Easter 5A 1 John 4:1-11 “Testing the Spirits and The Vision of Ministry of OSLC”
5/10/2009 Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, Audubon, Iowa
In our Epistle reading for this morning, we hear St. John, the last living Apostle, tell the church of his day: “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.” (v.1) While he was speaking of his time, this statement is most certainly true in our 21st century church, nearly 2000 years after these words were written. Do these words still apply to us today? How do we go about testing the spirits to see if a particular church, or preacher, or ministry is truly of God? Can we be sure what we are doing as a congregation is of God, or of ourselves? And for our graduates, who we’re recognizing this morning, how can you, as you go out from this community and off to your separate ways after you graduate from high school in a week, be sure that whatever message you are hearing out there in the world, is truly from God? We’re going to find that St. John gives us the answer to those very questions, and how that answer is going to dictate what we proclaim as a congregation, and to whom we will listen when it comes to matters of faith and life.
In telling us to “test the spirits”, John gives us a clear way of testing the spirits to see if they were of God or of man: “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 the 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. 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.” (v.2-6)
Before we go any further, it’s helpful to understand what it means to “confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” To confess something is to state “This we believe”, that’s why each week when we recite the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed in worship, we are “confessing” our faith, that is, we are making a statement that this is what we believe about God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This past Wednesday, in reading their essays entitled “What it Means to Me to be a Christian”, our 8th grade Confirmation students confessed what they believe, as they have learned it from the Scriptures and summarized in the Small Catechism. As Christians, we base our faith on the Word of God, what it has to say about Jesus Christ. And through the Scriptures, we learn that we are sinful, and unable to pay the tremendous debt of our sins, and deserve only hell and punishment. But, we also know that Jesus Christ, the 2nd person of the Trinity, was born of Mary, suffered, died, and rose again to be our substitute for God’s Wrath, and now freely gives us the gifts of forgiveness, eternal life, and salvation through the Word of God purely taught and the Sacraments administered according to His Word. That was the message of the early Church, and it is to remain the message of the church today.
Often, there’s a sentiment in the church today that the early church had it all together, and never had to deal with heresy, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The church of John’s day that he writes to was already in the midst of a crisis. While it was still pretty early on in the history of the church, there were already false preachers that were popping up and proclaiming different messages. The particular heresy that John had to deal with at this point was a teaching called Gnosticism. Gnosticism essentially teaches that God can only be spirit because anything physical was evil. Thus, if everything physical, including the human body, is evil, then there’s no way that the Son of God could possibly have come in the flesh. Being holy, God wouldn’t dare come near the earth, but would stay as far away from it as possible. Thus, Jesus could only be spirit, not flesh, in other words, he wasn’t a man at all, only a spirit or ghost. Gnosticism is a very dangerous heresy, because if Jesus was only a spirit, then he wasn’t fully man, and he couldn’t fully offer up His body on the cross as a substitutive for you and me. That would mean that the price of salvation would not have been paid, and you have to try to pay it by your own works and labors, in other words, you better do a good enough job of saving yourself, or else judgment and hell await.
If Gnosticism wasn’t dangerous enough, the New Testament world was full of all kinds of pagan rituals. These groups would be more than happy to acknowledge that Jesus was a man, they might even go so far as to say that he was a nice guy who did some good things before he was unjustly crucified. But the idea that He was also God wouldn’t make any sense. The danger here is if Jesus was just another nice guy, who did some good things and died, then He didn’t die for you. Throughout history, lots of nice guys did lots of nice things and died, but if Jesus is just another one of those guys and nothing else, then the price for your salvation hasn’t been paid. That leaves it up to you to pay it yourself through your works and labors, or else hell and Judgment await.
