Chapter 25
Discernment — A Red-Flag Guide for Pastors and Families

Marianne sat across from me in my office on a Wednesday morning, her mother's funeral bulletin still tucked in her purse. Her mother, Joyce, had been a woman of real faith — Sunday school teacher for thirty years, a prayer warrior, the kind of grandmother who kept a Bible on her nightstand and a pot of coffee on for whoever needed her. Joyce had died peacefully six weeks earlier, at home, at eighty-one, surrounded by her family. That part of the story was a gift.

But the weeks before her death had been complicated. In her final months, Joyce had begun having what she called "visits." She was lucid. She was not on heavy medication. She spoke of these visits clearly, with her eyes shining. Some of them were beautiful. She spoke of seeing Jesus more than once — of a warmth that filled the room, of being held by light, of her husband Charlie (dead now eleven years) standing at the foot of her bed and smiling. When she talked about those visits, Marianne wept and thanked God. Joyce's faith was deepening, not wavering. Her face was soft and radiant.

Then, about three weeks before she died, Joyce had a different kind of visit. She told Marianne about it one afternoon over tea. She said an "angelic being" had come to her — a figure robed in light — and had told her things she had never heard in church. The being had told her that "all paths lead to the Light." That Jesus was "one great teacher among many." That religion was simply the wrapping people put around a God too big for any one box. Joyce had accepted the teaching. She found it beautiful. She said it made her feel lighter, "freer," even a little sorry for the pastors who had limited her thinking for so many years.

Marianne had not known what to say. She loved her mother. She had watched Jesus meet her mother in those earlier visits — or so it seemed. How could the same dying woman, in the same bedroom, receive a message that contradicted everything she had spent a lifetime believing? Had she been deceived? Had the first visits been deceptions too? Had her mother slipped into confusion at the end? Had something dark crept in? Or had her mother finally seen the truth, and the church Joyce had served for fifty years been wrong about Jesus all along?

Marianne was not sure of anything anymore. "Pastor," she said, her voice thin, "what do I do with this? What do I do with her?"

That is the question this chapter exists to answer. Not just for Marianne. For every Christian who has ever been handed an experience — their own, or a loved one's — that did not fit neatly into one box. For every pastor who has sat across the desk from a Marianne and felt the weight of needing to be truthful and tender in the same sentence. The Christian tradition has a name for what Marianne needed that morning. It is a gift. It is a discipline. It is a way of loving. It is called discernment.

Why Discernment Is a Gift, Not a Gatekeeper

Before we build the framework, let us name something important. Some readers will come to a chapter titled "discernment" a little tense. You are bracing for a list of ways to disqualify experiences. You are worried the chapter will take back with one hand what the earlier chapters offered with the other. Many Christians have been wounded by pastors who used "discernment" as a blunt instrument — a way to shut down anything unfamiliar, a way to shame a bereaved person for finding comfort where the pastor did not expect to find it.

That is not the kind of discernment I am going to describe. That is suspicion, and suspicion is not a spiritual gift.

Real discernment is the quiet, loving work of testing what you are seeing so that you can receive what is good without swallowing what is not. It is the work a mother does when she tastes the soup before she sets it down in front of her child. It is the work a shepherd does when he counts the sheep at evening. It is the work Paul calls the Thessalonians to when he writes, "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:19–22).¹ Notice what Paul does and does not say. He does not say, "Quench the Spirit, suspect every prophecy, assume the worst." He says, "Test everything. Hold fast what is good." The command to test is paired with the command to receive. Discernment and openness are two wings of the same bird. Lose one and the other does not fly.

John the Elder writes in the same vein: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1).² John is writing to Christians who have been shaken by teachers whose message does not align with Christ. He does not tell them to stop having spiritual experiences. He tells them how to tell the real from the false. He gives them a test. And the test he gives, a few verses later, is christological — do the spirits confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh? (1 John 4:2). The center holds. Christ is the criterion.

So when I use the word discernment in this chapter, I mean it the way Paul and John meant it. Not as a rejection of experience. As the Christian way of honoring experience. The same love that receives a true gift learns to say "no thank you" to a counterfeit, because the gift is precious and the counterfeit steals from it.

The Biblical Frame: Test the Spirits

Let us put the biblical framework for discernment in front of us all at once, so we can see the whole shape of it. These are the texts the Christian tradition has always turned to when experiences need weighing.

Take those passages together and you have everything you need to build the framework. John gives us the christological test — does the spirit confess Jesus come in the flesh? Paul gives us the commandment to examine without quenching. Jesus gives us the fruit test — what does the tree produce over time? Deuteronomy gives us the doctrinal test — even a wonder-worker whose signs come true is a false prophet if his teaching leads you away from the true God. And Paul reminds us, soberly, that spiritual beings can disguise themselves. Not every shining messenger is from heaven.

Hold those five principles in your hands: Christ, examination, fruit, doctrine, disguise. Everything we do in the rest of this chapter is just spelling out what those five principles mean for the experiences we have been discussing throughout this book.

Seeking the Dead: What Scripture Actually Forbids

Before we get to markers, we have to address a biblical thread that makes some grieving Christians nervous about the whole field — the prohibition on consulting the dead. Does the Bible's forbidding of necromancy rule out taking any comfort from NDE accounts, deathbed visions, or sensed presences? The answer is no, but understanding why requires reading the biblical texts carefully.

