The Unseen Realm: Discerning Battles from the Inside Out

Quick Glance: For Your Heart Today
Not every thought or feeling is simply “you.” Some of what stirs inside of us is part of a deeper battle. Hebrews 5 reminds us that maturity in Christ comes not only from knowledge, but from having our spiritual senses sharpened—our discernment trained to recognize the difference between good and evil.

Discernment is how we learn to notice the movements of our hearts:

• Consolation draws us closer to God’s love, peace, and hope.
• Desolation pulls us away into discouragement, anxiety, or fear.

The unseen battle often begins right here—inside of us. But the Spirit trains us from the inside out, sharpening our perception so that what was once blurry becomes clear.

3 Takeaways
1. Discernment Is a Mark of Maturity.
Growing in Christ means moving beyond “milk” into “solid food”—allowing the Spirit to sharpen our ability to recognize truth from lies, and God’s voice from false spirits.
2. Pay Attention to the Movements of the Heart.
What matters is not just what we feel, but where that feeling takes us. Consolation moves us toward God’s presence; desolation pulls us away.
3. Practice: Stop. Listen. Look.
When something unsettles your spirit, pause. Stop to create space, listen for whether you’re being drawn toward or away from God, and Look up for His truth and presence in the battle.

If You Only Have a Moment
Take this breath prayer into your week:

• Inhale: Speak, Lord,
• Exhale: Your Servant is Listening

Full Sermon Manuscript  estimated reading time 25 minutes

Good morning, family. What a powerful prayer we just sang: “Speak to my heart, Lord.” Isn’t that exactly what we need—especially when we’re facing battles? In moments of confusion or conflict, what we want most is to hear from God so that we know what to do, how to respond, and which way to go.

Such a fitting song for the series we’re in called The Unseen Realm: Discerning Spirits and Ready for Battle. Last week we began by focusing on the truth that life is more than what we see in the physical realm. That’s why our anchor passage for this series is so important and before we dive into the message, I want to remind us of this truth.

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:10–12)

Beautiful. We’ll keep practicing week by week until it becomes part of us. Now let’s take a look at the kind of battle we’re talking about today.

If you are reading Piercing the Darkness, by chapter ten you know Sally Roe is confused, unsettled, even paranoid—with good reason. Someone has tried to kill her, and she literally is running for her life. On the outside, or in the seen realm, Sally is not only in grave danger, she’s falling apart. She can’t concentrate, she’s agitated, afraid and mentally overwhelmed. What she doesn’t see is that there’s also a battle raging in the unseen realm. She assumes what she’s experiencing is just emotions and her circumstances. But we the reader can see what’s really happening in the story—that she is also being tormented by spiritual forces.

Perhaps you can relate on a smaller scale. Maybe you’ve felt overwhelmed to the point of giving up, experienced heightened anxiety, or dealt with depression or discouragement in waves you didn’t fully understand. Now let me keep repeating: not everything we feel is a spiritual attack, but sometimes there’s more happening than we realize. We need to learn to discern.

And that’s the heart of today’s message. Last week the focus was about awareness—that the unseen realm is real. This week is about discerning the battles inside of us, about asking God to train our inner eyes so that we don’t just react, but discern.

Our text for this morning is from Hebrews 5. Now as we read this, it may not sound like a “spiritual battle passage” at first, but stay with me, I promise I’ll connect the dots.

“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.” (Hebrews 5:11–14)

To give context, this passage is jumping in the middle of a longer teaching. The writer of Hebrews has just started to unpack some of the richest truths about Jesus—his role as our great High Priest. And that’s an entirely different sermon. But before the writer continues to go deeper, he takes what my dad calls a side road. He notes: “About this, we have much to say, but it’s hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.”

Now that phrase “dull of hearing” doesn’t mean they had bad ears—it means his listeners had become spiritually hard of hearing and inattentive. Their hearts weren’t tuned in. The Word was going out, but it was falling on deaf ears—as we would say today. You can hear the writer’s frustration, and it’s a challenging rebuke. Because he’s not talking to brand-new believers here. He’s speaking to people who have been Christ followers for some time. By now, he says, “you ought to be teachers.” In other words, you should be guiding others, pouring into others, but instead you still need someone to pour into you. He likens them to infants who can only drink milk, because they can’t handle solid food.

In Scripture, “milk” refers to the basics of the faith—the foundational truths of salvation. Those are good and necessary when you are newer to the faith. But the writer is clear: if we stay there, we remain spiritually immature. “Solid food,” going deeper into the Word and righteous living, is a hallmark of maturity—the kind of maturity that isn’t just about how much we know but about how we live every day.

