Seeing 20/20 in 2020 …

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December is naturally a time for introspection because it’s the last month of the year. You’ve spent another 365 days of your life you’ll never get back.

How did you do?

A lot of us look back on 2019 and think, “I really didn’t see THAT coming …” or “I couldn’t have seen that but once I did, I didn’t respond well …”

For many of us, we miss so much of what is right under our noses for failure to discern, to “see,” kind of like this story told by Mike Eberly:

    Forty years ago a Philadelphia congregation watched as three 9-year-old boys were baptized and joined the church. Not long after, unable to continue with its dwindling membership, the church sold the building and disbanded.

    One of the boys was Tony Campolo, now author and Christian sociologist at Eastern College. He remembers:

    “Years later when I was doing research in the archives of our denominations, I decided to look up the church report for the year of my baptism. There was my name, and Dick White’s. He’s now a missionary. Bert Newman, now a professor of theology at an African seminary, was also there. Then I read the church report for ‘my’ year: ‘It has not been a good year for our church. We have lost 27 members. Three joined, and they were only children.'”

Maybe you haven’t seen what you should have in 2019, resulting in some bad decisions. If you’d like to see with closer to 20/20 in 2020, try these tips for better discernment:

1. Get and stay connected with God. There’s little we see fully, but there’s nothing God doesn’t see. So being connected with Him in a close relationship where you seek His direction will vastly improve your discernment. That will require being a committed student of the Bible, being fervent in prayer, and daily drawing close to God.

2. Foster an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit. Many Christians would have to admit the most negected relationship in their life is their relationship with the Holy Spirit. Even though the Holy Spirit actually lives inside of every disciple of Jesus, we’re more prone to grieve the Holy Spirit than yield to His leading in our lives. Yet He is assigned — and longs — to lead us to truth: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future,” John 16:13. How much better could you discernment be if you foster an imtimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, allowing Him to guide you to the truth?

3. Stop assuming so much. Our culture increasingly acts on assumptions and less on facts or truth; we react while uninformed instead of waiting to respond after gathering the truth. So stop assuming so much and start insisting more on having the truth before responding, making decisions, or taking action. Do the work you need to do to learn about people, places, and things in your life. Do the hard work of learning what you don’t know.

4. Listen more and better. We don’t listen much, and we don’t listen well. Improve both of those and you’ll increase in knowledge and make better decisions because when you listen more and better you’re able to improve your understanding. That positions you to be able to exercise greater discernment.

5. Seek wise, godly counsel. Often what we can’t see ourselves, or fully understand, can be seen and understood (at least in part) by wise, godly people in our lives, and their counsel can help us improve our knowledge and make better decisions. Being an active member of a church provides us with a spiritual family to provide the kind of wise and godly counsel we need.

Time is one of life’s greatest treasures because once spent, it’s gone forever. You can’t go back and redo things. But all of us can learn to spend the time we have with greater discernment so that, at the end of the year, we can be well satisfied with how we spent our days.

Scotty