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Who Are You Listening To? Learning Discernment in a World Full of Voices – Highlight Episode 373 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Infinite voices.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like that, doesn't it, Oscar?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like in a day and age where I call it just noise, incessant, constant noise, whether it's from social media or it's texts or it's emails or it's constant input, media, you know, news, things always come in our ways, and we need discernment.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Truly.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's more now than ever, perhaps, because, and I think really this is ultimately a discipleship issue with the local church.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: We need to figure out how to subvert what's happening because you you mentioned infinite voices.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's never been a time in history in which you are so plugged into other people's opinions and views of the world through podcast and YouTube.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, we are, you add up the hours of the amount of content that we consume on a regular basis that are being driven by an algorithm that's shoving us into some sort of pipeline of uh echo chamberism.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you you come to realize like it's really discipleship issue because now more than ever, other people are speaking into your lives.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're not careful, here's what happens is that you think you're a good Christian because you show up to church for an hour and a half on a Sunday, and then you spend the next 60 hours of consumption time in your week on your drives at the gym, cleaning the house, downloading and listening to podcasts, YouTube videos, et cetera, et cetera.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, here's the takeaway you are being catechized by whatever it is you consume.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: True, man.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: You're always being discipled.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're always being discipled.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Choose your discipler well.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Choose the person who's discipling you well.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: God has given us a filter to withstand the noise of the world.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's his word.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yo.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we would sanctify them by your word, right?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um when we think of John 10 27, my sheep hear my voice.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the loudest voice, it's not the trendiest voice, it's his voice.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes sheep will be very noisy.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so God calls us away from the sheep to be with the shepherd.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a quote from Charles Spurgeon.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: He said, discern is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong, rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right and almost right.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a just such brilliance.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it was absolutely destroyed by Mark.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Just decimated.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was the manly voice.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: 70 times seven.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's brilliant.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um A.W.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Toza said that the most dangerous trap and the most dangerous trap is just living and forgetting that God exists.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I read that, that thought horrified me.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you why.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine me waking up in the morning and not being conscious of God and his presence and his will and the Bible and what Jesus did on the cross.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just going about my own thing, doing my own little thing.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: That terrifies me to forget about the cross and eternity.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the greatest discernment is the realization that the pleasures of this world are absolute vanity.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: Amen.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's when you get that discernment, that's godly maturity.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Everything in the world is just transient, it's chasing the wind, it's but a vapor that appears for a moment and vanishes away.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's so good, right?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: I've said before in the past, and I'm borrowing from uh Brett McCracken's book Um on Wisdom Pyramid, I think is what it's called.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: But he says uh he says that we are knowledge in this day and age with social media, with AI, we are knowledge rich, but wisdom poor.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: We we have all the information we could ever ask for, more than any we can pull up any subject and get any fine detail on anything in the world, like no one has ever had, you know, you'd have to be in the library of Alexandria, spend eight months finding the right book to get the right piece of fact that you would want, and you can just get it with the tap of your fingers or calling up Siri, and yet more than ever, we lack wisdom.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the counter to that, I think that you know, getting back into this, how do we raise up discernment?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: How do we raise up wisdom?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: We can't do it online.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: We we don't need a frictionless discipling experience.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: We need friction, we need iron sharpening iron.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: We need men and women women sitting across the coffee table from one another, reading a book written by a Puritan, engaging in conversation about getting to know each other one-on-one.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: These are moments that God dwells in and means to refine you, that you just cannot substitute by watching a YouTube video.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: You need friction in your life.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's so good.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: I love the fact that you brought up knowledge versus wisdom.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you guys know the saying that says that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and and there is that importance because I think, Oscar, to your point, what what a lot of people don't do is they don't digest knowledge.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: And when you don't digest knowledge, it doesn't assimilate.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: It just becomes these little bite-sized sound bites that just become sort of trite sayings that you throw around versus like, no, that it's become a part of me.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: You were gonna go to Genesis.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was gonna say, you know, I I love how God when Eve heard something, or when Adam said he was naked and hid himself, and God asked, Who told you that you were naked?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's not it's not one of information, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's more of one of influence, right?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Who's influencing you?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where are you getting your information from?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's like when Adam and Eve were inside the garden and and they hid themselves, and God said, Where are you?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't one of information, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like he didn't know where they were at.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like where are you?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's more like, look where you're at.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Look where and that's not original, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Look where you're at, look where your sin has led you.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, look who you've been listening to.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's led you to this point.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're always listening, yeah, but who are you listening to?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and you think about it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: What did the serpent do?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: What's Satan do before that?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: He questioned God's voice.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: Has God indeed said?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: Did he really?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then God said, Who told you that?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, again, how many times have we said it?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: It goes back to authority, you know, and again, how often do people say, Satan told me?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I not that I endorse that kind of phraseology, but Satan told me.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so you're telling me you know who told you?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: What's his name?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, the father of lies.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, and you know his name.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: And what?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you're believing it?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, we have to we can't stray from the simplicity found in Christ, like Paul told the Church of Corinth.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: You think that's what happened with Adam and Eve.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: They they strayed from the simplicity of having a relationship with God the Father and just convoluted it with the noise of the world, with the with the commotion and the yapping of the time.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's always an algorithm.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you're on social media long enough, there's gonna be an algorithm that's gonna figure you out to keep you busy.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's crazy.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: How do we cut through the noise?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Having a discernment according to the word of God.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when I was a kid many years ago, uh what we used to do is we would get a package and do it up nicely like a like a gift and put it on the road with a piece of string to the side of the road, and then we'd hide in the bushes.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And when a car would stop and see the package on the road, the driver would get out, walk around the back, and by that time we'd pulled it in so that they couldn't find it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we just used to sit there and watch them getting under the car.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then I saw this package here, and we were in the bushes laughing.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: We used to do that too, we called it car fishing.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Car fishing?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So wait, wait, you put a package out.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It made it look really nice and it had string.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so you would just but like a light box, basically.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you pull it in and watch the driver.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: The driver would always stop, back up his car, and he'd look under the car because he thought, I did see it here, and we're in the bushes.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: But whenever you see a gift, in this world there are strings attached to it.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Always.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's always strings attached.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Someone wants to sell you something.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: You get a little sample at your door, they don't care about you having shampoo, they want to get the money out of your wallet.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need discernment to realize the cults have always got strings attached to them.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's grace plus.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Always.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we need discernment because the Bible says in the latter days there'll be false prophets and false gospels and false brethren.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we need discernment, particularly in that area, to know strings are attached to cults.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: And and for us as believers, too, you know, Acts 17, 11, the Bereans.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_03: Those who are in Berea were more noble-minded than those who are in Thessalonica, because now they don't they uh they not only received the word with great eagerness, but they also examined the scriptures to see if these things were so.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: Being Bereans and searching and going back and examining the word.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: Friends, we value your time.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: So we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped without the jokes and fellowship.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: Until then, you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaters.tv.