Welcome back to part 6 in my long running series: Practical Theology for Homemakers! It's been a while since we started this series. Feel free to jump into this lesson or head back to the other 5 first: 

Part 1 we covered: Why theology matters for homemakers - Hf #72, Part 2 is The Goal of Our Christian Life - Hf #74, part 3 is So What's the Big Deal about Studying God's Word? - Hf #76, part 4 is Studying the Attributes of God - Hf #78. And then episode #80 was the last part, How God is Different than Us and Why That's a Good Thing. 

I've been planning to cover this next part, but it has been such a big topic and I really wanted to make sure I was accurately covering it. Today we are going to be covering a VERY important topic when it comes to our theology: how to be discerning with what we read and listen to.

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(Note: I always publish a podcast episode and a full blog post for you to read through. But this blog post today will serve more as a notes page. Listen to the podcast above for the FULL discussion! 

Being discerning starts with and is grounded in good theology. How can you know when you come across something wrong? By knowing it's wrong in the first place. That's why studying theology, especially systematic theology, is so important. 

Why is this important? 

Partly due to our ability to access eons of information at our fingertips, there is a ton of false doctrine out there. You can pick up any book or listen to any sermon and come across a ton of false ideas about God or the Christian life. And other teaching is just plain fluffy. Maybe it's encouraging or humorous at first glance, but doesn't hold much substance beyond that. 

It's always extremely important for a Christian to be discerning with what they read and listen to, and our present age is no exception to that. 

So we need to be on guard. We need to constantly test what we read and what we hear against Scripture. 

If you want to learn more about this and how we can know that we can trust God's Word, then I have a resource recommendation for you. I highly recommend the book, Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung. It's very clear, straight forward, and extremely practical! If you want to know more about how we can trust God's Word, when God's Word applies, and how to know God's authority more in your life, then I highly recommend this book. I listened to this book as an audiobook and loved it! 

How to Learn Systematic Theology

Another way to learn more about God's Word, is to study systematic theology. This is a systematic, topic by topic approach to learning theology and the doctrines within the Church. 

For example, a systematic approach to studying the topic of Angels would be to look at what God's Word says in it's entirety about angels. And from there, a theology on angels is produced. 

One of the best things I've EVER listened to was the full Systematic Theology series by Wayne Grudem. While I don't 100% agree with him on everything (listen to the podcast episode for a few examples), he did an excellent and thorough course on systematic theology. 

He cover topics such as angels, theories on end times, the sufficiency of Scripture, heaven, and more! You can actually listen through all 117 lessons for FREE on iTunes. 

Jason and I both went through all 117 lessons years ago (it took us a while!) and it was so worth it.