The central passage is Deuteronomy 18:10–12 (ESV): "There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD."³ Parallel prohibitions appear in Leviticus 19:31 — "Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them" — and in Leviticus 20:6 and 20:27, which extend the warning with sobering force.⁴

The list in Deuteronomy 18 is specific. It is not aimed at ordinary grieving. It is aimed at a cluster of practices familiar in the ancient Near East — child sacrifice, sorcery, fortune-telling, mediumship, and the deliberate seeking of hidden knowledge from spirits of the dead through ritual technique. The Canaanite religions around Israel did all of these things. Israel was to do none of them. The prohibition is about seeking contact with the dead through occult means in order to gain knowledge or power God has not given. It is the act of going around God, refusing the means God has provided, and consulting other powers instead.

Notice what the text does not forbid. It does not forbid remembering the dead. It does not forbid loving them, speaking their names, visiting their graves, or thanking God for them. It does not forbid receiving a comforting memory or an unsought dream. It does not forbid crying out to God in grief and feeling the nearness of the one you lost. Israel held funerals. Israel mourned. Israel kept the names of the fathers. What Israel did not do was walk into the tent of a woman at Endor and pay her to "bring up" the spirit of a prophet.

That story, 1 Samuel 28, is the Bible's most detailed portrait of necromancy — and it is a case study in what not to do.⁵ King Saul, having rejected God, having already banished mediums from his own kingdom, disguises himself at night and visits the medium at Endor to "bring up" the prophet Samuel. Something does come up. Samuel (or something identifying itself as Samuel) speaks. The message is judgment: Saul's kingdom is torn, and Saul will be with Samuel the next day. Saul falls to the ground in terror. The scene is terrible, not triumphant. Whatever one makes of the metaphysics — whether Samuel himself appeared by God's sovereign permission, whether the apparition was a deceiving spirit using Samuel's form, or whether the text is ambiguous by design — the pastoral takeaway is unmistakable. Saul went looking for contact with the dead by forbidden means, and the outcome was despair and death. The story is not an endorsement of mediumship. It is a warning, written as an epitaph.⁶

Now carry those texts into the world of modern bereavement. A widow wakes at 3 a.m. and feels her husband's presence in the room. She does not go to a medium. She does not arrange a séance. She does not even ask for it — it simply comes. She thanks God and goes back to sleep. Has she practiced necromancy? No. She has been given an unsought gift, the kind the Christian tradition has always recognized as possible by God's permission. A dying saint looks across her bedroom and says, "Daddy, you came," to a father forty years in the grave. Has she broken Leviticus 19:31? No. She has not sought contact. She has been comforted by it.

The line is the line of seeking. Where the bereaved seeks out mediums, psychics, séances, Ouija boards, channelers, "crossing over" workshops, past-life regression hypnotists, or any ritual technique designed to reach the other side on demand, the line of Deuteronomy 18 has been crossed. Where experiences come unsought, the Christian may receive them, weigh them by the other tests of this chapter, and keep what is consistent with Scripture.⁷

Scripture also warns that spiritual deception is not always obvious. Paul tells the Corinthians that "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). In Acts 16, Paul encounters a slave girl with a "spirit of divination" (literally, in the Greek, pneuma pythōna — a "python spirit") who shouts true things about Paul and Silas as servants of the Most High God. The content of what she says is technically accurate. The spirit behind it is not. Paul eventually turns and commands the spirit to come out of her in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 16:16–18).⁸ True statements do not prove a true source. That is a sobering apostolic pattern. It tells us that in discernment, content alone is not enough. The spirit behind the content matters, and the fruit of the encounter matters, and the direction it pulls the human soul matters.

Seven Markers of a God-Given Experience

Now we come to the markers. These are not arbitrary. They are drawn from the long tradition of Christian spiritual discernment — from Jonathan Edwards's Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, from Teresa of Ávila's careful examination of interior visions, from the Ignatian rules for discernment of spirits, and most of all from Scripture itself.⁹ Edwards, writing in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, faced a situation not entirely unlike ours — real spiritual experiences were happening, and some of them were from God, and some of them were not, and the church needed to learn how to tell. He distilled the tradition into a working set of marks. The seven below are my own pastoral synthesis of that tradition.

One. The experience is consistent with Scripture. The content — both what the experiencer sees and what the experiencer is told — aligns with the whole of Scripture, not just a proof-text here or there. If a being says, "There are many paths," Scripture says there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:5). The teaching does not fit. If a being says, "God is love," Scripture says, "God is love" (1 John 4:8). The teaching fits. Scripture is the grid against which content is laid.

Two. The experience glorifies Christ. A genuine encounter with God points to Jesus. It magnifies Him. It does not compete with Him, replace Him, demote Him, or diminish Him. The Holy Spirit's own self-appointed ministry is to glorify the Son (John 16:14). An experience that draws the soul closer to Christ passes the first and deepest test. An experience that shifts the soul's center away from Christ, even if it speaks of love and light, fails the test at the root.

Three. The experience produces humility, not pride. The people in Scripture who actually saw God — Isaiah in the temple, Peter in the boat, John on Patmos — fell on their faces. They did not rise up preening. They became smaller, not bigger, in the light of God's bigness. An experience that produces in the experiencer the sense that she is now spiritually superior, that she has been chosen over others, that she possesses secret knowledge unavailable to the ordinary believer — that is a warning. The genuine article makes the experiencer more teachable, not less.