So John encouraged His readers to test the spirits by the Word of God. What do the Scriptures say about Jesus? What do the law and the prophets say about Him? How was He the fulfillment of them? You’ll remember in our Gospel reading a couple of weeks back, after his death and resurrection, Jesus appeared to His disciples, the men who would be his messengers to the ends of the earth, and that Jesus said to them “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:44-47)
Thus, if any group was claiming any sort of knowledge about Jesus, but it didn’t agree with this message, then Christ’s followers were to recognize that spirit was not from God. The Gnostics were not of God because they did not proclaim that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the Scriptures, the promised Messiah, God in flesh to save us from sin, death, and the devil. The same for the pagan religions of John’s day. The Church of the first century had one message to proclaim, “repentance and forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ, crucified for the sins of the world.”
Today, there’s a lot of talk about God out there in the world. There’s a lot of talk about Jesus. You can turn on your television sets, walk into any number of churches, go into any bookstore, and see, hear, or read any number of different messages about God or about Jesus. And what’s more confusing is that they’ll say different things about Jesus, or about the Word of God. So whom do we believe? Who are we to pattern our lives around? Who are we to pattern our ministry as a congregation around?
Thanks be to God that we have a measure of these teachings. Are they proclaiming “repentance and forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ?” Or, are they proclaiming some other message? If they are proclaiming Jesus Christ, come into the flesh to save His people, if they are pointing out sins that we are to avoid, repent of, and receive forgiveness from, then that voice is from God. If it’s proclaiming a different Jesus, in any way, shape, or form, then we know it is not from God. It’s a lot easier said than done though? For you high school seniors, when you go off to college next fall, one of the things you’re going to have to decide on is where you will go to church, if you’re not sticking around Audubon and planning to keep coming here. It wasn’t too long ago that I was in your shoes, and in my college years, I had the chance to visit a lot of different churches. Some of them proclaimed “repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name”, others didn’t. Sometimes, the churches that didn’t proclaim the Jesus of the Scriptures were the popular churches for college students to go to. It would appear on the outside that I chose to attend the wrong churches. But what would it have done to my faith had I attended these popular churches that were teaching “The Bible said this, but it doesn’t mean that anymore. It’s up to you and your works to live a successful life, and if you do the right things, then God will bless you.” But when we test the spirits of such churches, we quickly realize that if they do not proclaim Jesus Christ, come into the flesh for the forgiveness of sins, they are in the words of our Epistle reading “are not from God.” Such teachings may sound good to the ears, but will be nothing but spiritual poison for your soul.
For all of us here this morning, this text gives us an opportunity to reflect on John’s words, and how they apply to us as a congregation in this community. In our modern age, with all sorts of media available, perhaps now more than ever, in books, on television, radio airwaves, and the internet, you can access all sorts of preachers who will tell you all sorts of things, and tell you that their way is the right way. There are some who will seem to have a greater following than others. Their messages may seem “relevant” and “practical”, and your typical parish pastor such as myself will often be asked “why can’t we do such things as such as so church or such and so Pastor? They’re growing, we’re holding our own. They must be doing something right.” Again, now more than ever, it’s important to test the spirits to see if they are from God.
But to do that, you have to know what the Word of God is saying. And that’s not always a given. Look at our First Reading in the Book of Acts for this morning for an example. Here, Phillip, one of the Apostles, is sent to an Ethiopian eunuch, who was a high ranking slave in the court of the Queen of Ethiopia. He’d come to Jerusalem to worship, and he has stopped along side of the road on the way home, and he’s reading a scroll from Isaiah. Phillip asks the guy if he knows what he’s reading, to which he responds, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8) He shares the passage that he’s having trouble with, and Phillip uses that opportunity to show him how this part of Isaiah was telling about Jesus Christ. In this case, Phillip’s message was of the Spirit of God. It told of Jesus Christ come into the flesh, and was revealed through the Scriptures. Now notice that when left to his own, the Ethiopian eunuch didn’t understand what the Scriptures were saying, he was trying to see it apart from Christ. It wasn’t until someone explained it to him, someone who had been sent from God himself and had himself been well schooled in the Word, that the Ethiopian eunuch understood and believed.
