Abigail - Week 3: Defusing the Situation

Erin Davis: Welcome back to the Women of the Bible podcast! I’m Erin Davis, and we’ve been looking at a passage in 1 Samuel 25, trying to understand the life of a woman named Abigail. She is a gem of a woman, a treasure hidden in Scripture. We’ve been walking through the study together, Abigail: Living with the Difficult People in Your Life.

I’ve been gathered with friends. We have something good to drink; we have our Bibles open; we have our copy of the study. I hope that you have something good to drink, and I hope you have your Bible open and your copy of the study. I hope you’re gathered with some great friends, just like I am, as we’re looking at this woman who models for us how to deal with difficult people in ways that honor the Lord and show grace.

I want to introduce you to some friends of mine. You’ve already heard their voices on this podcast, but I’ll let them tell you a little bit more about themselves. First, we have my friend Joy.

Joy McClain: Thank you; it’s good to be here. I’m Joy McClain, and I live just down the road, three hours away, and have been married to my beloved for thirty-four years. I have four kids, six grandkids.

Erin: Four kids, six grandkids! That’s amazing! I’ve said I want to skip parenting and go right to grandparenting.

Joy: Amen!

Erin: That seems like a really good gig.

Joy: It is the bomb.

Erin: Do your grandkids live close to you?

Joy: Yes.

Erin: Oh, you’re blessed! And you’re a farm girl.

Joy: Yes.

Erin: You live in Indiana.

Joy: Yes.

Erin: Where the soil is dark and lovely.

Joy: And very wet right now!

Erin: And very wet right now! You have lots of critters. What do you have?

Joy: Chickens, goats, cats, donkey, pony.

Erin: Okay.

Joy: I think I covered them all.

Erin: That’s great.

Alright, we’re also joined by another friend of mine. Meg, tell us about yourself.

Meg Honnold: I am Meg Honold. I live about fifteen minutes down the road from Erin, in Rollo, Missouri, with my dear husband, Philip. I host the podcast, “You Never Asked.” I love Missouri.

Erin: And you grew up on a farm.

Meg: I did. I grew up on a farm. We had goats, chickens. We had a sheep.

Erin: What was its name?

Meg: It didn’t have a name. It was a very tragic story.

Erin: Oh, yes. Gotcha. Okay.

Meg: It ended up running away and dying, hence we didn’t have any more sheep.

Erin: Sure.

Meg: But I grew up on a farm. I love the midwest. I love the woods.

Erin: Yes.

Meg: Yes, I loved growing up on a farm.

Erin: I live in Missouri on a farm, so we didn’t plan that, but we’re farm girls. We’re midwestern farm girls, which, you know, kind of makes us experts on the story that we’re reading here. Because what does Nabal do for a living?

Joy: He has those sheep to shear!

Meg: Thousands of them!

Erin: He has sheep; he has goats. He’s a farmer. 

If you’re just picking up on this podcast, I’ll give you a quick review. I used to say it was the CliffsNotes version of things, but nobody knows what CliffsNotes versions are anymore. So it’s the Wikipedia, it’s the Twitter version of what’s happening here in 1 Samuel. We’re just focusing on one chapter (that’s what contains Abigail’s story), and there are three people that really we’ve been introduced to.

First is David. You probably know him as King David, though he’s not yet king. He’s been anointed king; he has slain the giant Goliath. But at this point Saul is still king and David’s on the run from Saul’s temper. 

Then he meets the man Nabal, and I think it’s appropriate for us to boo and hiss every time we say Nabal.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: We just don’t like him. He’s rude. The Bible tells us that he’s harsh, that he’s ill-behaved, and we’ve seen that play out in this first interaction with David. Meg, can you remind those who are listening, what does David ask of Nabal?

Meg: “Could I come over? Can I bring my guys? We were kind to you; be kind to us. Share some food.”

Erin: That’s right. They know that it’s shearing season. They know that the men are out working and that those men are eating. And they are on the run. They have been kind to Nabal’s men. And in a really gracious, honoring way, David sends this request through a servant. “Hey, could we eat?” basically. “Can you share your goods with us?”

Joy, remind us, how does Nabal respond?

Joy: Not well.

Erin: No.

Joy: He’s nasty and not kind, not gracious, very mean-spirited.

Erin: He’s mean-spirited. He’s sarcastic. He undercuts David. He’s patronizing. So we don’t like Nabal. 

