Close our eyes for a moment of prayer
as we prepare ourselves to listen to the
Word of God.
Spirit of God who wrote this eternal Word
and who indwells each of us who knows
Jesus, may the Word which you have written
find the response of our hearts and infiltrate
our minds that we may do that which
is acceptable in your sight.
We ask it for the glory of Jesus
himself.
Amen.
Some of you may have heard these words
if you've listened to any radio stations, particularly
those which emanate from south of the border.
This is a test.
For the next 60 seconds, this station is
participating in a test of the civilian early
warning system.
Then a few seconds later, the same voice
says, thank you.
This has been a test and repeats the
same words.
Now, we as Christians are called to involve
ourselves in some testing.
And although it's probably unwise to broadcast that
we're doing it, God called us, and specifically
in this passage this morning, to test the
spirits to see whether they are of him
or whether they come from someplace else.
And I want us to continue in our
study of 1 John this morning by looking
at the passage which comes in chapter 4,
which I read a few minutes ago, to
try to understand what God is commanding us
to do and to ask him to show
us from his word how we can obey
that commandment.
So if you've got a Bible or you're
sitting next to someone who has, turn with
me, will you please, to chapter 4 of
1 John and let's look at it together.
John begins by saying, Beloved, do not believe
every spirit, but test the spirits to see
whether they are of God.
For many false prophets have gone out into
the world.
That's the commandment and part of the reason
why he gives it.
And then the rest of the verse gives
some guidelines of how we can test the
spirits to see whether indeed they are of
God.
But before we can even get into those
guidelines and look at them in a helpful
way, I think it's important to clear the
ground a little bit, to make sure that
some misconceptions which may be in some of
our minds are swept away so that I'm
speaking the same language that you're hearing.
The first misconception is this word spirit as
John uses it here.
He says, test the spirits to see whether
they are of God.
He's not speaking of disembodied spirits or dealing
with speaking to the dead or anything like
that, which is prohibited elsewhere in scripture.
But as he makes clear, as he goes
on to talk about false prophets, John is
speaking of those who are representing not the
spirit of God, but the spirit of error.
So what we're testing here is not disembodied
spirits that people may be tempted to try
to contact in ways prohibited by scripture, but
those spirits which provide the message of false
prophets.
That's the first misconception I think we ought
to clear up.
Second is that this passage is not simply
instruction for those who are seeking to exercise
the spiritual gift of discernment.
Now anyone who has that gift should exercise
it in keeping with this passage.
But as most of you probably know, in
1 Corinthians 12, in the midst of that
list of spiritual gifts, one of them that's
mentioned is the gift of spiritual discernment.
And the key thing to understand about spiritual
gifts is that not everyone has all of
them.
Some people have one or more.
Others have others.
This passage is not to individual Christians who
have that particular gift, but to all of
us.
Beloved, John begins his passage.
He's speaking to everyone who reads the letter.
All of us have to exercise the responsibility
of distinguishing between those who speak out of
the spirit of error and those who speak
by the spirit of truth.
Third misconception I think we ought to make
sure we're clear about is that this isn't
the only test of whether or not someone
is a Christian, or whether someone speaks by
the spirit of God.
The whole book, as you've been studying it
together for these months, makes it clear that
there are other tests.
There's a moral test.
No one who keeps on sinning or who
makes sin a practice in his life could
possibly be of God, because people who are
reborn by the spirit of God have lives
which aren't characterized by sin.
They're characterized by righteousness.
And there's a social test.
No one who fails to love his brother
or hates his brother consistently can be born
of the spirit of God, because the spirit
of God enables us to love.
So this isn't the only test, and we
need to apply it with that in mind,
not rigidly or narrowly, but seeing it in
the larger context of the whole of Scripture.
And then last, in my little ground-clearing
exercise, the primary application of this passage is
to dealing with what we might call Christian
heresies.
When John wrote this to the young believers,
he wasn't telling them how to deal with
outright pagan beliefs, although there's a application there.
He's trying to help them understand how to
deal with those who claim to be Christian,
who are setting themselves forward as prophets of
the one true God, and yet prove by
what they say not to be.
So with that bit of ground-clearing, perhaps
we can look at the commandment itself.
Look at verse 1 with me again, will
you please?
The commandment is in two parts, a negative
part and a positive part.
