It is in response to a statement made to him:
“You say you had to be taught how to tell the difference between what you call "good" and "evil" thoughts. Who taught you this, and how did they teach you?”
"It was at once very simple yet time consuming. The basis of this is in Hebrews.
Heb 5:12 For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.
13 For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe.
14 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.
The first two verses are context. The operative part is verse 14. Mature Christians are those who by reason of practice have their senses trained to discern between good and evil.
The reason is that evil thoughts do not come directly at you. They come obliquely. The enemy always seeks to influence you by lies. There was a period of time that the Lord showed me how to discern the lie that was behind every thought. Satan can only work through lies. It is impossible for him to tell the truth. Consequently every attempt to influence comes with a veiled lie. The training was to be able to see the underlying lie.
The enemy always appeals to a few “hooks” he has in our minds (or in our flesh so to speak). Those hooks are:
(1) If we are controlled by the acquisition of pleasure or by the avoidance of pain.
(2) If we are subject to pride.
(3) If we are trusting in our own goodness to be acceptable to God.
(4) If we believe God no longer judges man for sin.
(5) If we are attempting to reform ourselves without submitting our lives to the Lord for His transformation.
(6) If we are deceived into thinking that in order to be like God, all we have to do is obtain the right knowledge.
(7) If we think that God no longer speaks to mankind.
(8) If we trust another knowledge source instead of God Himself.
(9) There are more, but you get the gist.
If there is a “chink” in our armor, he will make a suggestion using one of the hooks and try to convince us to do evil because of one of our “hooks”. For example, he might say, “Go ahead, you are a special person to God, He will overlook this tiny infraction. Go ahead and do it”. That would be appealing to 1, 2, 3, and 4. If there are hooks, you will fall because you believe the wrong things. The enemy can get you to do what he wants because he can see your hooks too. Unfortunately most people can’t see their hooks.
The means of teaching is really simple. It is to learn the same way an infant learns. Jesus not only said you must be born again in order to enter into the Kingdom of God, He also said if you don’t become as a little child you won’t enter or even SEE it.
All that mankind knows is contrary to the knowledge of God. In order to learn the things of God, one has to become like the little child.
Little children have no knowledge base with which to sift things they are told. Consequently, they accept by faith what they are told. They have no knowledge to make a decision as to the rightness or wrongness of what they are taught. Selective learning comes later, after a base of knowledge is built up. They then sift whatever they hear through that knowledge base, and will not accept things that go against what they already know. Up to the point that a child has a knowledge base with which to judge incoming information, they learn by faith.
The knowledge of man has never been able to discover God.
1Co 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
In order to learn from God, one has to first be disabused of all the falsehoods that he has been taught all his life. He must make himself into a little child to be untaught, and then taught all over again in the right way.
Children, when they are born can hear and see. They do not understand what they are hearing or seeing. They are a blank slate. The beginning of learning starts the first day when the baby gets hungry and starts to cry. Suddenly he is fed. That produces a revelation in the child: he can influence his environment. He can communicate his wants to those around him by a simple noise. They start to communicate immediately their likes and dislikes concerning their environment.
I think the next revelation is when the baby starts to make sounds and sees a wider causal relationship in different sounds. The baby says “mama” and that parental unit with the feeding station chest goes berserk with excitement. Wow, the child thinks, that sound must have some special meaning. Then comes “papa” and the other parental unit goes berserk. So now they know two very specific sounds that cause changes in their environment. Before too long the baby figures out which parental unit responds to “mama” and which parental unit responds to “papa”.
This learning curve is based solely on recognizing a causal relationship between something the baby does and its environment. From those simple revelations, the child then begins to put together an understanding of its environment.
That process is what is being spoken of above. Mature Christians are those who by reason of practice have their senses trained to discern between good and evil.
We hear something we think is from God. We make a decision to respond to the suggestion, and then consequences come. Sometimes we do hear God, and in those instances there is a good outcome - Peace, joy, comfort, etc. Other times we will be hearing a suggestion from the enemy, we act, and there are bad consequences – conviction, chastisement, God’s correction, God’s wrath. We learn not to listen to that voice again.