Four. The experience produces love. Toward God and toward neighbor. The first fruit of the Spirit is love (Galatians 5:22). A woman who returns from an NDE with a deeper tenderness toward her children, more patience with her husband, softer hands with her aging parents, and a new concern for strangers — that fruit is from the Spirit. A woman who returns harder, angrier, more isolated, cut off from those who do not "get it" — that fruit is not.

Five. The experience produces holiness. Not a performance of religiosity, but a deeper desire to obey God. More hunger for Scripture, more faithfulness in prayer, more honesty about sin, more willingness to repent. If a person's experience led them away from moral seriousness — toward indifference about sin, toward moral libertinism, toward private entitlement — it has failed this test.

Six. The experience aligns with the Body of Christ. The New Testament knows no solo Christians. A genuine experience tends to deepen, not sever, the experiencer's connection to the Church. It may take time to find the right church — not every congregation knows how to receive someone who has had a profound encounter — but the experiencer is drawn toward the people of God, not away from them. An experience that systematically pulls the person out of Christian fellowship, that treats other believers as uninitiated, that fosters a lonely specialness, is suspect.

Seven. The fruit endures. Time is an honest judge. Flash conversions fade; deep work persists. The early enthusiasm of an experience may wear off for any of us, but the slow transformation of character — the quieter love, the deeper peace, the more consistent prayer life — keeps going. An experience whose effects last a year and then collapse into disillusionment, or whose fruit turns sour, has not stood the test. The genuine experience leaves permanent roots.²⁸

Seven Red Flags — When Caution Is Warranted

The mirror image of the markers above is the list of red flags. If the first seven are green lights, these seven are yellow — not always red, but always warranting a careful second look.

One. Contradicts clear Scripture. Not "contradicts my pastor's opinion" or "doesn't match my theology." Contradicts clear Scripture. The being says Jesus is one teacher among many (contradicts John 14:6). The being says there is no final judgment (contradicts Hebrews 9:27). The being teaches reincarnation (contradicts Hebrews 9:27 and the whole biblical anthropology). The being teaches that humans are themselves divine (contradicts the Creator-creature distinction in Genesis 1). These are not side matters. They touch the center.

Two. Displaces or diminishes Christ. The experience subtly or overtly points away from Jesus. The being is vaguely loving but nameless. The "Light" is Light in general and not the Light of the world. The message is "all paths lead here" rather than "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Even loving, beautiful content, if it shifts the center off of Christ, has failed the christological test.

Three. Produces spiritual pride. The experiencer comes back feeling special — not grateful, but elevated. She views ordinary Christians as not-quite-there. She speaks of her experience as a credential. She gathers around her people who affirm her specialness. Pride is the first temptation, the oldest sin, and it is often the signature of counterfeit spirituality.

Four. Produces lasting fear, control, or oppression. Note the word lasting. An experience may have a frightening component and still be from God — the prophets in the Bible were often afraid. What matters is the fruit over time. If the experience leaves behind ongoing fear that presses the soul down, a controlling voice that returns and demands things, a weight that cannot be shaken by prayer and Scripture — these are not the peace of Christ. Christ casts out fear (1 John 4:18). He does not leave it lurking in the walls of the house.

Five. Pressures toward occult practice. The experiencer is urged — by the being in the experience, or by the gravitational pull of the experience itself — to develop psychic abilities, attend séances, consult mediums, "channel" contact with the deceased, practice automatic writing, or seek further initiation. This is a clear line. Scripture forbids it. Whatever is pressing in that direction is not of God.

Six. Fosters isolation from the Church. The experiencer drifts away from ordinary Christian community. She prefers online NDE groups to her local church. She finds the Bible "too narrow" after the expansive love she encountered. She stops praying with her spouse. She stops confessing to a pastor. Over time she becomes a lone spiritual authority in her own house. This is not the work of the Spirit, who binds the saints together.

Seven. Elevates the experiencer above Scripture. The experience becomes the final authority. "Yes, the Bible says that, but I know." The experiencer claims private revelation that trumps the apostolic witness. She appeals to what she saw rather than to what God has said. Scripture becomes a quaint preliminary. This is the most subtle red flag and perhaps the most dangerous, because every other red flag is downstream of it.

What the Research Actually Shows

Before you start worrying that the world of NDE and deathbed research is riddled with the red flags we have just listed, let me put an important piece of data on the table. It is tempting to imagine, from a distance, that NDE and ADC literature is a swamp of New Age teaching with occasional Christian pearls. The actual research tells a different story.