So we’re walking through that, and I want to get us to Abigail. To this point, we’ve only heard her name. Scripture has told us that she’s discerning and beautiful. What a great description, but we haven’t seen that in her yet, we’ve just learned her name. She’s Nabal’s wife, but we’re going to hear from her in this session.

1 Samuel 25:14–17. I’m going to read it to us. If you’re following along with us, I want you to read it right where you are. 

But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, “Behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to greet our master, and he railed at them.” 

I love that description. He railed at them. Don’t you know what it’s like to be railed at, or railed over, or ramrodded? I mean, that’s what happens here. 

“Yet the men were very good to us, and we suffered no harm. We did not miss anything when we were in the fields as long as we went with them. They were a wall to us, both by night and by day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep. Now, therefore, know this, and consider what you should do, for harm is determined to come against our master and against all his house, and he is such a worthless man that one cannot speak to him.”

So we learn some more about Nabal here.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: This is someone who works for Nabal, and how does he describe him?

Joy: He is difficult; he’s worthless; no one can even speak to him.

Erin: No one can even speak to him. I’m sure we can think of that person, that you just walk on eggshells around. You don’t know how they’re going to react. You’re afraid to talk about anything in their presence for fear of how they might react. 

We’re being careful as we’re walking through this study that we’re not always looking at others. I know there are moments in my own life that people would say, “Man, I can’t even say a word to her without her flying off the handle!”

Why do you think the servant goes to Abigail, and what is he essentially telling Abigail, Meg?

Meg: I think we find that she has a reputation of this discernment and wisdom. I have to think, as wealthy as Nabal is and important as he is, that he had to have a right hand man or other guys that this servant could have gone to. I appreciate that with this reputation of discernment and beauty and intelligence, he knows he can go to her and trust that she’s going to handle it in a wise way. He knows that in going to her it’s going to be handled correctly.

Erin: I hear fear in the servant’s voice.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: I mean, I don’t know if he knows David’s men are on the way (we know that from the text, David and 400 of his men). He knows what does David say when Nabal’s rude to him. He says, “Grab your swords. We’re going in!”

This is not a negotiation that’s about to happen. David is determined to wipe out Nabal, and the servant here discerns, “We’re all in trouble.”

Meg: Yes.

Erin: Even though this is a difficult man, even though he’s harsh, even though nobody could say a word around him, the servant discerns the whole house is going to suffer, because the house of David is coming against the house of Nabal. So what are Abigail’s options here? Joy, what do you think?

Joy: Well, what are her options? I think, first of all, the servant trusts that she’s going to choose wisely.

Meg: Yes.

Joy: So her options are: she could do nothing, she could be paralyzed, she could lash out. But he obviously trusts her to do the right thing. There are so many things she could do; she could do it wrongly, but she chooses wisely.

Erin: Yes. The men could have taken up arms; they could have fought it out.

Meg: She could have grabbed an army of her own.

Erin: She could have hidden. I mean, there’s obviously some distance between some of these conversations. Nabal is not at home with his wife; he’s out shearing the sheep. David is not in Nabal’s household; he’s out in the wilderness. It’s a distance that can be closed, because the servant gets to Abigail, but we don’t know in how much time.

So Abigail at this point is removed from the action, and she’s married to a harsh man. One option she had was to think, Okay, well, maybe I’ll be rid of this guy. She has lots of different options, but I think both of you saw something in the text that I see too: that Abigail can be trusted. Abigail obviously has a history of responding to situations in right ways.

Here she’s caught between the testosterone. Nabal and his men are worked up, and David and his men are worked up. I know what it’s like to be a woman caught between the testosterone; there’s a lot of that at my house. But what we don’t see Abigail do is repay foolishness with foolishness or anger with anger.

I fight that temptation in my own life. Someone’s shrill to me; I’m going to be shrill to them. Someone’s sharp with me; I’m going to be sharp to them. Someone acts a fool around me; I’m going to maybe act a fool around them. But we have to remember the kind of woman she is. Take us back to 25:3. What words are used to describe Abigail?

Joy: “Now the name of the man was Nabal, and the name of his wife Abigail, discerning and beautiful.”

Erin: “Discerning and beautiful.” She’s discerning and beautiful.

