If you turn within your Bibles, please to First John chapter 4, beginning at the first verse. John writes, ‘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. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, which you heard was coming, and now is in the world already. Little Children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world, therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. But we are from God; whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. We thank you, Lord, for the minds that you have given us. You give us wisdom and understanding; you help us to discern what is right and what is wrong. Protect us and preserve us. Help us to follow the spirits of Truth and avoid the spirits of error; for your sake, for our sake, and the sake of your kingdom. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Building upon the foundation of knowing, which is laid out for us in the first three chapters of this letter, John now pivots to explain how we should use this knowledge to benefit us in life. Specifically, so that we may make proper, informed, and godly decisions. He has shown us how we may know what belongs to Christ and what belongs to Antichrist. He has shown us how we may know that we belong to Christ so that we may have confidence before God and enjoy the assurance of our faith in him and abide in Koinonia with God the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.
He has shown us our necessity to always walk in the light, to live in the way that Jesus lived, as our acts of obedience to God the Father. He has shown us our obligation to love Agape God and to Agape others because of the love that we ourselves have already received from Christ. And he has shown us what Agape truly is: to care about others more than we care about ourselves, to live sacrificially for the good of others.
So now that we know and hopefully better understand these things, John now begins to explain what we must do whenever we interact with the cosmos, the fallen creation. He writes, ‘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.’ I mean it should be plain for us to understand by now that the world, the cosmos, is not to be trusted. The world is not a friend to Christians; it is never friendly towards us, especially when it seems to be inviting and accommodating towards us. Whenever the world acts like that, it is being deceitful and trying to corrupt us and transform us to remake us into its own image.
Whenever the world claims to accept us just as we are, it’s really asking us to accept the cosmos just as it is. The cosmos demands or insists that we tolerate it and approve of every sin, all in the name of Christian love, while it proves its own hypocrisy through the world’s intolerance of Jesus Christ and of Christians. The world does not Agape Christians; therefore, we should not Agape the cosmos.
‘Do not believe,’ do not pisteuete. The Greek word ‘pisteo’ means something more than just mere belief as in, ‘I believe you when you say.’ Pisteo means to trust in and to have faith in. Pisteo is something active and consequential, not passive or latent. Faith matters to you, and faith matters for you.
I mean, a person can say that they believe or have faith that the Cleveland Browns will win the Super Bowl this year. They can—
But that kind of faith does not matter or really mean anything to them because they have no skin in the game. However, if that same person says they believe the Cleveland Browns are going to win the Super Bowl this year, and then they go to Las Vegas in order to wager their life savings, their children’s education fund, and a second mortgage on their home upon this belief, thereby committing their everything to depend upon the fulfillment of their expectation, then they would be demonstrating a kind of true faith, true pisteo, in their false, flawed, and highly improbable and unlikely hope.
That kind of wholehearted total commitment to faith is what we Christians are called to have when we claim to have pisteo in Jesus Christ. This is why many apologists over the centuries have said something to the effect of, ‘Pisteo in Christ, faith in Christ, is the only certain bet.’ If we are correct about Jesus, then we stand to gain everything we hope and expect and far likely more than we could even imagine. Or if we’re found to be wrong, then we are still better off because we will live good lives of charity, kindness, and love so that ultimately we lose out on nothing of any lasting value.
However, if we are correct about Jesus, as we believe ourselves to be, then a person not having pisteo in Christ will not enjoy life as well or as fully as they otherwise could, and they will ultimately lose anything and everything which they might have ever hoped for. So which would you rather? Bestow the promises of God with all of the future hope that they offer to weary, sin-sick souls, or the promises of the cosmos which offer a person immediate gratification but is devoid of hope for the future—promises which offer a person only physical death, personal oblivion, and ultimately to be forgotten?
Faced with a choice like that, being given a choice like that, I will choose the promises of God every time because as a child of God I no longer desire what the world offers. Yet the world, the cosmos, will continue offering strange and new and different, but ultimately the same things because it is filled with false prophets and antichrists—all of whom are looking to lead Christians, the elect, astray if they are able. Therefore, it is a Christian duty to stand firm against them for ourselves and for others.