J. Steve Miller, weary of hearing the claim that NDE accounts are overwhelmingly anti-Christian, designed a simple test. He read 141 consecutive NDEs submitted to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), the largest publicly available NDE database in the world. After culling cases that were not true NDEs — visions, drug experiences, dreams, and so on — he was left with 100 consecutive accounts.¹⁰ What did he find? Eighteen percent of those 100 accounts reported an encounter with Jesus by name. Only seven mentioned anything even vaguely opposed to Christian beliefs, and only three actually contradicted Christian doctrine — and of those three, one had so many other red flags that Miller set it aside. Reincarnation imagery appeared in only two cases, both of which carried other warning signs.¹¹

Compare that to what a reasonable person might predict. In a 2021 Pew survey, a full third of American adults said they believed in reincarnation.¹² If NDE content were simply a projection of the experiencer's expectations, we would expect about a third of the cases to feature reincarnation. In Miller's sample it appeared in about two percent. The cultural expectation did not drive the experience. And the broader research literature — Jeffrey Long's large-scale work, for example — consistently finds that the NDE experience tends to confirm belief in a loving, personal God across cultures and religious backgrounds rather than dissolve such belief into generic spirituality.²²

The cross-cultural pattern is similarly striking. Miller found that in the NDERF database, out of more than 5,000 reported experiences, only three mentioned Krishna and only two mentioned Buddha. Of eighty self-identified Muslims, none reported seeing Muhammad. And in all three Hindu cases that mentioned Krishna, Jesus was also reported.¹³ These are not the numbers you get from a field that is fundamentally anti-Christian.

Michael Sabom, the cardiologist who was one of NDE research's earliest and most rigorous investigators, pushed back directly against Kenneth Ring's suggestion that NDEs typically led people away from Christianity toward reincarnation and Eastern belief. When Sabom did his own study of a more random sample of NDE experiencers, he found something different. A minority had become more open to reincarnation; another significant minority reported that their belief in reincarnation had strongly decreased. Net change: essentially zero. Church attendance went up, not down. Bible reading went up, not down. Sabom's sober summary was that belief in reincarnation and in Eastern religious systems was not a direct aftereffect of the NDE itself.¹⁴

This matters pastorally. When Marianne walks into your office worried that her mother's mixed experience is evidence that the whole field is corrupt, you can tell her the truth. The field is not corrupt. It is mostly consistent with Christian faith. Her mother's syncretist message is an outlier — a real outlier, not to be dismissed, but an outlier nonetheless. Most experiences in the research fall on the Christ-honoring side of the line. That does not mean every experience passes. It means that the discernment work of this chapter is applied to a minority of cases, not the majority.

There is a pastoral implication here that deserves its own sentence. If most of the field is consistent with Christian faith, the most common pastoral error is not that pastors receive too much — it is that they receive too little. Too many grieving Christians have carried deathbed visions, sensed presences, and even full-blown NDEs in silence for decades because they worried their pastor would dismiss them. A surprising number of bereaved believers have buried comforting experiences that were almost certainly gifts from God because somebody in authority told them the whole category was suspect. The research does not support that posture. Scripture does not require it. Let us not be the pastors who wound grieving saints out of an excess of caution.

At the same time, the minority of cases that do carry real red flags are real, and they matter. The Ring-versus-Sabom exchange is instructive here. Ring drew his early conclusions about post-NDE religious drift from people who had found their way into the International Association of Near-Death Studies — a self-selecting group with its own cultural tilt.¹⁹ When Sabom sampled more broadly, the drift disappeared. That is a reminder that where NDE experiencers land after their experience matters enormously. A vulnerable experiencer who stumbles into a community oriented around mediumship and channeling will be pulled in a different direction than one who lands in a healthy church. Part of the Church's calling, then, is to be a better home for experiencers than the alternatives. Where we are not, we share some responsibility for where they go instead.²⁰

Applying the Framework to Near-Death Experiences

With the markers and red flags in hand, and with the research in perspective, we can apply the framework case by case.

For an NDE, ask the markers. Did the encounter exalt Christ — either by name, or in terms a Christian can recognize (love that is holy, light that is personal, a being who claims to be the source of life)? Has the fruit over the years been deepened love, deepened prayer, deepened moral seriousness? Is the experiencer still drawn to Christ and His people, or has she drifted away? Has her Bible opened more, or less? Most Christian NDEs pass these marks decisively. Receive them.

Where the NDE contains peripheral oddities — an element of imagery the experiencer herself finds hard to interpret, a phrase she was told that she cannot quite place — handle gently. Not every detail of a long, vivid experience carries equal theological weight. The core is the core; the periphery can be held loosely. This is the pattern Christians have always followed with dreams, visions, and memory: the central truth is received; the unclear detail is not forced into dogmatic shape.²⁷

Where the NDE explicitly denies the gospel — where a being of light tells the experiencer that Jesus is one of many, or that there is no sin, or that everyone is automatically saved without respect to repentance — the Christian can still receive the reality of the encounter while discerning that the interpretation is compromised. The person did go somewhere. She did meet Someone. She returned changed. But the doctrinal claim attributed to the being is not binding on the Church, because no experience, however profound, outranks the apostolic gospel (Galatians 1:8). Pastors sometimes find this distinction helpful: the fact of the encounter is one thing; the content attributed to the being is another. We weigh them separately.

And rarely — but truly — an NDE is best understood as something closer to a demonic counterfeit. Where a "being of light" pressures toward occult practice, explicitly mocks Christ, demands worship of itself, drives the experiencer toward isolation and self-harm, and leaves behind ongoing oppression, the encounter is not the encounter Scripture would name as an encounter with God. Pastors who work in deliverance ministry have seen this, rare as it is. The full treatment of distressing NDEs — their categories, their pastoral handling, and the reality that most are not demonic in origin — belongs to Chapter 20.²¹ We will return to how to handle it briefly below.

