Reed Sea actually swallowed up all of Pharaoh and his armies a few minutes later.

But nonetheless, we hear all these kinds of slogans that undermine Scripture.

How about slogans that undermine the church?

You know, I don't go to church because the church is full of hypocrites.

To which I like to respond, well, come on, we can always use one more.

Or how about the phrase, you know, I love Jesus, you know, I was raised kind of Christian, whatever, I fell out of that.

I still I'm still I'm still cool with Jesus, but I don't do institutional religion.

The Apostle Paul would go along with that line of reasoning as much as he would tolerate someone saying, you know, I believe in gravity, but I'm just gonna step off this cliff here.

Right?

It's inconsistent that God would set up this institution and that Jesus would be the founder of the church, and then all the Christians thereafter who take the name of Jesus have nothing to do with that institution.

Or how about ideas that undermine God's providence?

You ever heard a Christian even say things like, you know, it's been a really hard week, I have some bad karma or something.

Karma.

An Eastern religion idea of suffering, of cause and effect.

It's a fatalistic view, and it's heresy.

We say things like, you know, I need to donate a kidney or something, or maybe sacrifice a chicken to get a little better karma.

Or how about one we use probably all the time?

Knock on wood.

We haven't had any injuries this season.

Knock on wood, as if the wood God is listening to make sure that whenever you express gratitude for something positive, you better knock on some hard surface near, or else he's going to send injuries.

We act like pagans sometimes in the things we say.

Instead of saying, you know, I'm really thankful to the Lord, he's really blessed.

We have had no injuries this season.

We talk like pagans.

Or how about ideas that contradict what God has designed and commanded regarding marriage and sexuality?

You hear the phrase, love is love.

Love is love.

In other words, which it's called the tautology.

By definition, love is love, right?

But what it's loaded with is the idea that if you love something, that love is legitimate.

Even if I'm married and I love your spouse and she or he loves me, it's all legitimate because love is love.

Consenting adults can do whatever they want.

Or how about this?

You know, you wouldn't buy a car without test driving it, would you?

That's why me and my girlfriend are gonna move together, live together, and we're gonna live for maybe a year or two.

We're gonna test the waters of marriage, we're sort of play marriage without the covenant commitment before God.

If things go really well and she doesn't um turn into a psycho, we're gonna get married.

Looking forward to it.

You gotta love that kind of commitment.

That reasoning is a cultural wisdom that is false.

God designed sexuality to be a beautiful thing that takes place within the covenant marriage of a man and a woman.

There are those who would say that Jesus never condemned homosexuality.

He never condemned that at all.

In fact, that's why we can say if Jesus was silent on it, then that means it's okay.

Silence is permission, they say.

But they ignore the fact that Jesus didn't address bestiality either.

He didn't address um uh killing your spouse.

Right?

For money, for hire.

There's a lot of things Jesus didn't, but he did address murder and he did address marriage.

And when Jesus addressed marriage, he reaffirmed the design of God before the fall, which was one man, one woman before God in covenant love.

He didn't address pedophilia.

But because he addressed sexuality and lust, and he addressed marriage, we can apply what he did address to any perversion around it, no matter how wild your imagination may be concerning it.

We could list many, many more cultural one-liners, theological one-liners, but I think we get the point.

The fact is that some of these slogans are actually honest misunderstandings of scripture.

People that have been just, you know, they read one text and they thought that uh they can come up with some understanding of scripture that's just an honest mistake.

But many of these are blatant lies and misinformation, denials of what God has said.

And in some of these objections, some of these one-liners, some of these things that culture proliferates around us, often in the name of Christianity and tolerance, some of them have an element of truth in them.

But their conclusions are unbiblical and ungodly.

For example, God is love.

But God, who is loving, would never send someone to hell.

It is true that God is love, but it's the wrong conclusion because Scripture tells us in numerous places.

Paul talked about, for example, I was just reading this past week, talked about false teachers, and he says their destruction in the end is will be justified.

God does destroy sinners that are not in Christ Jesus and covered by his blood.

And he does so in his justice and in his righteousness.

So here's the vulnerability.

The vulnerability, the fact is that when we have a weak or immature understanding of what God has said about doctrine and about culture, terrible ideas sound plausible.

And bad ideas sound like good ideas.

And good, hard, difficult sayings in Scripture sound like bad ideas.

And so we embrace a humanistic, a fallen view of the world.

And each of these slogans, each of these ideas that fall short of biblical truth, in the name of whether it's reason or tolerance or progressivism or equality or scholarship or even science, what they do in every time, in every instance, is they deny something God has affirmed, or they affirm something God has denied.

And so I think we need to be very careful to what voices we are listening to today.

I want to challenge you, parents.

When you put something in front of your children, if you can't express out loud with conscious strings of sentences, the worldview of the movie or the show or the whatever that you're putting in front of your kid, you should vet it first before you do that.

Um, whether it's frozen or whether it's uh Mulana or whatever it is.

You need to realize the themes of mysticism, you need to realize the themes of Eastern religion, the themes of uh of uh uh the worship of Allah.

You need to realize the themes of feminism that's not the biblical view of biblical uh femininity, but it's but it's a cultural movement of feminism or hypermasculinity or hypo-masculinity, men that are bumbling fools that don't take responsibility for the people under their care like God calls us to.

Whatever the form is, you need to recognize it.

If you can't see it and explain it to your children, you probably shouldn't be putting that in front of them to train them and disciple them in those ideologies.

Or how about the men here?

I mean, who's more popular than Joe Rogan, right?