In a day and age where absolute truth is being defined as a thing of the past, we’re told this morning that God’s Word is absolute truth. What we believe, teach, and confess as a congregation MUST be in line with this book. And how will we understand what God’s Word says if we’re not taught? One of the biggest problems I have seen in the church at large has been a gradual erosion of Christian Education following 8th grade. I find it amusing that when students graduate from high school, they are encouraged to further their education. Yet, when it comes to education in God’s Word, we treat Sunday School as if once you have that 8th grade education, and you’re confirmed, you’ve “Graduated” from the Bible or from church entirely and you don’t need any further education in the Word of God. Such an attitude is often at the root of so many doctrinal problems that creep into the church. If we don’t stay in the Word, if we don’t learn what it says, if we don’t demand of our Pastors to teach us from it every opportunity we can, we’re going to be in the same situation as the Ethiopian eunuch, sitting there at the side of the road, unable to discern the Spirits of the age, because we never learned what God’s Word is saying to us. Or, use the analogy in the Gospel reading for today of Christ as the vine and us as the branches. In order for a branch to live and produce good fruit, it must remain firmly attached to that vine. As long as it stays attached to the vine, the branch will live. But, once you separate that branch from that vine, the fruit on it will eventually rot, it will cease to grow, and it will shrivel up and die, and all that’s left for it is to be disposed. Christ himself says it’s vitally important that we remain firmly connected to him, and we do that by staying in His Word, by coming to His House, where in this hour or so of worship, he serves us by coming to us through Word and Sacrament to forgive our sins and strengthen our faith.
Sometimes Pastors are asked if they have a vision for the future of the congregations they serve. I think I have been here long enough now to where I have begun to form a vision of the future for Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church. In many ways, the words of our Epistle reading describe that vision I have. If we are to be a branch of the one, holy, Christian and apostolic church as we confess in the creed, then we are to remain firmly connected to Christ. We are to test the spirits of those who wish to bring their teaching into our midst, and those who confess Jesus Christ as Savior, who proclaim a message of repentance and forgiveness of sins, are recognized as being from God, and those who do not, who lift up their own ideas, their own image, their own brand of spirituality, no matter how popular or relevant it may be, are to be recognized as not from God, and avoided. That’s the vision I have for the future of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, that we be a congregation that “tests the spirits of the age”, and remains faithful and connected to our Lord Jesus Christ and His Word in all that we say and do, and avoid anything that threatens to take us away from it.
The way we will do that is by staying in the Word of God, through worship on Sunday morning, where we will hear God’s Word preached in its purity and the Sacraments administered according to the command of Christ. We will do that by studying the Word of God together, from the youngest child, to the oldest adult. We will do that by sharing the love of Christ with others, through benevolence giving, and other ways we can find to meet some needs in this community, with the goal of explaining to others the reason we have such hope and joy. By sharing with them the good news that Jesus Christ has died for us and risen for us, and that our sins are forgiven. It also means we will warn those in our congregation, and our community, about those false spirits, those who claim to be from God, but are in reality, the “spirit of the antichrist”, which stands to destroy God’s church, even when it’s not the popular thing to do. Spirits who claim that it’s up to you to save yourself, that the Christian faith is about comfort and happiness in this life, with no mention of eternal life, that fail to warn you of the dangers of sin that lurk in the world today. We do this not to judge others, but out of a deep love and concern for them, to lead them to repentance and forgiveness that only Jesus Christ can provide. For the times where we as individuals and as a congregation have failed to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness in the name of Christ”, let us repent, and know that there is forgiveness in Christ, and let us move on to proclaiming that message to the world.
Just as Phillip was sent to the Eunuch, you are being sent today into this community, to be witnesses of Christ’s Word. For our graduates, you are being sent to be witnesses of Christ’s Word to the world in all that you do as you leave high school. As you do, be branches of Christ, firmly connected to Him through the truth of His Word. Keep attending worship here or in a church that is firmly rooted in the Word of God. When you have trouble figuring out if the spirits in that church you choose to attend are of God, don’t be afraid or embarrassed to call me and talk about it with me. Keep studying your Bible. I am encouraging you do to this so that when others bring you their teachings, teachings that do not confess Jesus Christ come into the flesh, you will be able to recognize them, warn against them, and remain firm in forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and salvation that only Jesus Christ can provide. May God grant that to us for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