Applying the Framework to Deathbed Visions

Deathbed visions — the visitations, awareness of the dead, and encounters with Christ reported by the dying — are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, peaceful, biblically consonant, and pastorally comforting. The Hospice Buffalo studies by Christopher Kerr and others have documented the peace-giving quality of these end-of-life experiences in large samples of dying patients.¹⁵ The Christian pattern is remarkably unbroken: the dying speak of Christ, of deceased loved ones, of homecoming. The hand to hold here is not the hand of suspicion. It is the hand of presence.

Where a deathbed vision contains unsettling or unbiblical content — the dying saint announcing, for example, a universalist gospel she had never taught before — the family's pastoral priority in the moment remains comfort and presence. You do not correct a dying woman's theology at her bedside. You sit with her. You hold her hand. You do not interrupt what may be a tender mercy from God in order to litigate one confused sentence. The discernment work, if it needs to happen, can be done later with the family, gently and thoroughly.

In Joyce's case, this is part of what Marianne needed to hear. Her mother's Jesus-visions did not need to be discarded because a later vision introduced confusion. The earlier visits can stand on their own, be weighed against the markers, and be received as the comfort they appear to have been.

Applying the Framework to After-Death Communications

Most ADCs — the unsought senses of a deceased loved one's presence, the vivid dream in which Dad comes to say he is well, the shared moment at a funeral when everyone feels the same thing — are brief, peaceful, and leave no behavioral aftereffects beyond a measure of comfort. The Christian framework for these is worked out in more detail in Chapters 22, 23, and 24. For discernment purposes, the question is simple. Was the experience received unsought or sought? Was the content consistent with Christian hope? Did the fruit draw you toward God, or away?

The line worth drawing sharply is the line between receiving and seeking. If the bereaved begins to seek ongoing contact — returning to mediums, attending channeling sessions, developing rituals to re-invoke the deceased — she has crossed into territory Scripture forbids. This is where many well-meant bereavement journeys take a wrong turn. The first ADC felt like a gift. The fourth was craved. The twentieth was manufactured by a paid stranger. The line to watch is the line where the gift becomes an appetite the grieving person keeps trying to feed.

When an ADC carries a message that contradicts Scripture — a "Mom" who tells you to leave your husband, a "Dad" who denies the gospel, a "friend" who urges you to begin occult practice — evaluate the message by Scripture. The real deceased, reposing in Christ, does not preach heresy. Something else is speaking. It may be a grief-induced projection processing old unresolved material. It may be memory distorted by longing. Or it may be something more deliberate and darker. All three possibilities need discernment, and in the last case, pastoral intervention.

Applying the Framework to Sensed Presences

Sensed presences — the feeling that a departed loved one is near — are among the most common bereavement experiences, reported by a large share of bereaved spouses and parents in the grief literature.¹⁶ The vast majority are transient, peaceful, and tender. They do not require much discernment work at all. Take the comfort, thank God, and keep walking.

A small minority of sensed presences, however, become haunting in character. The sense becomes oppressive rather than comforting. It demands attention. It prevents sleep. It feels less like a gift and more like a weight. These cases, though uncommon, warrant pastoral care. Sometimes the oppression lifts with ordinary Christian disciplines — prayer, Scripture, sacramental life, fellowship. Rarely, deliverance ministry may be appropriate.

The question to ask a bereaved person who is unsettled by a sensed presence is usually the same question we have been asking throughout this chapter. What is the fruit? A presence that comes unbidden, brings peace, and then fades is one thing. A presence that persists, demands, and produces fear is another. Scripture is not ambiguous about which is which. "God is not a God of confusion but of peace" (1 Corinthians 14:33). Where the fruit is peace, the Christian may rest. Where the fruit is ongoing disturbance, the Christian is invited to bring the experience into the light of community discernment.

Is It the Deceased — or a Deception?

This is the hardest question in the chapter, and the one pastors are asked most often in private. If a contact is problematic, what exactly is it? Is it the actual deceased loved one, appearing with real content the Christian must wrestle with? Is it the bereaved's own mind generating an experience under the pressure of grief? Or is it a spiritual deception — a hostile spiritual being impersonating the dead for the purpose of causing harm?

Let me tell you about a woman I will call Anna. She called me late on a Tuesday night. She had been experiencing what she at first believed were tender after-death contacts with her mother, who had died four months before. The first few had been brief and comforting — a scent of her mother's perfume at odd times, a sense of presence in the kitchen, one vivid dream. Anna had thanked God for them and gone on with her grief work. But in the third month, the "contacts" had changed. The presence returned nightly. Then it began to speak. Then it began to demand. "Mom" told her that the pastor's sermons were a waste. "Mom" told her that her husband had been unfaithful, without evidence. "Mom" told her to quit going to church. Then, on the night she called me, "Mom" told her to leave her husband.

Anna was terrified. She was also not crazy. She was a mentally healthy, intelligent woman whose bereavement had started in ordinary territory and had traveled somewhere it should not have gone.

What Anna needed that night was someone who would not tell her two things. She did not need a pastor to say, "It was always just your grief; go to a grief counselor and forget about it." She also did not need a pastor to say, "The devil has you; renounce your mother." She needed someone to sit with her, read 1 John 4:1 and Deuteronomy 18 and Matthew 7 with her, and walk with her through what was clearly happening. What had begun as unsought ordinary grief-comfort had become something else — something that was no longer her mother. That is not a pastoral failure. That is exactly the situation for which discernment was given.

