Senses Exercised by Reason of Use

She is twenty three and she has been walking with God for two years, and she has an assumption she has never inspected.

She assumes that the people around her arrived with the equipment installed.

The woman who leads the Tuesday group says things like I felt a check about that and the Lord shut a door, and she says them the way somebody reports the weather. Not dramatically. As ordinary information about a life.

And she, at twenty three, has none of that ordinary information. What she has is a swirl. Impressions that might be her, might be God, might be something she read on Thursday, and no way at all to sort them.

So she has concluded that some believers come equipped and she is not one of them.

She has stopped bringing decisions to Him, not out of unbelief, but out of a kind of embarrassment: what is the use of asking a question when you cannot read the answer?

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She believes she was issued a faith without the part that hears.

Read how the equipment arrives

There is a line in Hebrews aimed at people who ought to have grown further than they had, and it says exactly how the growing happens.

But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.Hebrews 5:14

By reason of use.

Read that phrase slowly, because it demolishes the assumption you've been living under. The senses are exercised. Not issued. Not distributed at conversion to a favored group. Exercised, which is a training word, and by reason of use, which means the training happens through using the thing before it is any good.

Which means the woman on Tuesday did not arrive with it. She has been using hers, probably badly at first, for however many years, and what you are watching is the result of use rather than the result of issue.

Your discernment is exercised into place rather than handed over finished, and Hebrews 5:14 says by reason of use in plain words. That is what the word actually describes, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who trains a sense in a believer who is still using it badly.

The swirl is what beginning feels like

Now the plain thing, and I want it said with heat because it has cost you two years of asking.

The swirl is not evidence against you. It is what an unexercised sense feels like from the inside, and every single person you admire has been exactly there and most of them will tell you so if you ask them directly.

Nobody photographs the beginning. What you see on a Tuesday is the finished report, delivered calmly, with the ten years of getting it wrong edited out because nobody thinks to include them.

And notice what your conclusion has done. It moved you from I am learning this to I was not given this, and one of those is a stage and the other is a sentence, and only one of them is written anywhere.

And nothing about being two years in has ever disqualified you from any of it. Scripture puts discernment on a training schedule and never on a list of gifts handed to some and withheld from others, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a beginner.

Use it badly on purpose

Here is the practical piece, and it will offend your instinct to get it right.

Make small calls, out loud, and expect to be wrong sometimes.

Not the big ones. Not who to marry and not whether to move. Small. Which of two people to phone this week. Whether to say the thing at the group or hold it. Whether to go to the thing on Saturday.

Make the call, say it out loud so it is on the record, do it, and then write down afterwards what you noticed. Not right or wrong. What you noticed, before and during and after, because the noticing is the muscle and the outcome is not.

I am not giving you a test that tells you which impressions are God. There is no such test, and if I handed you one it would break on the first hard decision and you would conclude you had failed it. I am giving you the training the letter describes and a God who steers people while they are learning.

You are able to start exercising this today, and the exercising was always how it comes. Hebrews 5:14 says senses are trained by reason of use, and the Holy Spirit is the One who is teaching a twenty three year old in the middle of getting it wrong.