Teaching Your Family to be Discerning

No matter where your family or the world is with economic, political, and cultural ups and downs, Dads, we have a responsibility to train our families to be discerning.

Quick tour of the Bible's guidance on discernment:

1. Discernment is a gift from God. See Solomon's story (1 Kings 3:9-11), for example, and Daniel (Daniel 2:21).

2. Discernment also requires our cooperation and study. (multiple references in Proverbs)

3. We need to study God's Word as the standard for righteousness. We need revealed truth, because we cannot rely exclusively upon what our hearts may tell us. Consider Hebrews 5:12-14 (emphasis mine):

"In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil."

Engineers might say discernment is about selecting meaningful, valuable signal from a noisy environment.

Wise fathers are constantly seeking to discern between good and evil, and the best direction to take, thinking methodically about situations (because they are complicated, with multiple stakeholders, perspectives, and factors moving over time, all in a sin-stained world). And one of the avenues to our own growth is that we're coaching our own families in this same practice.

Try talking through situations aloud with your children. Pitch issues to be age appropriate, and build on what you know of your children's learning history. Teenagers should be engaged as intelligent youth -- the label "teen" does not show up in Scripture. You can work through current events, stuff that goes on at school, issues that affect your extended family, almost anything. Go to relevant Bible passages as a source of truth.

Wherever your children are now on the discernment scale, they need your help to get to the next level. Helping them helps you, too.