We worked through it carefully over the next weeks. Anna stopped giving the "voice" access. She recommitted her days to prayer, Scripture, and confession. She stopped isolating. Her husband, who was not unfaithful, sat with her when she was afraid. A small, mature Christian group prayed with her through several evenings. Within three weeks the pressure lifted. Within three months she was sleeping again. The real grief for her mother did not go away — it is still with her today — but it is grief, not bondage. And she can read her Bible again without flinching.

I tell Anna's story not to scare you. Cases like hers are not the normal course of bereavement. Most of my readers will never encounter anything like this, and that is as it should be. But a book on grief and experience that did not tell the truth about the occasional Anna would be a book that abandoned her. She exists. She is real. And her pastor needs to know what to say.

A Careful Word on Demonic Counterfeits

Scripture is clear about the reality of hostile spiritual beings. The New Testament takes them with full seriousness. Jesus casts them out in nearly every Gospel. Paul names them. Peter warns against them. The Christian tradition has always affirmed their existence. To deny them is to depart from the apostolic witness.

At the same time — and this matters — Scripture and the tradition have also warned against over-attributing spiritual phenomena to demonic activity. Not every sorrow is a demon. Not every bad dream is an attack. Not every anxiety needs deliverance. The pastoral middle is not credulity. It is discernment.

How do you tell, in practice, when what you are dealing with is spiritual deception rather than ordinary grief, ordinary anxiety, or an unfamiliar but real encounter with God? The markers and red flags are the first instrument. If the "experience" tramples multiple red flags, if its content is anti-Christian, if it pressures toward occult practice, if it produces persistent oppression, and if ordinary Christian means — prayer, Scripture, sacraments, fellowship — are met with resistance or even hostility, the weight of discernment shifts toward recognizing spiritual deception.

What do you do then? Not Hollywood. The Christian tradition on this is far more ordinary than the movies would have you believe. Begin with prayer. Begin with Scripture. Begin with confession. Bring in a small, mature, accountable Christian community to pray with the person. Where needed, consult a pastor or minister experienced in deliverance who is under proper accountability — never a solo operator who makes dramatic claims. The goal is not drama. The goal is freedom. And the freedom comes, in nearly every case I have seen, through perfectly ordinary means — Scripture, prayer, fellowship, repentance — applied patiently over time in the name of Jesus Christ.¹⁷

When Mental Health Is Part of the Picture

A pastoral chapter on discernment that ignored mental health would be negligent. Some of what is reported as spiritual experience reflects psychiatric conditions — not always, not even usually, but sometimes. A trained pastor watches for this.

Signs that warrant mental health referral alongside spiritual care include: significant loss of contact with reality, severe dissociation, command voices that urge self-harm or harm of others, patterns consistent with untreated bipolar mania or acute psychosis, trauma responses that may be generating dissociative material, and grief that has become clinically complicated over a long period of time. Trauma is especially important. Complex bereavement, unresolved childhood trauma, and untreated PTSD can produce experiences that look spiritual but are rooted in the nervous system's response to overwhelming loss.²⁴ A pastor is not competent to diagnose, nor should he try. He is competent to notice — and to love the grieving person enough to say, "I think it would help to talk with a therapist alongside our meetings. Would you be open to that?"

Discernment is not either/or. A person can need both pastoral care and psychiatric care at the same time. The Holy Spirit is not offended by antidepressants. Cases of genuine spiritual oppression and cases of genuine mental illness can both respond better when the other dimension is addressed too. Err on the side of involving professionals when in doubt.

Discernment Is a Community Practice

One more principle before we bring this chapter home. The New Testament does not imagine discernment as a solo activity. When Paul instructs the Corinthian church about prophetic speech, he writes, "Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said" (1 Corinthians 14:29).¹⁸ Weighing is a plural verb. Others. Together. The community discerns.

This is enormously pastoral. The bereaved Christian who has had an experience she cannot place does not have to figure it out alone at 2 a.m. She can bring it to her pastor, to a wise believing friend, to a small circle of prayer partners, to a trained counselor, and ask them to weigh what she is seeing. The combined wisdom of the Body of Christ is one of the Spirit's gifts. An individual experience that she might misread in isolation becomes clearer in conversation with people who love her and love the Lord.

This is also why I urge pastors not to bear discernment work alone. If a pastor finds himself sitting across from a Marianne or an Anna, he is welcome to bring in trusted others — a fellow pastor, a wise elder, a seasoned counselor. Discernment is not a test of the pastor's personal spiritual sharpness. It is the work of the Body, and the Body is bigger than any of us.

A Pastoral Theology of Receiving, Weighing, and Releasing

Let me pull all of this together into a simple pastoral pattern you can carry away. Call it the three-fold pattern of discernment: receive, weigh, release.

Receive. Most experiences in the grief journey — most sensed presences, most ADCs, most deathbed visions, most NDE accounts — are received with thanks and never need much further examination. They are gifts. Thank God, hold them tenderly, keep walking. The defensive posture that treats every experience as suspect is not biblical, not pastoral, and not kind. It also makes us bad at grief care.