First, negatively, do not believe every spirit.
The temptation which faced those young Christians, and
if anything is even more rampant now in
our generation, was to think more of the
manner of delivery or the manner of expression
than of the content of what was said.
See, some of these people who claim to
be representing God claim to be prophets of
God, spoke in a way their utterances were
accompanied by claims, thus saith the Lord, or
they spoke in perhaps a quavering voice or
in some other way which was supposed to
indicate that they were speaking from God.
And the temptation is with today.
People say, I've got a word from the
Lord, and some Christians automatically assume that whatever
that person then says is indeed a word
from God.
John says, don't be so gullible.
Don't believe every spirit.
Just because someone says, I've had a word
from the Lord, it doesn't mean that he
necessarily has had a word from the Lord.
Or just because someone is using the kind
of language that we expect a born again
person to use, that doesn't mean that what
he's saying is a word from God.
So don't be gullible.
Some of you who are sociologists, or maybe
some of the rest of you, have heard
of what sociologists call the halo effect.
By that they mean someone will say, be
an expert in one area of life, and
when he speaks on another area of life,
even though he may know absolutely nothing about
it, people, gullible people like ourselves, accept what
he says, even though he has no real
authority or basis for saying so.
It's used in advertising all the time, when
someone who's good at something speaks about something
else which he may know nothing about.
And the advertisers hope that because he's thought
to be knowledgeable in one area, everyone will
take his word for something in another.
Now Christians are guilty of believing people for
the very same reason, and maybe the term
halo effect is more applicable in our situation
than some of the others.
We listen to someone who we know is
right in some areas, even though what he
says in others isn't accurate.
We as Christians are not to be gullible.
We're not to believe every spirit, but as
the Apostle Paul tells us, we're to test
all things and hold fast to that which
is good.
So that's the negative side of the commandment.
The positive side, as John puts it here,
is test the spirits to see whether they
are of God.
And in the rest of the passage, he
tells us how to do that.
But before I look at those guidelines which
he gives us, let's look at the last
part of verse one, because it tells us
something of why.
Why do we do this?
Why is it important that we test the
spirits?
Well, in the first place, he says, for
many false prophets have gone out into the
world, and I would add, and some of
them have ended up in Toronto.
In fact, we don't have to go very
far, just less than a quarter of a
mile down the street to visit the Unification
Church in Toronto.
Just two or three blocks in this direction
where the Hare Krishna movement have their own
headquarters or one of their outposts, at least.
False prophets have gone out into the whole
world, and some of them are here.
And not just a few of them.
They're plentiful.
There are loads of people who are propagating
ideas which don't come from Scripture and which
we are to reject.
So that's one reason, and it's an important
one, not only because of the damage they
can do to us as those who believe
in Jesus, but because of the damage they
can do to others.
But not only are these false prophets plentiful,
we could say that these false prophets aren't
working on their own.
They're not individual people who've gotten together just
for their own gain, to build up some
kind of a cult, to feather their own
nest, although sadly and predictably, that's often part
of the motivation.
These people, John tells us, are in league
with someone else.
Look at verse 3.
Every spirit which does not confess Jesus is
not of God.
This is the spirit of Antichrist, of which
you heard that it was coming, and now
it is in the world already.
What John is saying clearly in this passage
and comes out through the rest of Scripture
is that we're involved in a tremendous conflict.
When we as Christian believers come face to
face with someone who is teaching lies, teaching
error, it's not just two people confronting each
other.
It's not a simple difference of opinion.
There are two kingdoms in conflict.
On the one hand, the kingdom of God
with Jesus as our king and our leader,
and on the other hand, the kingdom of
Satan with the Antichrist leading them.
Not only do we have the Holy Spirit
on the one hand, the spirit of truth,
but on the other hand, there's a spirit
of error, truth against error, light against dark.
The church, those who believe the spirit of
God and are indwelt by him, and the
world, those who are indwelt by the spirit
of error, and these two are in conflict.
So when we have contact with those who
prove to be false prophets, we're not just
dealing with individual people working on their own
or speaking out of their own minds, but
they're being led by the spirit of error.
These two worlds are locked in conflict.
So that makes it imperative that we know
what we're talking about.
We need to know how to test the
spirits.
If it's more than just my opinion against
someone else's.
So John has obligingly given us four good
guidelines, four clear rules, four ways of determining
whether someone is speaking of God or not.
