A Rapidly Changing World Highlights the Need for Discernment

This is a guest post from Chris Brauns.

A rapidly changing world makes discernment all the more indispensable for Christians.

In Philippians 1:9-11, Paul prayed that the Philippians's love would increasingly abound in knowledge and depth of insight so that they could make wise decisions. Living in a fallen world always requires discernment, but it seems that the lightning rate of change of culture should motivate us to pray all the more that we would be discerning as believers, that we may be pure and blameless for the glory of Christ.

I am sure you don't need to be convinced of the lightning rate of change which requires that Christians make ongoing decisions about technology. Never the less, consider this letter written in 1956:

June, 1956: Co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Hewlett, writes to then-Provost at Stanford and the man widely considered to be one of the "Fathers of Silicon Valley," Fred Terman, "I have no personal knowledge of computers nor does anyone in our organization have any appreciable knowledge."

Terman was a member of the US Army Signal Corps' advisory board at the time, and when asked by the army how best to acquire a computer for research purposes, he naturally turned to Hewlett — one of his former students — for assistance. Unfortunately, HP were then immersed. . .

Read more and see a picture of the actual letter on Letters of Note.

See also Tim Challies's The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment