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When tellers or retail workers learn about counterfeits, they don’t study fake bills. Instead, they study real ones. Fake ones can change every day. But the real government-issued ones set the standard. The same for us who walk with God. We can’t study every false teaching, doctrine, minister or person. We have to go to the source—the Scriptures in order to know what is right and what is wrong. Elisabeth Elliot, the late speaker and teacher, said “The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”

Hebrews 5:12-14 says, “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

In the previous chapters, the writer of Hebrews has been expounding some heavy questions; truths essential to the understanding of Christianity. But his audience isn’t mature enough to comprehend these. The author isn’t rubbing them gently on the back saying, “That’s okay, you’re a baby saint.” He is saying that they ought to have trained themselves better by now. The Greek word for trained, , contains a root from which we get our word gymnasium. The phrase translated “constant practice” carries the sense of “habit.” So, the writer is saying, “You should have been in constant training to develop the habit of distinguishing good from evil!” That’s work. Far from being spoon fed. Successful training of the senses is the result of “practice.” Again, this is the only time this Greek word, hexen, appears in the New Testament. Vines’s Dictionary says that it “denotes habit, experience, or use.” F. F. Bruce says in his commentary on Hebrews that it is “experience acquired through practice.” It is not something that comes overnight, but through diligence.

If you are going to live for God, you must train your “senses” according to the truths of God’s word to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. Otherwise, you’ll find ourselves like those in Judges 21:25, when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

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