And then comes verse 14, which is the heartbeat of our message today: “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” Did you catch that? Maturity isn’t just about knowledge—it’s about developing powers of discernment, sharpened through practice, to be able to recognize the difference between good and evil, including the schemes of the enemy.

As I thought about this passage, I was reminded of my own eyesight. I started wearing glasses when I was six. I have astigmatism in both eyes, and from early on I couldn’t see well. For years—probably until high school—every time I got my eyes checked, the doctor would give me a slightly stronger prescription that my eyes were ready to handle. Every time I got a new pair of glasses, I was able to see more clearly than I could before. That’s how spiritual discernment works. It doesn’t come all at once—it grows stronger through use, through practice, through the Spirit sharpening our spiritual sight.

So if the writer of Hebrews is frustrated with believers who have stalled out, the invitation for us is to lean in. Not to remain spiritually passive, but to let the Holy Spirit heighten our senses so that we can discern what draws us closer to God and what pulls us away. That’s the starting gate for learning to fight our battles from the inside out.

So what does this look like for us exactly? The key is in these words from our Hebrews text: “having their powers of discernment trained by constant practice.” That suggests discernment isn’t something we stumble into by accident. It’s a process that not only develops over time but comes with practice.

The original Greek word for constant practice used here means a “habit” or a “faculty developed by use.” The picture is of something that grows sharper, stronger, and more reliable the more it is exercised. Discernment is like a muscle that gets stronger with use as the Spirit guides and trains our inner being.

This is exactly what Paul prayed in Ephesians 3, when he prayed that his readers would be “strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man.” That’s inside-out strength. It is the Spirit Himself who builds that strength and trains us as we grow.

And that’s encouraging. Because sometimes when we hear the word “spiritual discernment,” we imagine it’s something only for prayer warriors, or for pastors. But the writer of Hebrews is saying discernment is for every believer. It’s a mark of maturity that comes as we allow the Holy Spirit to train our spiritual senses.

One way we can do this is to draw upon the insights of St. Ignatius, a 16th-century Christian leader and spiritual writer. He gave us helpful language to notice what’s happening inside of us as we seek to discern. He coined the terms consolation and desolation as discernable movements of the heart. Consolation isn’t just about feeling good—it’s describing an inner movement where we are being drawn toward God’s love, peace, and hope, and sense the sweetness of His presence. Desolation isn’t just about feeling bad—it’s describing an inner movement of the heart where we lose sight of God’s goodness and we’re drawn away from God toward despair, anxiety, or restlessness.

Imagine a man sitting alone in the middle of the day, worried about his job because he suspects he’s about to be laid off. In one movement of the heart, his worry becomes a doorway into consolation. He prays. He remembers God’s faithfulness in the past. A sense of peace grows in him, even though the problem isn’t solved. That movement draws him closer to God—that’s consolation.

Now that same worry can also take a very different turn. Let’s say he replays every failure in his head, remembers when this has happened before, imagines worst-case scenarios, and God seems far away. In fact, he sinks further into fear and worry. That movement of the heart pulls him away from God—that’s desolation.

When we talk about discernment training for battles inside of us, we are talking about noticing these subtle movements inside of us. The question isn’t about whether we’re worried—worry is just a human emotion—the question is where is this emotion taking me. Because interior spiritual battles often take shape right here.

In consolation we are strengthened and draw closer to God’s presence. But in desolation, we are vulnerable. That’s where the enemy will press in, twisting our emotions, hoping to erupt a full-on interior battle. And family, that’s why discernment practice matters. The more we practice noticing those interior movements, the more our perception is sharpened. What once felt blurry or confusing begins to come into focus, and we have a clearer understanding of the warfare that is around us and in us.

We grow to recognize the difference between what may simply be human emotion and the stirrings of a false spirit wanting to derail, distract, discourage, or deceive us in a spiritual battle. And this is what it means to fight battles from the inside out. When we learn to pay attention to what’s happening within—our thoughts, our feelings, our inner movements toward God or away from God—we are better prepared to fight with clarity and strength. This is the practice and training of discernment—through the Holy Spirit—and it’s available to every one of us.

To be clear: when we talk about consolation and desolation, we’re not talking about losing your faith or turning your back on God. If you are a follower of Jesus, your love for God is intact, your salvation is intact, and God’s love for you never changes. What we’re discerning here are the subtle movements of the heart—whether in a given moment we’re being drawn closer to God’s love, or pulled away into fear, anxiety, or discouragement. Discernment is how we pay attention to those currents, so we can recognize them for what they are and fight the enemy who’s looking for an inroad to take us down.