It is our duty to God and our King to remain resolute and steadfast. It is our duty to the Spirit of Christ, which dwells within every believer. It is our duty to ourselves towards our hope of rewarding the eternal kingdom, and it is our duty for our children and our children’s children, so they may be preserved and walk in the light of Christ with us.
To do our duty, we must know who and what we can trust so that we are not fooled, distracted, or drawn out of our Koinonia with Christ Jesus. Therefore, we must test the spirits. But what does it mean to test them? How do we test them? And what spirits is John writing about anyways? He’s not writing about angels or demons; he is writing about people and the things which they teach, do, and encourage other people to do.
He’s telling us to test the spirits, both the messengers and their messages, to know from whence they come in order to decide who we should trust and whom we should obey. Spirits only come from one of two sources: God or the devil, and only one is worth paying attention to. But when we test them, how do we know which comes from which?
John tells us, ‘By this you know’ (gnosko) ‘the spirit of God: every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God.’
But hold on, that’s rather odd, isn’t it? That’s an unusually specific metric, even for a writer like John who strives for clarity: ‘Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh’ (sarks) ‘is from God.’ That is certainly not an issue or concern that we often hear about today, is it?
But it was a very significant concern for Christians during the first century. Although it may not sound like a big deal for us now, it remains at the highest level of importance because it concerns the humanity and the deity of Jesus. Sarks is a very important word in the New Testament scriptures, especially for the Apostle Paul. Paul used the word 91 times in his letters. The ordinary meaning of the word is flesh, muscle, tissue—a physical body—and Paul used it that way many times.
But he also used it 41 times, almost half, according to his redefinition of the word found in Romans 7:5. ‘For while we were living in the flesh’ (sarks), ‘our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.’ Although he was inconsistent in his used meaning for sarks, he was consistent when using sarks to refer to our sinful passions, our sin nature.
He used it this way so often that whenever we encounter sarks, or the word flesh, in the New Testament, we have to pause and pay attention because that sinful passions is now its primary Christian meaning. Occasionally, John used sarks according to Paul’s redefinition. John uses sarks here in its ordinary meaning, but for extraordinary reasons.
Previously, I mentioned that some challenges to the Christian faith that John wrote against were proto-gnostic heresies. So the statement that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is evidence for that assertion. The Gnostics taught that Jesus lacked a true physical form, teaching that he only appeared in the likeness of a man and did not possess an actual physical body. This particular heresy is commonly remembered as docetism, a name coming from the Greek word dokin, meaning ‘to seem,’ and it was very popular among the Gnostics.
They held this view because they believed that the material physical reality was corrupted, imperfect, and evil, and that only spiritual things could be good. So it is easy for us to understand why their belief in Jesus lacking a physical body is problematic for the faith. If Jesus lacked a physical body, then there was no actual virgin birth. If Jesus did not have a physical body and was not actually born of Mary, then he could not have been either the son of David or the Son of Man.
If Jesus did not have a physical body, then he did not actually die upon the cross as an atoning sacrifice. If Jesus did not have a physical body and if he did not actually die, then he could not have been resurrected, and we can have no hope for a future resurrection of the dead. But the gospels make it quite clear, over and over again, that Jesus did have a physical form.
He was frequently touching and being touched by people. The woman with the bleeding condition touched his robes and was healed. Jesus put his fingers in the ears of a deaf man. Jesus spat, made mud, and put it on the eyes of a blind man. A woman poured ointment onto Jesus’s head before his passion. It is the clear testimony of scripture and the Holy Spirit that Jesus has a physical human body. It’s a necessary condition, in fact, in order for him to be the God-Man, to be both eligible to pay our debt of sin as a man and also be able to afford paying it, God.
If Jesus did not have a physical body, then scripture must be wrong. It must contain errors, and if it is wrong in any one point, how can we trust it to be correct at any point? This was not heresy because of why they denied scripture; it was heresy because of what they denied about God and Jesus. If their denial, the clear testimony of scripture, was true, then that would have disastrous effects and consequences to the validity, effectiveness, and truth of the Gospel.
That is why John is being so specific about the necessity of Jesus to have come in the flesh as an effective rubric to determine whether a spirit came from God or not because of the derivative effects of what that denial means about Christ. It means that he is not who or what scripture says he is: the God-Man.