If you listen to Joe Rogan and you enjoy his banter and you enjoy his sense of humor and his wit and all that sort of thing, and you don't know that he's a pragmatic agnostic that disdains biblical Christianity, then you're just setting yourself up to be feeding on all this thing.

You know, that's a good point.

That's a good point, Joe.

I like that.

Or how about Jordan Peterson?

I mean, a lot of us probably like Jordan Peterson, the guy, the guy's a fountain of knowledge, right?

As he critiques uh inconsistencies in all sorts of things in our culture.

But you need to realize that when he teaches scripture, when he tells the story of Adam and Eve, when he tells the story of Abraham, and he starts teaching the Bible, and you're like, wow, this doctorate in psychology is teaching scripture.

Yeah.

You need to realize that he has uh the classic 19th-century liberal theology view of scripture that a guy named Rudolf Boltman from Germany imported to the U.S.

that has killed mainline denominations up until this day.

So unless you think we're all excited about Jordan Peterson teaching the Bible, you realize he's got a deadly view for churches of scripture, a hypo-biblical view of God's word.

We need to be discerning.

The temptation is to either hole ourselves away like monks in some mountain.

We can't watch anything unless except home movies.

No, I'm not talking about that.

There can be much that can be redeemed from imperfect sources, but we need to be discerning for the sakes of our families, our friends, our children, and our own souls.

One thing I want to point out about this prayer from the Apostle Paul, he says that the end result, the goal of love and discernment being fostered in us is verse 10.

Verse 10 says this so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.

I'm afraid that you and I so often have a view of discernment and of maturity that asks the wrong question.

It asks the question, how much garbage can I consume without being too affected?

And I want to use my discernment to make sure I don't cross the line of ingesting all this garbage or feeding my family with garbage.

That's the wrong question.

Because the goal of discernment is not how close can I get to the cliff without slipping off?

The goal of discernment is so that we would approve what is excellent.

So whenever you're thinking about a show for your kids, don't just ask, is it too bad?

Is it is it too far?

The question should be, is it excellent?

Is it something that is disciplining my kids in themes of honor, in themes of sacrifice, in things of wisdom, and and those kind of uh things, as the Apostle Paul D in the Philippians, he says, think on these things if they're honorable.

In fact, a lot of comedy out there that we might chuckle along to and laugh to doesn't pass this test.

That it's something that's actually making us more pure and blameless in our lives as we approach the second coming of Jesus Christ.

If your discernment is just to see how much garbage you can consume without going too far, that's not biblical a discernment.

The real question is: is this excellent?

Does this promote my purity of mind?

Does this foster my living in a blameless way?

Is this building character in my children and in my heart?

C.

H.

Vergin put it this way: discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong, it's knowing the difference between right and almost right.

And I'll close with our gospel conviction.

Christ Jesus died and he rose and he lives to make us mature.

To make us mature.

One aspect of the good news of the gospel this morning is that Jesus is the very embodiment of loving discernment.

I want to look at one passage real quickly in closing, Colossians chapter 2, verses 2 through 4.

Colossians 2:2–4

Paul prays for the Colossians, which he wrote in the same sitting as Philippians because it was written from the same, probably sent out at the same time.

He prayed that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love.

So there's this idea of the believers in Jesus Christ, they're discouraged, but when their hearts are knit together in love, they become encouraged.

That they reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and of the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

He says, I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments.

You're not going to fall for terrible terrible arguments.

You're not going to fall for implausible arguments, you're going to fall for erroneous, plausible arguments, unless you're rooted in a knowledge and understanding of God in Christ Jesus and what he's revealed.

So notice again how Paul hitches growth in love and growth in discernment together.

You dare not have one without the other.

And he does so by reminding us that there's no one in all the universe so knowledgeable as Jesus.

The next time you open your Bible and you think it says this, but culture's saying this, and I want to be on the right side of history, you need to realize that the author of Scripture, Jesus Christ Himself, the living word, has more knowledge deposited, contained in him than all the world's.

The greatest minds, the most inventive imaginations in human history, the most perceptive intellects, the most incisive philosophers of the ancient Romans and Greeks, or even in our day and time, are but a faint glimmer at best of the knowledge and the wisdom of Jesus Christ, who created all things.

This is wonderful news for us as the people of God today because our Lord Jesus Christ is both indescribably kind and wise.

God is making us into his image.

Look to Jesus, the one who is quintessentially loving and discerning.

And we see this even in the suffering and the death of Jesus Christ.

Because although Jesus shared in equality with God, he humbled himself and died for those whom he loved, so that they could be rescued from their natural bent towards antipathy and prejudice and arrogance and age-old pride in the knowledge we have, so that we ourselves can by grace become a people who resemble his love.

And although Jesus was the one who knows the complexity of the human heart, he knows same-sex attraction because he created humans.

He knows the extent of the fall and the corruption and the twisting of the human psyche.

He knows that stuff.

In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

And although Jesus Christ never spoke a miscalculation, an untruth, or uttered a lie, for our sakes he was falsely accused of error.

He was mocked as delusional.

He was condemned as a heretic.

He was beaten as a blasphemer.

And willingly reduced to an oozing corpse on a Roman cross so that you and I could grow out of our adolescence into being not only loving but learned.

Not only devoted, but discerning.

Not only people of compassion, but people of conviction.

And so I call us this morning as we close to behold our Christ.

When you hold up the philosophies of man that are so trendy and ever-changing, by the way, and hold up what God has revealed through Christ in his word, go for Jesus.

In him is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

And as you behold him, as you follow him, as you grow, you will become more loving like him, more discerning like him.

And so it's my prayer that you and I would make this prayer for loving discernment our own.