Testing, Testing, 1-2-3: 1 John 4:1-6
The People Of God: Studies in 1 John November 6, 2005
Intro:
It is good to be back after a couple of weeks vacation, and I really mean that! We had a good time away as a family, enjoyed our trip, and created some great memories. It was good timing for us, as both Joanne and I had been pouring a lot of time and effort into work and hadn’t taken much time off during the summer, so needed to take a break. But here is what I want to share before diving back into 1 John – I discovered something interesting about myself. I didn’t need, or want, a break from loving and caring about people here at church. In fact, during my time away I found my thoughts and prayers very often returning to a number of specific people here, and I enjoyed that. I wasn’t worrying, I wasn’t concerned that things were going to fall apart without me (in fact I trusted they would improve in some ways!), I just found my heart reaching out in love and compassion, reaching back here, which is home.
I found that an encouraging affirmation of what we have been studying in 1 John this fall – that being the people of God means, above everything else, that we are a people who love God and one another deeply. God has loved us so much, and being His children means loving Him and others in return.
1 John 4:1-6
This morning we continue our study in chapter 4, verses 1-6. As we have been throughout, we approach the passage with a central question – what does this tell us about who we are as the people of God?
“1Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
4You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.”
Context:
In order for us to figure out what John is talking about, it helps to remind ourselves of the context of the letter. John is writing to a church who was facing some difficult opposition from people who had been a part of the church, but had come to some very different conclusions about who Jesus is and what it meant to be a Christian. In chapter 2, John wrote “18Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. 19They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us… their going showed that none of them belonged to us… 22Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son… 26I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray.”
Here in chapter 4 John returns to this reality, and helps prepare them to face opposition.
Testing The Spirits: vs 1
Sometimes we equate faith with mindless acquiescence. We think that taking something “by faith” means “in the absence of proof” or sometimes even “in spite of the evidence…” That may at times be part of what “faith” means, but it is missing the foundation – truth. Faith is not about shutting off our brains and blindly accepting or mindlessly believing. Faith is about a bedrock of truth about who God is, who Jesus is, who we are as children of God indwelled by the Holy Spirit, how we are to live in our world as ambassadors of Jesus, and of then having faith in those truths for the needs and realities of the moment.
That is the kind of faith John calls us to in verse 1: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
John is saying, “don’t be naïve. Don’t mindlessly accept what you hear or believe what you see, test it. Check it out. Dig a little deeper and make sure.” In our culture, this is an especially important skill, because all of the messages we get, the news we see and read about, the promises of advertisers, comes from an underlying view of the world, of reality, and from a place where they are hoping to get us to respond in a certain way. Read about the same situation in the Edmonton Journal and the National Post, or watch Fox news and then the BBC coverage of the same story. I don’t want to pick on journalists, because advertisers are certainly worse. Even in a sermon, we all need to recognize that as we listen we are responsible to test what we hear.
But how do we “test” a spirit? I know how to test a battery – I get out my handy-dandy voltage meter and presto! I know how to test an adjustment on my table saw or router – I run a scrap board through and see if it is right. I know how to test an idea – I gather people around who understand the situation and ask “what do you think about…?” But how do we test a spirit?
How To Test: vs 2-3
“2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”
As plain as it sounds, this is actually a little tricky. First let’s agree what John is not saying – he is not saying we need to actually have a conversation with a bunch of supernatural “spirits” and ask them what they think about Jesus… John is talking about us testing the things that other people say (which is obvious from vs 1’s inclusion of “false prophets”) by looking beneath the words to see whether the spirit behind them is the “Spirit of truth (or) the spirit of falsehood” (vs 6). John does also not mean that simply speaking the words “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” automatically means we accept whatever comes next. “acknowledging” means in word, life, character, and obedience.
So if it is not those things, what is the test? I want to talk about that for a moment, and then show you how it works. The test, according to John, is “acknowledging that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” The test is Jesus.
Indulge me for a brief moment in some “doctrine”, so that we can make some sense out of this – and I hope you will see how relevant this doctrine is for our lives. What do we believe about Jesus? That is the heart of John’s test, and I might add is the critical question in evangelism in our context. Who is Jesus? Just an historical figure, a good man, a moral teacher? Doesn’t pass John’s test “Christ (or Messiah) come in the flesh”. Was Jesus just an ordinary man like the rest of us who was filled with the Spirit of God (probably at his baptism), and so “became” the “Christ”, and then had the Spirit leave him prior to his death on the cross? Again, doesn’t measure up to John’s test of “acknowledging that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh”, which recognizes that Jesus existed with God prior to being born into humanity. Do you begin to see how important it is that we really know what we believe about Jesus, and that we affirm that Jesus is fully God and fully man? For John, that is the measure by which we “test the spirits”.