And his purpose in this passage, as in
the whole book, is to give us confidence,
to help us as we confront people who
have these kinds of opinions to know what
they're saying, to know what they're up to.
So if you're taking note, there are going
to be four of these guidelines.
And the first one is this.
Does this person confess Jesus?
Look at verses two and three.
By this you know the spirit of God.
Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has
come in the flesh is of God.
That's straightforward.
But just to make sure, he states it
the other way.
And every spirit which does not confess Jesus
is not of God.
This is central, basic, and should be right
at the top of any list of trying
to determine if someone is speaking from God
or speaking from the devil.
Probably the clearest account of the Holy Spirit's
job description is that he is someone who
glorifies Jesus.
That's his job.
That's his purpose.
That's the main reason he came into the
world, to give glory to Jesus, to testify
to Jesus, so that someone who has the
spirit of God within him will automatically and
inevitably give glory to Jesus and point to
him as the Christ who's come in the
flesh.
And as Paul said in 1 Corinthians, nobody
who has the spirit of God can say
Jesus be cursed.
On the other hand, those who do not
confess Jesus, those who do not have him
central in their thinking and in their preaching,
John says here, are not of God, because
they don't have the Holy Spirit, because that's
what the Holy Spirit does.
Now, verse 2 has been translated a number
of different ways, but I think we need
to look at it in detail, because John
had in mind a specific kind of heresy,
a gnostic heresy, which said that the spiritual
world can have nothing to do with the
physical or material world.
And then these two or three words here,
he points a double barrel shotgun right at
those heretics, and he wants to make it
clear to his readers that what they believe
can't come from the spirit of God.
I think it's best translated that we've got
to believe, when we confess Jesus, not simply
to use his name, or not even simply
to say he is Messiah without knowing what
that means, but to confess that Jesus, the
historical man, is the eternal Christ and the
Son of God, as he says in verse
15, who has come in the flesh.
That this being is not simply Jesus, a
historical man, on whom this eternal spirit dipped
down and touched at a portion of his
life, but the human historical Jesus and the
eternal Christ are one and inseparable.
And that this person lived and walked the
earth.
Jesus is the Christ who has come in
the flesh.
Now, this is tremendously helpful when we're talking
with people that we suspect don't come from
God, because, you see, this guideline works both
ways.
Those who do not confess Jesus are touched
by it as well.
A few years ago, and I don't know
whether they still put their message in these
terms or not, but those who were propagating
transcendental meditation or various kinds of yoga would
say this particular belief or system or way
of acting is neutral theologically, that it doesn't
say anything about God.
It's simply a way of improving your own
religion, whatever that may be.
If you're a Christian, it'll make you a
better Christian.
If you're something else, it'll make you better
at that.
And I understand that they have been taken
to court in the States because that's a
blatant lie.
When we look at what they ask people
to do, they give them a mantra to
learn, a little phrase which they repeat again
and again, which when translated is nothing less
than worship of pagan deities.
But if we had properly applied this kind
of test and seen earlier on that Jesus
wasn't at the center of their message, that
they didn't confess Jesus, and that word means
more than acknowledge, we would have known that
they weren't of God, that those kind of
cults, Scientology and others, cannot simply be a
way of improving what we know about Christ
and improving our relationship to him, because they
don't confess Jesus.
They don't commit themselves to him, as the
wording implies.
Now, this is a slippery guideline because we
live in a generation when, unfortunately, people use
words in slippery ways.
This week, I walked down the street to
the Unification Church, armed with a little list
of these guidelines, just to see how they
worked out in practice.
And I asked the people there several things,
and one of them was, what did they
think about Jesus?
Did they feel that he was the Messiah
come in the flesh?
And they said, yes.
And I think I could have been satisfied
if I didn't know a bit more about
the group and about the movement.
But I began to ask a few more
questions and discovered that they think, although they're
willing to use those words, Messiah come in
the flesh, even Son of God, they believe
that Jesus was a failure, that his whole
ministry ended in failure.
Now, whatever words they may try to use
to describe Jesus, if they believe he was
a failure, it's clear that they don't believe
in the same Jesus that we believe in.
So, what I'm urging you to do is,
when you apply these guidelines, be cautious.
Ask the Spirit of God to help you
press on, pass the word sometimes to the
truth which lies beneath them.
