Senses Exercised Is a Training Word, and Nobody Is Born With It

He is waiting to feel sure, and he has been waiting since he was about thirty.

The waiting is not passive. He reads. He listens. He turns things over. What he will not do is act on his own read of something, because acting requires a level of confidence he has never once had, and he assumes that other people have it.

That is the assumption underneath everything: that the men he watches make decisions from a settled interior sense, and that his own permanent uncertainty is a disqualification.

So he defers. It looks like humility and some of it is. And the rest of it is a man who has been waiting three decades for a feeling that was never going to arrive, because he has misunderstood where the ability comes from.

There is one verse that says where it comes from, and the answer is embarrassingly ordinary.

Two words

Here it is, in the King James Version:

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. (Hebrews 5:14)

By reason of use.

That is the source. Not by reason of gifting, not by reason of study, not by reason of a settled temperament. Use.

And have their senses exercised, which is the language of training. Exercised is what happens to a body: repetition, over time, producing a capacity that was not there at the start and that nobody could have felt coming.

Which means the ability this man has been waiting to receive is not received. It is developed, and it is developed by the exact activity he has been declining to do until he receives it.

That is the loop he has been in for thirty years, and it is a closed one, and the verse cuts it.

You have an ability that comes by use and you were never going to be issued it in advance. Hebrews 5:14 says the senses are exercised by reason of use, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than an arriving certainty who develops what that verse describes.

What the writer says about not starting

And the two verses before it, which are blunt about what happens to somebody who never begins.

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. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. (Hebrews 5:12-13)

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers.

That is a time-based sentence. Enough time has passed. The problem named is not incapacity, it is that the time went by without the use.

Unskilful in the word of righteousness. Unskilful is a craft word again, the same family as the workman's image elsewhere, and it means a man has not developed a skill rather than that he lacks a faculty.

That is a hard word and it is also enormously freeing, because unskilled is a condition that changes and disqualified is not.

And the very next thing the writer says is not a rebuke, it is a direction:

Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection. (Hebrews 6:1)

Let us go on. First person plural, and forward.

You are unskilled rather than disqualified and you were never going to be stuck in that condition. Hebrews 5:13 uses a craft word for the lack and Hebrews 6:1 says let us go on, and it is His Spirit who makes moving forward possible for a man who has not started.

What a man is allowed to ask for

And a young king, on the first night of a job he had no idea how to do.

Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people? (1 Kings 3:9)

That I may discern between good and bad.

He asks for it. Directly. And the reason he gives is that he does not have it: who is able, which is a question with the answer nobody built into it.

And God's response is worth having, because it says something about how this request is received:

And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. (1 Kings 3:10)

The speech pleased the Lord.

So a man who says out loud that he cannot tell one thing from another, and asks for the ability, is doing something Scripture records as pleasing.

And Paul prays the same thing for a whole church:

And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment. (Philippians 1:9)

Yet more and more. Which is growth language and assumes a starting point below the finish.

You are able to ask for this outright and you were never going to be thought less of for saying you cannot. 1 Kings 3:10 says the request pleased the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an honest admission a place where God gives rather than assesses.

What it actually feels like

And a verse that describes the process, because a man waiting for a feeling should know what the actual experience is.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:2)

Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove.

The proving comes after the renewing, and renewing is a process word, and the whole sentence is in the passive voice for the part a man cannot do himself.

Which tells you what to expect. Not a moment of certainty. A gradual change in what a man notices, over a long time, mostly invisible while it happens, and detectable mainly in hindsight.

That is what discernment is in practice, and it is why it cannot be waited for. A man cannot detect a slow change in himself that has not started.

You have a renewing that produces the proving and you were never going to feel it arrive. Romans 12:2 puts the transformation before the proving and puts the transforming in the passive, and it is His Spirit who does the renewing that verse describes.