How It Works:
Let me give you two examples of how that works. I use the internet quite a bit for sermon research, because I consistently find a great deal of helpful insight and information. But I am also keenly aware of John’s instruction whenever I am doing that, because I know how much false teaching is out there. I am grateful for my formal education, which did a really good job of teaching me how to recognize when things are off. Especially there, “test the spirits”.
The second example moves our discussion from testing to see the orthodoxy of teaching, into discerning what God might be saying in a particular situation today. In John’s context, it is pretty obvious that people in the church were making statements through “prophetic gifts” or likely even through speaking in tongues. If those ideas are new to some of you, I’ll over-simplify them by saying that they are two ways that people relate a message they believe is from God, “prophecy” being in the language we recognize and understand, and tongues being in a language we do not know.
Now, assuming we believe God still speaks to us today, which I hope we would agree on, and assuming next that we don’t want to restrict the ways in which God can speak today by believing that He might only speak through a sermon or while reading your Bible, and further assuming that we believe 1 Corinthians 14 which says we need these kinds of messages in order to be encouraged and directed as the church, we come to a potential problem. When someone relays a message, how do we know if it is from God or not? Again, we test it.
The first test is, “does it come from someone whose heart (or spirit, if we keep John’s language), we know?” If Norma Whittle, whom I have known for 20years, tells me that she thinks God might be saying something, I’m going to listen because I know her heart – I know her spirit acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh and that she seeks to live her life out of that reality. So I trust her. If I’m at the Banff Pastors conference this week and someone I’ve never met comes and says the same thing, I’m going to be a little more wary but still open. And if a perfect stranger in the ATM lineup says, “Hi, God wants you to know…” I’m going to be even more wary – not dismissive, but cautious.
The second test is, “does this message agree with our only objective standard, the Bible.” If that ATM stranger says, “Hi, God wants you to divorce your wife so that you have more time to serve Him” I’m going to toss that message in the garbage.
The third test is, “does this message agree with the things God has been speaking to you about already?” I believe that God will have prepared us for a message, or He will have heard our request for guidance or encouragement, or He will have seen the things we are struggling with, and so I believe that most often the messages we get that are truly from God will agree with the things God has already been saying.
The fourth test is, “what does my community think about this message?” Here we use one another to help discern. This is what John means in vs 6: “We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.” The important part is the pronouns – “we, us.” We discern (or recognize) the truth in community.
A little while ago, someone in our community confronted me with an error in our worship services. We were inviting people to share words that they believed were from God, which was good and right and Scriptural, but we weren’t testing them. Perhaps some of you noticed that we stopped doing that, because I recognized that we were missing that “testing” piece, and I realized how dangerous that could be. Just imagine the potential harm of someone wrongfully saying “I believe God wants you to stop taking your medication so that He can heal you.” So I stopped it, until we could figure out how to test the spirits like John instructs us. Now, with this morning’s teaching, it is time to start it again.
The Rules:
We have a standing policy as a church that if you think God might be saying something to the church or to another individual, you need to submit to the leaders. Any word of correction or rebuke must be delivered first to a pastor or elder before being taken directly to the person, and someone is always available in the back prayer corner to do that. We’ll apply that fourth test before passing the word along. Words of encouragement, or of praise to God don’t need to be tested by a pastor or elder first, those we will test in community.
So here is how that looks: say you have been reading your Bible one week, or you are participating in a worship service, and you feel like there is something that God wants you to share with the rest of us. If it is a word of correction or rebuke, deliver that to a pastor or elder and we’ll help decide what God wants to do with it. If it is a word of encouragement, stand up and say “I think” (or I feel or some other caveat that makes it clear that you aren’t claiming unequivocal divine inspiration), and then share the message. Then the rest of us will test it together – we will ask each other if that message is from God. I think we will practice that in communion this morning.
The Closing Thought:
Testing the spirits is John’s main thought, but there is one gem in verse 4 that I want to close with: “4You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” That is the simple reminder I want to leave you with this week. We have nothing to fear, God is greater and stronger and better than everything destructive we will face, and He is in us.