Once we begin to notice those inner movements—whether we are in consolation drawing us toward God, or desolation pulling us away from God—we will begin to notice the deeper battles within us, especially the battles we can struggle with again and again.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to talk about our “inner demons.” We may say it as a joke, but the taunting of false spirits may be truer than we realize. Take Sally Roe in Piercing the Darkness again. By the time she’s made it to that little hotel room, she isn’t just reacting to her current circumstance of being hunted. She’s confronting something much older. She’s anxious, scared, and confused. We even see her struggling with mental instability. But it’s all familiar to her. She’s been here before. As she battles a hint of depression, she notes she thought all of this was over and she dreads these feelings returning to her. And because they feel so familiar, she assumes they are part of her normal, as much as she wants them gone.

And isn’t that how it is for us too? Sometimes we don’t even question our thought patterns because they’ve become familiar, even when we are frustrated or ashamed that we’re fighting the same thoughts again. The truth is, we all carry wounds, moods, and thought patterns that feel like “who we are.” Melancholy that lingers. Irritability that rises too quickly. The constant whisper: “I’m not good enough.” We’ve felt these so often we stop questioning them. But here’s what’s important: those familiar patterns often become a foothold and playground for the enemy.

Neuroscience tells us when a thought or reaction repeats often enough, it carves grooves in our brains. Those grooves make the pattern feel automatic—but automatic doesn’t always mean true. And spiritually, those patterns are often the very places where the enemy presses hardest. Many of our battles begin when a trigger—an external circumstance or even an internal thought—collides with one of those grooves, and we react. A friend’s offhand comment causes us to seethe inside with resentment. An old memory reopens wounds of shame. A scroll through social media leads to a spiral of comparison, self-doubt, or deep loneliness.

But here’s where discernment becomes vital. As we practice discernment and notice what’s really going on inside, Viktor Frankl gives a helpful insight: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That space is the battleground. It’s the place where the enemy presses in with lies and distortions, whispering fear, shame, or discouragement. But it’s also the very space where the Spirit wants to meet us. Through discernment, the Spirit invites us to pause, notice what’s happening, and choose a response in His power. We don’t have to fight every battle on our own. The same space where the enemy tries to attack is the very space where the Spirit empowers us to stand.

And here’s the good news: we may not get it perfectly right yet, but we are in discernment training and we can practice. The Holy Spirit is our Sensei! That’s what Hebrews was pointing to—powers of discernment sharpened through constant practice. Training that helps us not just recognize the battles, but be prepared to fight from the inside out.

So how do we pull all this together? It was a lot today, I know, but in reality there’s an easy way to fold in everything I’ve shared into a simple spiritual discernment training regimen. It’s simply this: Stop. Listen. Look.

When something stirs in us—an agitation, a discouragement, a thought that doesn’t feel right—the first practice is to Stop. Pause long enough to notice what’s happening inside. That’s creating that space Frankl talked about, the space between trigger and response.

Then Listen. Listen for how your heart is responding. Is it drawing you closer to God in consolation or pulling you away into desolation? What thoughts are stirring? Are these true spirits or false spirits? Listen so you can discern what’s happening inside so you don’t mistake a false spirit’s taunting for truth.

Lastly, Look. For every battle, we need to lift up our eyes to the hills from which comes our help. We need to ask God to open our eyes so we can see His nearness, His presence, His truth in the middle of the battle.

Let me begin to close by sharing how this played out for me this past week. A friend I don’t know well made a comment that hurt my feelings. They had no clue, and I know it wasn’t intentional, so I wasn’t upset with them. But it touched a tender place in me—an insecurity, one of those mind grooves. And sure enough, it triggered me. I kept thinking about it and started to feel discouraged. After maybe the third or fourth go-round in my mind, it hit me what was happening.

The Spirit invited me to practice what I’m preaching. So I stopped, creating space to recognize this just wasn’t hurt feelings—it was lingering. There was something more here. I listened to my heart and realized I was experiencing desolation. My focus was on my pain instead of God’s presence, and a false spirit was aggravating an old wound. And then I was able to see clearly and say: “That’s not happening today, devil.” So I looked and turned to Jesus. He was right there, reminding me of His love and truth. The discouragement lifted, and I moved out of a negative spiral and closer to God.

Friends, that’s the practice of discernment for fighting battles from the inside out. When we stop, listen, and look, our eyes can be opened to see what’s really going on. And in that space, knowing we are more than conquerors, we can worship because Jesus is there right with us, whatever battle we may be facing inside and out.

So we are going to close with a moment of worship again, because like I said last week, worship is one of our strongest weapons. When we sing, when we pray, when we lift our eyes and say, “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord,” we are training our vision. We’re asking the Spirit to sharpen our perception, so that even in the thick of battle we can see Him, draw near, and stand strong.

Let’s worship together—asking God to open the eyes of our hearts, to give us discernment, and to train us to fight our battles from the inside out.