The Religious Economy (3)

 Discernment is a spiritual capacity. It is the insight that comes with Christian wisdom. It is the ability to see "through" life, to see it for what it really is. Some people are more naturally sagacious than others, some more critically astute than others, and God may enhance this sort of gift by his grace, but it is not this natural ability that I am referring to here. The heart of the ability to discern right from wrong in the actual circumstances of life is the rich flowering that God intends from the interactions of the truth of his Word, reflection on it, and the moral character that grows out of it. It is this culture of wisdom with which the Bible, in both Testaments, is much concerned and in which the evangelical world appears to have lost interest.
 
Indeed, wherever there is worldliness in the church today, it has made its inroads because of insufficient belief in the Transcendent and a surfeit of belief in the modern world. The problem of worldliness, of modernity happily ensconcing itself in the church, is a problem of misplaced belief. It is a problem of mistaken loyalties, of misjudgment about how relevance is really to be assessed and how success is to be defined. Christian faith made relevant to the "world," in this third and final sense, will be Christian faith no longer relevant to God, to his Christ, to his truth.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.