Weigh. Some experiences include elements that require a second look. The core of the encounter is good, but a detail troubles you. Apply the markers. Apply the red flags. Read Scripture. Talk with a wise friend. Most of the time, weighing leaves the core intact and simply releases the puzzling detail to God. "I do not know what to make of that part. I will trust Scripture and trust that God knows." This is not a cop-out. It is honest Christian humility.

Release. A small minority of experiences — or small minority of elements within otherwise good experiences — fail the tests at the center. The being denied Christ. The message demanded occult practice. The fruit has been lasting oppression. In those cases, the Christian's work is to release — to renounce, in prayer, what has been shown to be contrary to the gospel, while still honoring the person who had the experience as a person beloved by God. You do not renounce your mother. You renounce the deception attributed to her.

Back to Marianne

Remember Marianne. I want to return to her now, because the framework we have built is for the Mariannes of the world.

Joyce's experience was mixed. Some of it — the tender visits from Jesus, the appearance of Charlie in those final weeks — aligned with the markers beautifully. Christ was glorified. Joyce was humbled, softened, drawn toward prayer and Scripture in her last months. Her family felt comforted, not disturbed. The core of those visits passes the tests.

The later syncretist message does not. "All paths lead to the Light" contradicts John 14:6. "Jesus is one teacher among many" contradicts the apostolic gospel at its root. The teaching fails markers one and two at their center. What should we say about that element?

We have three honest possibilities to hold. First, the episode may have been a demonic counterfeit — a hostile spiritual being disguising itself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14) in order to introduce error into the final days of a faithful saint's life. Second, it may have been Joyce's own mind interpreting an ambiguous experience through cultural categories she had absorbed without realizing — the gentle, ambient syncretism of late-twentieth-century American spirituality, which had slipped past her defenses in ways she did not recognize.²³ Third, it may have been a mix of both — an ordinary confusion exploited by an extraordinary suggestion. We cannot be certain which. We do not have to be.

What Marianne can be certain of is this. The Christ who met Joyce in those earlier visits is the real Christ of Scripture. He did not deny Himself in the later episode. The teaching of the angelic being, whatever its source, failed the tests Scripture provides for the testing of spirits. Marianne is not obligated to accept that teaching as binding. She is not dishonoring her mother by refusing it. She is, in fact, honoring her mother's real faith — the faith Joyce had lived for fifty years before a single confusing episode near the end.

And Joyce is safe. The God of Joyce's lifetime of faith did not lose her in the last three weeks. Her salvation does not rest on her doctrinal precision in a moment of weakness. It rests on Jesus, the same Jesus who met her in those earlier visits, the same Jesus who holds her now. Marianne can grieve her mother, receive the Christ-visits as gifts, and release the syncretist message as something to be declined — and walk out of my office with her head held up. That is what discernment is for.

For Your Reflection

Take your time with these. You may not know all the answers. Sit with the questions you do not yet know how to answer, and bring them to the Lord.

1. Have you had — or has someone you loved had — an experience that contained elements you were not sure how to receive? What has it been like to carry that alone?

2. As you read through the seven markers of a God-sent experience and the seven red flags, what came to mind? Did any of the markers or flags fit something you have wondered about?

3. Have you ever been in a conversation where "discernment" was used to wound or shame you? What would it mean to let that experience be redeemed by a different, gentler model of discernment?

4. Is there any place in your own grief journey where you have been tempted to seek contact with the deceased by means Scripture would warn against — even in small or casual ways? What would it mean to name that honestly and come back to the Lord?

5. Who in your life could help you weigh an experience? Is there a trusted pastor, friend, or small group who would read Scripture with you and pray with you through something confusing?

6. If you have lost someone whose last weeks or words included something strange or troubling, can you make a list — short, honest, unhurried — of what about their life and faith passes the tests? And what, if anything, needs to be released?

7. Where do you sense that God might be inviting you — gently — to receive more than you have been allowing yourself to receive? And where might He be inviting you to release more than you have been allowing yourself to release?

For Pastors and Caregivers

This chapter is, in one sense, the pastor's chapter par excellence. It is the framework pastors will return to most often when NDE, DBE, or ADC situations land on their desks. Here is how to use it in practice.

Key pastoral observations. Discernment is a spiritual gift (1 Corinthians 12:10) that can be cultivated through Scripture, prayer, and mature counsel. It is not a personality trait some pastors have and others do not. It grows, and it grows in community.²⁶ Watch two opposite temptations in yourself. One is the temptation to weaponize discernment — to use the word as a way to shut down conversations, dismiss experiences, and protect your own theological comfort zone. The other is the opposite temptation, to refuse discernment out of a sentimental pastoral softness that does not want to tell anyone that anything is wrong. Do not be either pastor. The grieving need you to be both tender and truthful. Both.

Notice what is actually in front of you. Most experiences walked into your office will be ordinary, peaceful, and consistent with the markers of a God-given experience. The research bears this out; the pastoral reality bears it out. Your default posture, then, is receiving, not weighing. You begin in trust. You listen all the way through. You look for the marks of the Spirit before you look for the red flags. The red flags matter — they are in this chapter for a reason — but statistically they will apply to a small minority of the conversations you have. Calibrate accordingly.