That’s where I want us to focus our time in this episode, on that word “discerning.” We all shared with each other that we would love for somebody to call us discerning. That is high praise. But you know what, I think that’s kind of a church word, I think it’s kind of “Christianese,” and it might be one of those words that we just gloss over. We know it’s good, we know we’d like to have it, but what does it mean, exactly, to be discerning?

So I’ll throw it to you, and it’s okay if this is clunky, because it is a concept that we don’t have a lot of clarity about; but Joy, how would you define “discernment”?

Joy: Well, obviously it’s knowledge. To me it’s taking the time to think, to consider. We know it’s wisdom, but to take the time to consider what are the options, what is best. What is the big picture? Who does it benefit? Not to just react selfishly or out of fear or out of haste or whatever, but just to think, wisely consider.

Erin: Yes, I love that. What do you think, Meg? How would you define discernment?

Meg: I think if I put it in today’s terms, it would be having a filter. I don’t just mean for what we say, but filtering what we’re allowing in. We have all this access to information everywhere, so having that filter or that guard, the discernment to say, “Okay, what am I going to allow to sink in? What am I going to pass aside?” And then taking that in our responses, in our relationships, and in our words.

Erin: I love that. I’m not sure I would have thought of that in that way. You’re twenty years younger than me. No, fifteen. You’re younger than me. Kesha, you’re younger than me. I don’t know how much younger. You and I have talked about how, as a woman in your twenties, the information overload is just constant. We’ve also talked about how you’ve had to learn to work through, “What is actually Bible? What is someone’s thoughts about the Bible?”

Meg: Yes. What is someone’s version, someone’s opinion, someone’s blog article?

Erin: That’s right. I think that is a way to practice discernment.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: It’s not just what comes out that is discerning, but also what comes in.

Meg: I need discernment when I open Instagram, for crying out loud! You know?

Erin: Yes, absolutely!

Joy: Absolutely.

Erin: Yes. 

I would just define it simply as wise judgment, similar to what you said, Joy. It is rooted in wisdom, it informs our decisions. Proverbs 16:21 tells us that the wise heart is called discerning.

So maybe we could think of them as two sides of the same coin, that wisdom is one side and discernment is the other; wisdom, perhaps, being a heart attitude, discernment being how that shows up in our lives, whether it’s just the wisdom of a pause in a situation or the wisdom of what we read and what we don’t read; then we discern those, too.

It’s still a little bit hard to define. I did as much digging as I could in Scripture about discernment. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a verse where it said, “And the definition of discernment for the people of God is . . .” I think we have to use discernment to identify discernment! It’s something that we need the Lord’s help with.

But when I can’t define something, I try to think of examples. So in your own lives, can you think of a woman who you would say, “Absolutely. She’s discerning. She has the gift of discernment; the Lord has given her discernment.” Would you just describe her for us as a picture? Joy, can you think of a woman of discernment in your own life?

Joy: I can. I think of a good friend of mine who has great discernment, and I would also describe her as very gracious. She’s beautiful, too, inside and out. But I think there is the time factor. She’s not quick to always respond; she’s quick to listen, and I think evaluate and pray over and pray through. Her husband happens to be a successful business owner, so they have to have discernment with what God has given them, with the wealth and what to do with that and steward that well.

I have seen her over and over just absorb something and take the time to consider and really pray, and not be in a huge hurry to dish out an answer, yet to be more concerned about what God thinks about this than the pressure of people and a timeframe.

Erin: I love that. What’s that biblical encouragement, that we are slow to speak?

Joy: Slow to speak and quick to listen.

Erin: Quick to listen and slow to become angry. I do think that is an indicator of discernment. 

Meg, can you think of a discerning woman in your life?

Meg: I can think of so many. I have a dear friend, and she’s around my age. But I immediately think of her in that I’ve watched her lay aside some really cool opportunities, with maybe some flair to them, that would give her some status, whatever it might be. I’ve watched her really consider those. 

I watch her consider her yeses and her nos and what she allows into her schedule and into how that will affect her marriage and her family. Instead of just jumping at everything that comes along, she really weighs and balances that, knowing how it will affect her daily life.

Erin: Yes. I think it’s possible to be a good decision-maker apart from the Lord; I don’t think you can be discerning apart from the Lord. So we’re not looking at this study like learning new character traits, necessarily. We’re looking at this study, and it’s exposing our need, and we need the Lord to grow us in discernment.