So, that's the first guideline.
What does this person, does this person confess
Jesus?
Second guideline is, where does the person in
question get his message?
Look at verse 5, the first part of
the verse.
They are of the world.
Therefore, what they say is of the world.
It's as simple as that.
These people don't come from God, they come
from the world.
They're indwelt by the Spirit of the world,
and they get their message from the world.
And when we begin looking around at the
various cults which have sprung up in the
past years, we see that that's exactly what
happens.
The Mormons have the Book of Mormon, and
the Pearl of Great Price, and other books.
The Christian scientists have science and health with
a key to scriptures.
Although it's always struck me as having a
great deal of gall to take a book
which had to go to several editions because
of errors within it, and say that it
itself was a key to the eternal and
infallible Word of God.
Or the Unification Church, which has their divine
principle as the source of their information.
Or the Scientologists, who get their information from
books by L.
Ron Hubbard.
Or some may point to the Jehovah's Witnesses,
who would claim at least that scripture itself
is their source of information.
And then we discover on looking closer that
it's their own translation of scripture which they
use, and how they have twisted some of
the important passages in it.
So that's the second guideline.
Where does this person get his message?
If he gets it from some book other
than the Bible, we need immediately to be
suspect.
But there's a third guideline which comes in
the second part of verse 5, and it's
this.
Who listens to his message?
First, does the person confess Jesus?
Second, where does he get his message?
Third, who listens to his message?
Last part of verse 5 says, and the
world listens to them.
And let's be clear about this.
I don't think John is saying here that
the cults, or those who are claiming to
be prophets of God and are not, get
their adherence from some part of culture, or
some part of the population of the world
which is excessively depraved, or which has particular
problems.
I asked the representative of the Unification Church
who their message appealed to, where most of
their converts came from, and he said all
kinds of people.
And of course we would say exactly the
same.
Christian gospel appeals to all kind of people,
and indeed we should have in our congregation
every kind of person imaginable, every psychological background,
every kind of personal background.
The point really here, I think, is does
their message appeal to the world as opposed
to the church?
See, John is again using this category, these
two categories, which he repeats all the way
through the book.
Light and darkness, those who are of God
and those who are not of God, and
the church, those who know God, as opposed
to the world, and they're only those two
categories.
So what we want to do when we
apply this guideline is ask where do the
people come from in the sense of are
Christians appealed to by this kind of teaching?
And it may be overstating it, but my
experience is that there are very few people
in these cults who've had a clear conversion
experience, who have been deeply and meaningfully grounded
in the Word of God, and who've had
a meaningful relationship with the people of God.
Now sadly that's not to say that there's
never anyone from an evangelical church who've been
involved, who've listened to these people.
But it is to say that when we
really know God, and when the Spirit of
God is working in us and producing the
fruits of a knowledge of God, then it
will be clear to us when we hear
these people that they're not of God.
His Spirit, which who bears witness to us
what is of God, will also tell us
when something isn't of God.
Maybe I can illustrate this slightly from history.
In about 1831, a group called the Plymouth
Brethren was formed.
Now some people at the time may have
said this was a splinter group trying to
break away from the rest of the church,
and yet if we look at it, although
we may not be in total sympathy with
some of their theological ideas or some of
their ideas about church structure, one thing is
very certain.
These people confessed Jesus.
He was central to their message.
They didn't get their message from any other
source except the Bible, and in fact it
was from the Bible that they wanted, because
of their understanding of the Bible, that they
did what they did.
And to emphasize my point in this third
guideline, the people who listened to their message
were Christians, were believers.
That's completely different from what's happened in more
recent years in some groups where cults have
started up, and those who have been drawn
to it have been either from outside the
Christian church or from the ranks of nominal
Christianity.
So those three guidelines, and then a fourth.
Does this person receive the biblical message?
Look at verse six.
John writes, We are of God.
Whoever knows God listens to us, and he
who is not of God does not listen
to us.
Now that may sound like the height of
arrogance until we understand what John is actually
saying.
Let's be clear.
He's not here giving us the license to
say, I am of God, I know what's
right, and anyone who disagrees with me is
wrong.
We misinterpret it if we read it that
way.
The key to understanding this verse is to
know who the we is.
This is John the apostle speaking, and when
he speaks of we and of us twice,
and the context there, he's speaking of the
apostles.
