Hearing Conference - Saturday: Session 1 - Spiritual Discernment - Interacting with the Invisible God
May 13, 2023      |     By: Sam McVay, Jr.      |      Category: Special      |      Location: El Dorado
Back to the Resource Library

Sam reminds us God is invisible - a fact that offends our natural minds. He shows a model of a natural ear and teaches us how it testifies of our spiritual hearing.

Spiritual Discernment
"Interacting with the Invisible God"
Sam McVay

1 Timothy 1:17 (ESV)
17 To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Immortality & Invisibility are two of the primary descriptions of the one and only King of the ages.

One of these, immortality, appeals to the fallen flesh man that is desperately trying not to die.

The other, invisibility, offends the fallen flesh that demands sight as the primary confirmation of reality.

1 Corinthians 2:14-16 (ESV)
14 The natural person (soulish) does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 
16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

1 Corinthians 3:1 (ESV)
1 But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

The scriptures make a distinction between those that perceive reality from the soul man and those that perceive reality from the spirt man.

The soul man, since the fall, uses the body’s five senses along with reason as its primary confirmation of reality.

The spirit man, since its redemption, uses the word of God and spiritual discernment as its primary confirmation of reality.

Hearing in the natural mirrors hearing in the Spirit.

How humans hear
Step 1: Sound waves enter the ear. When a sound occurs, it enters the outer ear causing the eardrum to vibrate sending those vibrations to the middle ear.
Step 2: Sound moves through the middle ear, with the three tiny bones that amplify the sound in the middle ear sending that amplified sound to the inner ear fluid.
Step 3: Sound moves through the inner ear where there is fluid. As the fluid moves, 25,000 nerve endings are set into motion. These nerve endings transform the vibrations into electrical impulses that then travel along the eighth cranial nerve (auditory nerve) to the brain.
Step 4: Your brain interprets the signal into understanding and responds.

https://www.healthyhearing.com/uploads/images/the-ear.jpg

How redeemed humans hear God:
Step 1: The Spirit produces a "discernible disturbance" to our normal sense of perception that enters the outward heart (sense of feeling beyond the natural realm).
Step 2: This impulse moves through the middle of our heart where the stirring is amplified and increased in our attention.
Step 3: Then the increased attention in our sense of knowing sets in motion a kind of 'electrical strength’ that travels through a kind of sensitive nerve to our inner Mind of Christ.
Step 4: The Mind of Christ in us interprets the increased sensitivity by way of scripture-informed spiritual discernment that suddenly has a trans-rational knowledge to follow.

Your new creation that you received at salvation has the capacity to hear the Holy Spirit and His word. But it does take some learning to grow in fruitfulness.