My hope for the women who are doing this study in living rooms, in Sunday school classrooms, I hope there are people that are doing this study together across the miles and listening to the podcasts. I hope as they listen to this episode they cry out to the Lord and say, “Lord, make me a woman of discernment!” It’s not something that we can do on our own.

Meg: Yes. We can’t trump it up.

Erin: There are no fifteen steps to becoming a discerning woman. It’s something the Lord has to do in us, and it’s something that we see the Lord has done in Abigail.

So I want to pick up the story, and I want to read us verses 18–22. This is Abigail’s response to this news that comes through the servant, “Uh-oh. We’re in trouble.”

Then Abigail made haste and took two hundred loaves, and two skins of wine, and five sheep already prepared, and five seahs of parched grain, and a hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundreds cakes of figs, and laid them on donkeys. 

We have to pause there for a minute.

Joy: That’s a lot of food!

Erin: It speaks to their wealth, which we already know that Nabal and Abigail are a wealthy couple. But how did they already have 200 loaves of bread baked? What kind of situation are they in out there in the woods? But anyway, she loads it all up on the donkey, and it all sounds quite delicious. Sometimes reading the Bible makes me hungry.

And she said to her young men, “Go on before me. Behold, I come after you.” But she did not tell her husband, Nabal. 

We’ll pause there. Why do you think she didn’t tell him?

Joy: I think there wasn’t time.

Erin: Yes.

Joy: She was acting. She had to respond to this, and she had to get those things moving, and not take the time to deal with the foolish man who would delay or thwart or just cause more chaos.

Erin: Do you see in her any lack of submission or disrespect of her husband in this moment where she chooses to act without speaking to him?

Joy: It’s such a big, broad thing!

Erin: I know, it’s complicated!

Joy: Because he is, as well, under submission to God, which he didn’t even recognize.

Erin: Sure.

Joy: Or honor. So I think she is able to look at the big picture and to say, “Our household will go down, we’ll all go down, everything, if we don’t respond in a wise way.”

Erin: We don’t see disobedience. We don’t see anything in here where Nabal said, “You are not to take 200 loaves of bread to David.” They’re separated, so it is absolutely nuanced. I don’t know that there’s a right answer or a wrong answer, but I just never want women to use Scripture as a weapon in their own situations. So I wouldn’t want a woman who is actually disobeying the Lord in her failure to submit to the authorities to go, “Well, look at Nabal’s wife, or look at Deborah,” or look at whomever. It’s just more complicated than that. So, worth a pause there, maybe.

 As she rode on the donkey and came down under the cover of the mountain, behold, David and his men came down toward her, and she met them. Now David had said, "Surely in vain have I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him, and he has returned to me evil for good. God do so to the enemies of David, and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him.”

Now, David knows the promises of God. David knows that the people of God are going to stand. God has said, “Who blesses you I’m going to bless, who curses you I’m going to curse.” David’s leaning into that, and he thinks, Okay. Nabal is a goner here.

But what do we see in the character of Abigail in the way she’s responded so far? She gathers the goods of her household; she sends the servants out in front of her; she herself rides on a donkey, and she comes up to David at this moment that David’s still really frothing at the mouth. I mean, he’s still very angry. What do you see so far in her character, Meg?

Meg: I found for me that it was important to note that Abigail and David both responded quickly. The issue wasn’t a quick response. Sometimes the pause is necessary, but in this case it needed a quick response. Obviously, their two responses were very different.

Erin: Right.

Meg: I think it comes down to, David wanted to take control of the situation, and Abigail was honoring God’s control over the situation. It turned out to be a completely different response.

Erin: Yes, and we see the inverse of Nabal. You know, Nabal was like, “I’m not giving you any meat! I’m not giving you any men!” And Abigail’s like, “I’m going to give you cakes and raisins and figs and wine.”

Meg: She comes in humility.

Erin: It’s that scarcity versus abundance. He was close-fisted; he wasn’t going to share; and her hands were open. Were her hands just open to save her skin? Maybe, but we know she’s a woman of discernment and beauty, we know she’s a woman of wisdom, so I think we do see a trust in the Lord.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: This had to have been a costly gift. Even if they owned thousands of cows and goats, this had to have been a costly gift. The sheer numbers make you pause and go, “Whoa!”

Meg: Right.