What to say. When a person brings you an experience that contains something that needs discernment, do not rush. Consider phrases like these: "I want to hear the whole thing first. Take your time. Don't try to interpret it as you go — just tell me what happened." Or: "Let's walk through this carefully together, with Scripture open. I'm not going to rush to judgment one way or the other." Or: "The core of what you describe — being met, being loved, being shown — has a lot in common with many experiences I've heard of and with what Scripture teaches. There's an element or two I want to think through with you. Can we sit with it?" Or: "You are not obligated to reject the whole thing because one detail troubles you, and you are not obligated to accept the whole thing because most of it was beautiful. That's what discernment is for — keeping the wheat and letting the chaff go."

What NOT to say. Avoid these common pastoral mistakes. "That was demonic — stop talking about it." Too fast. Too harsh. Even in the rare cases where demonic elements are present, the pastoral response is not to shut down conversation; it is to open it with care. "Every experience is from God." False. Scripture forbids this posture. "It was just your grief." Dismissive and usually wrong. "Let's not focus on this; let's focus on Scripture." Scripture is not an alternative to the experience; it is the framework by which we weigh it. "The best thing is to put it out of your mind." No. Suppressed experiences do not stay suppressed. They resurface, usually worse. Walk with the person through the weighing. Do not advise them to bury it.

Questions to ask. A few simple ones that open the conversation. "Tell me everything — what happened, what was said, what you felt." "Over the months since, what has been the fruit in your life? In your prayer life? In your family?" "As you tell me about what was said, does any of it trouble you? Is there anything that doesn't sit right?" "What did the experience point toward — Christ, or something else? Did it lift Him up or move Him aside?" "Have you felt any pressure to seek more contact through means Scripture would warn against?" "Who else has walked through this with you? Is there anyone else who could help us weigh it?"

Watch-outs. Three specific landmines. First, some pastors reflexively weaponize discernment to avoid theological discomfort. If a person's experience challenges your systematic theology more than it challenges Scripture, check yourself before you check them.²⁵ Second, some pastors mistake personal squeamishness for spiritual caution. Not every unfamiliar experience is a red flag. A sensed presence, a deathbed vision, a vivid dream of the deceased — these are ordinary to bereavement and ordinary to the Christian tradition. Do not make people feel strange for experiencing what many grieving Christians experience. Third, rarely, you will encounter something that actually warrants deliverance-level response. Do not improvise. Call a pastor or mature Christian minister who has experience in this ministry under proper accountability. Do not work alone.

Next steps. For most conversations: keep the door open. Schedule a second conversation. Assign a gentle reading from Scripture or a chapter of a trusted book. Pray with the person. For conversations that involved clear red flags but no active oppression: walk together through releasing the problematic content in prayer, recommit to Scripture, and check in again in a month. For the rare cases that involve ongoing oppression, seek out mature deliverance-capable ministers within your denominational or pastoral network. For anything that might be intertwined with mental health concerns, make a warm referral to a Christian therapist alongside continued pastoral care — the two work together, not against each other.

A note on self-care for the pastor. This kind of work is tiring. If you walk through a season of ministry in which multiple families bring you experiences that require careful discernment, you will find yourself spiritually stretched. Make sure you are tending your own soul. Keep your own prayer life warm. Keep your own confessor close. Keep your own Scripture reading intact. A pastor doing discernment ministry on empty is a pastor heading for trouble. The work is holy. It is also demanding. Honor it by caring for the instrument — yourself — through which the Lord is working.

On written resources. When a family member or parishioner has had a troubling experience, it can help enormously to put a trusted book in their hands. John Burke's Imagine Heaven is a generally accessible starting point for understanding the NDE landscape through a Christian frame. J. Steve Miller's research is more thorough and will reassure parishioners who have been told the field is uniformly anti-Christian. For those struggling with specifically troubling content, Jonathan Edwards's Religious Affections — in a good modern edition — remains the gold standard on discernment of spiritual experience. Put the right book in the right hand and you have given the parishioner a friend who can keep working after you have gone home for the night.

One last pastoral word. When you sit across from a grieving person who is trying to weigh an experience that puzzles her, remember that she has trusted you with something holy. She is not bringing you an abstract case. She is bringing you the memory of someone she loved. Handle her, and that memory, with the care you would want someone to handle yours. Discernment, at its best, is a form of love.

For Further Reading

Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. The classic. Edwards, writing after the Great Awakening, distills the Christian tradition on how to tell genuine spiritual experience from counterfeit. Dense in places, but the core markers repay careful reading.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. A deceptively slim book that teaches discernment sideways — by letting a senior demon describe how ordinary Christians are deceived. Often funny, always serious, immensely useful.

Jerry Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most. A careful, philosophically rigorous treatment of the afterlife that gives pastors conceptual tools for handling hard questions without either dismissing or sensationalizing.

John Burke, Imagine Heaven. Burke's framework for weighing NDE content against Scripture is a practical, pastorally sensitive tool for pastors newly engaging this field. Especially useful alongside this chapter.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Miller's research on the scarcity of anti-Christian elements in the NDE literature is essential background for any pastor who has been told that NDE accounts are fundamentally at odds with biblical Christianity. Calmly, carefully, with data, he shows otherwise.

Charles Kraft, Christianity with Power. Kraft's work on spiritual discernment from a Christian worldview is widely consulted in pastoral care and deliverance ministry contexts. Engage with care; his experiential framework is strong in places where he is working pastorally.