So yeah, it’s good that we don’t need to worry about this particular complaint and falsehood anymore, right? Wrong. Because it continues to be a concern and problem for us today. Although our culture may say that it loves the idea of Jesus, the man, it hates the idea of him as God. Ever since the early 20th century, people have been on a quest to find the historical Jesus—the man behind the myth—falsely teaching that the church took Jesus’s moralistic teachings and transformed them into the Christian religion.
Some liberal theologians and skeptics lay the charge against Paul as being the true founder and source of Christianity, not Jesus. This is just a different side of the same heretical coin because now the world admits that Jesus was or is a real person, that he truly existed, that he exists, because there’s too much evidence from world history to deny that fact.
Now instead, they merely continue to deny that he is God. These false prophets affirm the flesh of Jesus and deny the deity of Christ. The Jewish general and historian Josephus mentions Jesus in his writings, although that reference may have been an addition by a late Christian author. But Josephus also wrote about John the Baptist and several other persons named in the gospels without any questions or concerns about that text.
There’s been a stone bearing a Roman inscription naming Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea that was recovered in the 1960s in Caesarea Maritima, offering tangible archaeological evidence for the person who signed off on Jesus’s death. Other evidence has been recovered which supports the veracity of the gospel’s description of crucifixion practices in the form of a heel bone pierced with a nail affixed to wood.
It’s an accepted historical fact that all the apostles were martyred, and it is an accepted truism that no one will willingly die for something they know to be a lie, much less 10 or 11 people. Nero persecuted Christians because of their belief in the lordship of Jesus and his resurrection.
Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Bithynia, wrote letters to the emperor Trajan requesting advice on how he should deal with these troublesome Christians in his province. Any movement like Christianity, which causes such extreme societal and individual change, cannot be reasonably sourced from the imagination of men or be mere myth because it is counterintuitive and counter-cosmos.
There’s just too much evidence supporting the existence of Jesus for the world to deny the fact that he is. All they can do is deny who he is. Therefore, in that same heretical spirit as the first century, we have modern Christian liberalism, which denies the virgin birth, miracles, and the resurrection, and most of those liberals also affirm pluralism, the idea that there are multiple ways to reach heaven and be approved of by God, in clear opposition to John 14:6.
Truly, they are denying the same things the Gnostics and Docetists denied: the inspired testimony of scripture concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ. What John is saying here concerning this confessional affirmation of Christ is not just about the fact of Jesus’s mere physicality, but it’s also inclusive of all the other facts and details about Jesus contained in scripture. To deny any one of these is denying them all.
Therefore, in order to tell the difference between heresy and Christian orthodoxy, we must know how to test the spirits. Therefore, every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. Every spirit, every person, and every institution that does not confess Jesus Christ entirely and only as he is described and testified to in sacred scripture—the Jesus of the Bible rather than a fabricated, reconstructed historical Jesus—does not come from God, is not approved of by God, and does not belong to God or his eternal kingdom.
Therefore, everyone and everything which does not confess Jesus Christ as the eternally begotten Son of God and the Son of Man comes from Satan and possesses and is possessed by the spirit of Antichrist. John writes, ‘This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.’
Remember, Jesus warned the disciples about Antichrist to come, John warned the first Christians about Antichrist, and John has warned us about Antichrist, and we know that they’re present in the world all around us. Evidence is incontrovertible; look around, and you can see it plainly for yourself.
But fortunately, we do not need to feel dismayed about this because we can tell the difference between these spirits. John comforts us and reminds us, saying, ‘Little Children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.’
We are from God because we belong to God. We are from God because we are united into God through Koinonia, and since we’re united into God the Son, Jesus, because he has already triumphed over sin and death, Satan, and the cosmos, therefore we also have overcome them.
What does John mean when he says that we have overcome them? When we look around, it often looks like we are losing the war against Satan, not winning—much less looking like we have already won the war. If we’re in Christ, if we abide in Christ, walking like Christ, then he abides within us, and since he has overcome the world and all the powers that Satan commands, if he is greater than all those who are part of the world and belong to the world, then we are now made greater than them as well.