Joy: Plus, they’re putting out so much because it is shearing season, so they are…

Meg: They’re feeding a lot of people.

Erin: Right.

Joy: But it also took such courage. She could have stayed back.

Erin: Sure.

Joy: She could have sent everything onward, but she goes to speak with him personally.

Erin: She does. I think we see . . . I just love this girl! I think we see so much goodness in her. 

I’m just going to pick it up, 23–31. Here Abigail and David speak. 

When Abigail saw David, she hurried, got down from the donkey, and fell before David on her face and bowed to the ground. She fell at his feet and said, "On me alone, my lord, be the guilt! Please let your servant speak in your ears, and hear the words of your servant. Let not my lord regard this worthless fellow, Nabal, for as his name is, so he is. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him, but I your servant did not see the young men of my lord whom you sent.

"Now then, my lord, as the Lord lives, as your soul lives, because the Lord has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand, now then, let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my lord be as Nabal. And now let this present that your servant has brought to my lord be given to the young men who follow my lord. Please forgive the trespass of your servant, for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house because my lord is fighting the battles of the Lord, and evil shall not be found in you so long as you live.

"If men rise up to pursue you and seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living, in the care of the Lord your God. And the lies of your enemies He shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling. And when the Lord has done to my lord according to all the good that He has spoken concerning you and appointed you prince over Israel, my lord shall have no cause of grief or pains of consciousness for having shed blood without cause, for my lord, working salvation himself, and when the Lord has dealt well with my lord, then remember your servant.”

It’s a beautiful speech. She’s articulate, she’s passionate, but there’s so much going on there. What do we see? What jumped out at you about the way that Abigail responds to David? Joy?

Joy: She takes it upon herself. She says, “In me alone, my lord, be the guilt.”

Erin: Yes.

Joy: So she’s putting that on her own shoulders.

Erin: She is. Though she did nothing wrong.

Joy: Just such humility.

Erin: Yes, absolute humility. I mean, she jumps off that donkey and she bows as soon as she sees him, which is a posture of humility. You know, that’s why we bow when we pray. We don’t always have to bow when we pray, of course. You can pray when you’re walking; you can pray when you’re sitting; you can pray everywhere you go, but when you bow it’s a posture of humility before the Lord. There have been a few times in my life where this was my posture in front of the Lord: on my face. It’s, “I need You. I need You to intervene.”

That’s what we see in her. She takes it on herself. How does she talk about David? What does she say about him to him? Meg, what did you see?

Meg: I think she calls out how the Lord sees him. She calls out the purposes and the plans that God has for him. She reminds him who’s in charge, and in light of that who he is. She doesn’t go out and wag a finger at him, which I think is really neat. She simply reminds him who God is and who you are.

Erin: Yes, in contrast to Nabal. Nabal says, “Who is David?” As if he’s never heard of David. And his wife is like, “But you are the Lord’s anointed, and when you are prince over Israel . . .” she is absolutely reminding him who he is. 

There’s a story, I don’t where it came from, but it’s a part of the lore of our family. It’s of an African village, a small village, and when a member of that village sins or fails the other members of the tribe circle that village member. What they say is, “This is not who you are.” They remind him, “You’re kind, you’re generous, you’re giving. This is not your identity.”

We do that with our sins. I’ve watched Jason do it over and over and over. He will say, “This is not who Davis men are. Have you ever seen your papa behave like that? Have you ever seen your pa behave like that? Have you ever seen me behave like that?” It has more punch when he does it. But I’ll sometimes drop down and look at their little faces and just say, “This is not who you are.”

That’s what Abigail’s doing. She’s saying, “You’ll be so glad when you are king that you did not shed innocent blood. This is not who you are.”

We hear the name of the Lord on her lips. There’s the lowercase “lord” she says many times, referring to David, but there’s the capital L “Lord,” and in this speech she says six times. She’s talking about the Lord, the Lord, the Lord, the Lord. This is how we know she’s a woman of faith. She knows both the promises of God, that God has promised David will be on the throne, and she just knows who the Lord is. 

I think that is one indicator of a woman of discernment. It’s the Lord’s name who’s on her lips. It’s not, “Me, me, me, me, me.” It’s not, “I, I, I, I, I.” It’s not even, “You. You did this, and you need to change that.” It’s the name of the Lord that is on her lips.