As I said before, this process can take a long time. I knew it might, and I recognized how it was that God was going to teach me how to recognize the voice of the enemy or His voice. At first I learned the timber, the sound, of their voices. Then I learned how to spot the underlying lies. The entire process of being trained how to discern between good and evil is EXACTLY like a baby learning how to communicate with those around it.
While the senses being trained are not PHYSICAL senses, they are senses nonetheless. The spiritual senses at first are not recognizable, but as time goes on the ability to exercise your spiritual senses grows easier and easier. The spiritual senses are communications in the Spirit, not in the physical realm. Each physical sense has a similar spiritual counterpart. The spiritual senses are prophecy, words of knowledge, words of wisdom, tongues, interpretations of tongues, revelations, visions, dreams, and, the #1 and most important, spiritual discernment.
Spiritual discernment is that one can tell the state of the Spirit of God within him. Discernment is a binary switch. If the Spirit is sanguine and at peace, then that indicates the Spirit is approving of whatever is going on. If the Spirit is not at peace, it indicates trouble, beware. When one trusts God for guidance, this is the primary means for delivering that guidance.
The process of learning is one that requires thought, an analytical mind, and remembering outcomes. Learn from your mistakes, and learn from your good choices. In the end, you senses are trained to discern between good and evil. And in the process, all of the “hooks” that the enemy uses to oppress you into doing evil are exposed and removed. Also, this is the way one can cease from sin entirely.
This is a very condensed overview of thirty five years of walking down this path. In order to even go down that path, there are certain things you MUST accept by blind faith.
(1) God is good in every way and has only our best as His priority.
(2) He can speak, even if we do not know yet how to hear.
(3) What might seem to us impossible is not impossible to God.
(4) He will not lead us astray.
(5) He will do exactly as He has said without failure.
(6) That which used to seem like imagination might not be imagination.
(7) That which used to seem to us like coincidence might not be coincidence but divine intervention.
(8) You are placing your entire life in His hands; therefore you must trust Him completely.
(9) You MUST believe that there are supernatural things, even if you do not yet know what they are.
(10) Those who trust in the Lord will never be abandoned or failed.
Those that are damaged by the presupposition that there is nothing supernatural cannot go down this path. They are completely lost, and have no hope of ever hearing God speak to them.
And the final answer to this question who taught me this? When I believed in Jesus, repented of my sins, a new person entered into my body. He is called the Holy Spirit. It is the same Spirit that dwelt in Jesus and produced His supernatural life.
I had to learn to communicate with that Spirit in the manner in which the Spirit communicates. It is not like the physical, although some things are similar. When I learned on what level and how the Spirit communicates, it opened up a direct link with God.
The first level of learning is how to identify the Spirit’s way of communicating. The next level is to practice it. After that one has to grow in understanding God’s character. One also has to learn the tactics and weapons the enemy uses against us.
It is EXACTLY like becoming a baby again, and growing up all over again with your focus not on the physical things of this world, but the spiritual things of the Kingdom of God.
Atheists like to discount the Bible as being myth or unreliable, but they have never tried to PROVE it is true. It is impossible to prove it to be false, becasue it is impossible in the laws of logic to prove the negative. The only thing that can be done is to prove it true, and it fails to prove out to be true, then one can assume it is false.They simply assume it to be myth and untrue. I approached it with a different perspective. I wanted to PROVE it, not DISPROVE it. I believed that if it was true, it would have to work for me. If God was real, and the Bible was true, I should see the same supernatural reality become reality in my life.
I never grew faint with unbelief, as Dave M did to his own destruction, but I pressed on believing that if the Bible is true, then it would happen to me as it happened to them.
Since I did not grow weak in faith because of the conundrums in the physical/spiritual "contradictions", what the Bible describes became real in my life also. I know what I am talking about. I have heard the Lord speak to me times beyond numbering. I have seen Him with my own eyes and touched Him several times. I was taken to heaven not once but twice. The one who created all things has even called me His Friend. In addition, all the miracles recounted in the Bible, with one exception, I too have done. That includes a feeding miracle (multiplying food like the loaves and fishes were multiplied).
I have not yet been asked to raise someone from the dead, but I expect that will come in time. He told me once that if I went into the ministry, there would be resurrections. That has not yet happened."
-Bro Cope