‘They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them.’ Every Antichrist is from the cosmos; every Antichrist speaks with the voice and mind and will of the cosmos. They speak to the cosmos, and everyone who belongs to the cosmos listens, heeds, pays attention to, and obeys every sinful inclination that the devil commands.
But we are from God. We, whoever knows God, listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. Every Christian is born again, born of the will of God, and we know the Good Shepherd. We hear his voice, so we listen and follow him.
Christ abides within us; then we speak with the voice and mind and will of Christ about the things he calls us to speak upon. Whenever we speak about the things of Christ, other people who know and love Jesus hear us, recognize us, and heed whatever we have been given to say.
Well, those who are not of God do not listen to us. That’s why they ridicule and mock us. That is why the world tries to ignore or silence Christians. Truth can never be hidden or suppressed for very long; the truth will always come out in the end.
By this, we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. The spirit of truth, alathea, belongs to Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. But the spirit of error, of deception, of delusion, of perversion, and of falsehood belongs to the spirit of Antichrist.
See, we’re constantly being given the choice to pisteo either of these two spirits: the spirit of truth that comes from Christ or the spirit of error that comes from the Antichrist. And whichever spirit we place our trust and confidence in has lasting consequences for us, our families, and our friends. This is why John tells us to test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
All of the spirits, people, and ideas which come from God have the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ within them or as their foundation; they overcome and conquer the things, people, and ideas presented by the cosmos. They refuse to pay attention to or give credence to the things that belong to the cosmos, trust and obey the commandments of Jesus Christ; they are the spirits of truth because they are Christ-like.
But all the spirits, people, and ideas which come from the cosmos have the spirit of Antichrist within them, and as their foundation, they are conquered and defeated by truth. They refuse to hear or accept the truth, denying the gospel, they forsake or abandon the promises of God in Koinonia with him and his Son, Jesus. They listen to and obey their father, the devil, gladly following him in every perverse deception; they are spirits of error because they are Antichrist-like.
So now that we know (gnosko) the difference between these two opposing spirits, how do we do as John instructs? How do we test the spirits? By comparing them against what is written in sacred scripture.
If we’re going to test the spirits in order to recognize, know, and understand whether something comes from God or comes from the devil, then we need to know our Bible very well, both the Old and New Testament. There were very few people who have the ability or inclination to carry a Bible around with them everywhere they go, nor does God really expect us to stop, crack open our pocket Bible every few minutes, just to check and see which side of the spiritual line something falls. That is impractical, and it’s not something that Jesus would really expect of us.
We do not have the time or capability to stop and search everything out. So since it’s not feasible or reasonable for us to always look everything up in our Bibles, instead, we must know what the Bible says and how to apply it to our lives, both in our hearts and our minds. And I do not mean just memorizing scripture Bible verses, although that is helpful. No, we do not need to know the Bible frontwards and backwards, but we do need to know it so familiar and intimately that we almost bleed the Bible.
We need to know it well enough that we can discern who a spirit belongs to merely by seeing it or hearing it. Unfortunately, we have a major problem, and we are the only ones who can do anything to fix it. LifeWay did a study in 2020, finding that only 32 percent of Americans who attend a Protestant church regularly say they read the Bible personally every day. Evangelical Protestants like us fared a little bit better: 36 percent.
As Al Mohler put it, ‘The scandal of biblical illiteracy is our problem.’ This means that only one-third of people like us read their Bible daily. This suggests that one in three of us present here are intentional about taking the time daily to read and know the only book of true value and substance—the only book which contains the words of eternal life and the only book that can tell you where you are going and how you’re going to get there.
That is beyond sad; it should be criminal for a Christian because it means that when two-thirds of people do not read their Bible daily, they need to test the spirits for spiritual discernment. The odds that they are going to discern wrong drastically increase. However, reading the Bible for only 15 minutes a day will surely improve a person’s odds in discerning what is spiritually true or false.
And just because someone might know (gnosko) the Bible frontwards and backwards—like I knew a lot of inmates in prison who did, and they can quote scripture chapter and verse verbatim—that doesn’t mean they understand it. That takes a whole lot more work and effort and prayer. That’s why we gather on Sundays to worship the Lord and hear his word as written, explained, and expounded. That’s why I put so much effort into my vocation, both for your souls’ sake and for my own.