He's saying we who are apostles speak what
is true, because we were specially commissioned by
Jesus himself to recall his teaching and to
receive new revelation which became the rest of
the New Testament.
So we can't go out into the streets
and say, well if you agree with me
you're right, but if you don't you're wrong.
But we do have license and commandment to
test people by their reaction to the biblical
message.
We need to find out how they respond
to what John and the rest of the
apostles wrote, because anyone who has the spirit
of God understands the word of God.
It rings bells with him, it rings true
with him.
Again, I asked this fellow at the Unification
Church what he thought of the Bible, what
he thought of the scriptural message.
He said it's just not clear.
Couldn't be, or there wouldn't be so many
differences of opinion about it, and he said
in effect that's why we started this group.
And I thought that fitted in very well
into the pattern of everything else he'd been
saying.
Without the spirit of God he wasn't able
to see what scripture was saying, and indeed
it wasn't clear to him.
So what's to be our attitude as we
live in a world where there are many
false prophets, and where those false prophets represent
the Antichrist himself?
Well I want you to remember two words
from the passage.
We're to be critical, and yet we're to
be confident.
Critical not of ourselves, because by these tests
I hope we can see that as if
we are truly born again believers, we do
confess Jesus, and he's central.
We do get our message from the Bible,
and everything else that we read or think
needs to come under the judgment of scripture.
People who listen to the message, we are
those who listen to the message, and we
know we're of God, and we receive the
whole biblical message as it is.
But critical of those who for some reason
or another don't adhere to these guidelines.
We're to ask, does this person really confess
Jesus, really commit himself to Jesus?
Not simply the word or some idea which
he may have, but the biblical Jesus.
Does he drive a wedge between the Jesus
of history and the Christ of faith?
That's a wedge which scripture itself doesn't allow,
a two or one.
Does this person, where does he get his
message?
We don't have to listen to these false
prophets very long until we discover that the
real source of their message, whatever they may
say about the Bible, is something else.
And what about those who listen to his
message?
Are they genuinely born again people who've known
the Lord, known the word, and known the
fellowship of his people?
Are they outsiders or merely nominal believers?
And what do they think of the biblical
message?
What do they think of the Bible as
God has given it to us?
But not only are we to be critical,
we're to be confident, not in a proud
or boasting way, but in a quiet and
yet powerful way.
For the very reason which John gives us
in this passage, look at verse four.
Little children, you are of God.
Some of you may have thought it was
presumptuous to sing that hymn we sang earlier
in the service, we are on the Lord's
side.
It's often presumptuous for us to say God
is on our side because we sometimes drag
him, drag his name into things which he
wouldn't associate his name with.
But by the grace of God and by
the testimony of his word and his spirit,
we can say, as John says here, you
are of God.
We are of God.
We are part of his team.
So we have that confidence.
And he goes on to say, and have
overcome them for he who is in you
is greater than he who is in the
world.
So when we run up against people like
this, when we discover someone who's teaching false
doctrine, we don't need to be afraid.
We don't need to be scared.
We need to be armed.
We need to be aware of the fact
that there are many of these people and
that their message comes from the spirit of
error.
We need to be armed with guidelines such
as I've given you this morning, but we
can be confident because the battle doesn't really
happen simply between the two of us.
It's already happened.
Jesus is already the victor.
He has already overcome the world.
We're of God, and we can have confidence
when we face these people, knowing that he
who is in us is greater than he
who is in the world.
Let's just pray as we end our time
of thinking together.
Holy Spirit, Heavenly Father, it seems incredible to
us that just as we are missionaries of
yourself, there are in the same world with
us, indeed living on the same street, those
who are missionaries of the evil one.
We thank you that you have not left
us without warning that this would be the
case.
We praise you that you've given us commandment
to test the spirits, and you've given us
some guidelines so that we can know how
to do that.
We pray that as we come in contact
with such people, we may show forth your
love and your care, but that we may
not be gullible, believing everything and anything, but
that we may, by your grace and by
your spirit, discern whether they are of God
or whether they are of not.
So enable us by your spirit to go
forth in confidence, assured that whoever we meet
or whoever we confront, he who is in
us is greater than he who is in
the world.
We ask it that the kingdom of God
may be established and that Jesus, our Lord,
may be glorified for his name's sake.
Amen.