So when I think about discernment, I think about it not being a switch that we can flip on and off. “Today I have discernment, today I don’t.” It just an outflow of knowing the Lord. And the whole purpose for us doing this Bible study is we want to know the Lord. 

Yes, we want to know how to deal with the difficult people in our lives, but there’s no checklist. The way we learn to deal with the difficult people in our lives is by becoming women of discernment.

What does Scripture tell us the beginning of wisdom is?

Joy: The fear of the Lord.

Erin: It’s the fear of the Lord. So if wisdom and discernment are two sides of the same coin, the beginning of that, how we become a discerning woman, is by knowing the Lord. How do we know the Lord? Through His Word.

Wisdom isn’t this pie-in-the-sky idea that you just grasp out of nowhere. The Bible gives us a map to wisdom. That’s part of why we read the Bible—to grow in wisdom. And it’s clear, what does the Bible tell us, Joy, is the beginning of wisdom?

Joy: The fear of the Lord.

Erin: The fear of the Lord! What is the fear of the Lord? What’s that look like?

Meg: The fear of the Lord in my life means looking at Him completely, having an equal view of He is God, He is King, He is the authority. We see Abigail here revering His authority above all else. She risks her life to honor the Lord’s authority over this situation, also knowing Him as friend and cultivating that personal relationship, putting Him above the fear of man, looking at Him first.

Erin: Yes. I think when we deal with difficult people we need a bigger view of God.

Joy: Absolutely.

Erin: We can get so bogged down in that human relationship. We can default to fear of man, which Proverbs tells us is a snare, a trap, right?

Meg: You notice, Abigail doesn’t pick a side. She’s not worried about the fear of man in this situation.

Erin: Well, she does say Nabal is a fool. But she’s stating a fact.

Meg: She acknowledges the evil, but she’s guarding his household at the same time.

Erin: Sure.

Meg: God is first in this situation.

Erin: Sure. Yes. I love that. That is why she’s discerning. I mean, we don’t know a lot about her. We don’t know what kind of parents she had, we don’t know what kind of circumstances she had, but it’s not just like she’s a woman who’s discerning just by chance.

Meg: Yes.

Erin: It’s because we see in her this deep fear of the Lord.

Joy: It’s something she has put into practice.

Meg: Yes. It’s not a one-time fix.

Erin: Yes.

Meg: That would be nice.

Joy: Exactly.

Joy, can you read us Hebrews 5:11–14?

Joy: Absolutely.

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 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. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child, but solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Erin: Do you want to be on milk or meat spiritually?

Joy: Well, hey, I want some meat! I want some solid food!

Erin: Me too. I don’t want anybody to look at my walk and say, “She’s such a baby. She’s not growing.”

Meg: Yes. I liked how they put “the powers of discernment.” I want a superpower of discernment! How do I get that?

Erin: Me too! What did it tell us we do? What’s the word it used?

Joy: We have to be trained by constant practice.

Erin: Trained by constant practice. So, I think of discernment like a muscle.

Meg: Yes.

Joy: Yes.

Erin: You know? I need to flex it, I need to grow that muscle. So if we want to be women of discernment, that’s what we want to do.

I think about the women who picked up this study. Nobody picked up a study on dealing with the difficult people in their life accidentally, I’m thinking.

Meg: Yes!

Erin: Maybe you did. Maybe you thought it was about something else. But you want to know how to deal with that difficult person, or you know you’re the difficult person. I think if we want to be discerning, we could practice using that muscle, with the Lord’s help. Maybe the difficult person in your life is the weight that’s going to help you flex that muscle and grow in the area of discernment.

I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but what’s the promise that we have regarding wisdom in James? The Bible tells us when we lack wisdom, what should we do?

Joy: We ask.

Erin: We ask! And what will happen?

Joy: We’ll get it!

Erin: The Lord will give it to us generously and without finding fault. So I want to be a discerning woman. I would love for people to say about me, like Abigail, “She was beautiful and discerning.”

So we ask the Lord for that. It always points us back to the work we want God to do in our lives.

I’m asking the Lord to give me new ways to respond, and I’m sure that you are. I thought by way of sending women out with that thought we’d just pray Philippians 1:9 as a prayer for all of us as we grow in discernment. So Meg, can you read us Philippians 1:9?

Meg: I can. “And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.”

Erin: Amen.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

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