You need to know your Bible well because you should even test me and what I say here as well. Test the spirit of what I say from up here; I want you to. It’s another way to be engaged in your faith. That’s why I cite all of my scripture references and other sources so that you can check me when you read the printed copies of the sermons that are in the Narthex. Trust and verify, as Ronald Reagan used to say.
Every one of us needs to read God’s word. We all need to hear it, be explained, so that we can understand it better. It’s the most important thing we can ever do for ourselves and our loved ones because only then can we share with them what we have learned and know, because only then can we teach them and lead them in the way in which they should go—the way of Christ.
But I know the common objection and excuse because I’ve offered it up too many times myself: ‘I’m too busy.’ Baloney, you’re not. I’m not. We just think we are because we allow Satan to convince us that we are. We allow the cosmos to lead us around by the nose and allow the cosmos to fill up our 24-hour days with things that are not God-honoring, not God-glorifying, or spiritually edifying, which makes our Sunday mornings even more important because it may be the only hour or two each week that’s safe from the world and devoted to Jesus Christ.
For two-thirds of us, we all have plenty of time to read scripture each day; I guarantee it. We all have the same 24 hours each day, and we do not need to sacrifice sleep to find time. If you have time to watch TV, to scroll through Facebook, to read the newspaper, or watch the 24/7 news cycle but think that you do not have time to read God’s word, then I tell you your priorities are wrong. The truth is we have the time, but we need to prioritize reading scripture before all of the other trash we read or watch or otherwise waste our time on.
It’s up to each of us to be intentional about setting aside time to stop and listen to God. But if you don’t know where to start with reading the Bible, then pick up a Bible reading plan. Ask me for one; I’ve got several that I can suggest, or even check in your study Bible because many of them have a suggested plan already written in them. Try a Bible in a year plan; it’s okay to start now if you’re not doing one presently because there’s no reason to wait until January.
Even if you’ve already read the Bible once, twice, or ten times, read it again and then read it again. Just start at the beginning with Genesis and work your way on through. And when you run into difficulties, such as with all of the Levitical rules or with genealogy lists, mark them, skip that chapter, and continue reading; but come back to it again.
And if you don’t finish it in a year, then so what? You’re still reading more Bible than you were before, and that is an improvement. Maybe pick up a scripture-heavy daily devotional and read all of the related and suggested Bible passages along with the published encouragement and exhortation. Make a commitment to yourself and just set aside 15 minutes a day just to read the Bible.
Read it every day at the same time, every day for the same length of time. Every morning, my wife Jody and I do this; it is our first thing while we drink our coffee, and it’s my favorite part of the day. Then think about what you read; pray about what you read. Ingest and digest the scriptures because nothing is more important or more beneficial to you in life or for eternity.
Only when we know the scriptures, only once God’s word is so much a part of us and a part of our being as our blood and our bone, can we easily and correctly test the spirits and walk in the light of Jesus Christ. More faith! Only then can we easily know the difference between truth and error, between light and dark, between Christ and Antichrist, and only then can we steer others onto the path and help them follow Jesus.
There’s a lot of anti-Christical noise going on outside in the cosmos. There are a lot of falsehoods being taught and accepted as if they are true. If you can tell the difference, if you know the difference, if you test the spirits and know which are right and which are wrong, then you have the duty to help others know as well.
Do not keep it to yourself. Even if they accuse you of being unloving when you tell them the truth, nobody likes being told that they’re wrong. Everyone will react and respond to the truth with great difficulty. However, if you see someone headed down the road to destruction, then the most unloving thing you can do is not tell them and show them the better way.
The only loving thing we can do is tell them the truth, show them the truth, beg and plead with them to turn away from what we know will be a tragic ending. Meanwhile, pray and hope that they will listen, hear, repent, and turn to Jesus. But we cannot do that if we do not test the spirits. We cannot do that if we do not know the truth, which is contained only within scripture.
So know Jesus! Get to know him better. Choose the good, avoid the evil, and teach others how to test the spirits and always only judge them according to the word of God. Amen.