What is spiritual discernment?
Answered by New Wine
Spiritual discernment, in the charismatic tradition, is both an ordinary Christian discipline and a specific gift of the Holy Spirit — the ability to recognize and distinguish between the different kinds of spirits at work in a given situation.
The Biblical Case
Paul lists "discerning of spirits" among the manifestations of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12, and as Derek Prince points out, the phrase in Greek is plural on both sides — discernings of spirits.
That grammatical detail matters.
According to Prince, this means each act of discernment is its own individual operation of the gift, the same way each healing is a distinct operation of the gift of healing, not a permanent faculty a person possesses once and for all.
Prince names five categories a believer may need to distinguish between: the Holy Spirit, good angels, fallen angels, demons or evil spirits, and the human spirit — each person's own spirit, distinct from all the others. He points to John 1:47, where Jesus discerned in Nathanael a guileless spirit, as an example of reading the human spirit rather than an evil one.
Why This Distinguishing Matters
The purpose of discernment is never suspicion for its own sake — it's accuracy. Prince observes that failing to discern correctly cuts both ways: some believers have failed to recognize the Holy Spirit Himself when He moved in unexpected ways, dismissing a genuine move of God because it didn't match their expectations. Others, he notes, have mistaken the work of evil spirits counterfeiting the Holy Spirit for the real thing — something he says has troubled the Pentecostal movement historically.
- Discerning the Holy Spirit — recognizing His genuine activity even when it looks unfamiliar or unexpected.
- Discerning angelic activity — Prince cites Acts 27, where an angel visited Paul's ship during the storm, apparently perceived only by Paul.
- Discerning evil spirits — recognizing their presence, activity, and operation, including their tendency to counterfeit the genuine.
- Discerning the human spirit — distinguishing a person's own disposition or character, as Jesus did with Nathanael.
Discernment Is Practiced, Not Assumed
Prince is direct that natural instinct — feelings, personal impressions, ordinary reasoning — cannot be trusted as a discerner on its own. The only reliable discerner is the Word of God, and using it well requires spiritual maturity, drawing on the distinction in Hebrews 5:13-14 between those still on milk and those trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.
Prince describes making this a daily discipline: walking into a room and asking what spiritual forces are at work, listening to a sermon not just for its content but for the spirit behind the words. Discernment, in his view, should be as regular a part of the Christian's spiritual life as prayer — something sharpened by repeated use, not a one-time endowment.
He also builds out a related distinction between the spiritual (pneumatikos) and the soulish (psuchikos) — recognizing what originates from the human soul, mind, and emotions versus what comes from the spirit realm, a distinction English struggles to translate but which Prince considers essential groundwork for discerning rightly.
Spiritual discernment is the Spirit-given ability to see past appearances to what is actually operating in a person or situation — Holy Spirit, angelic, demonic, or simply human — and it grows only through disciplined practice in the Word, not through instinct alone. This material in the library centers almost entirely on Derek Prince's teaching, so a fuller picture would benefit from consulting his broader work on the gifts directly.
Sources
New Wine drew this answer from these teachings.
- A Word of Knowledge and Discerning of Spirits — Derek Prince
- How Spiritual Gifts Operate — Derek Prince
- Earthly, Soulish, Demonic — Derek Prince
