Spirit of Truth

Newspaper ad read like this: Have you ever wanted more out of your life? We can help. Discover powerful and easy secrets that have proven, have been proven and are guaranteed to give you the results that you want. No matter who you are, you too can profit from knowing these safe, trusted, and easy to understand principles for personal growth and achievement.

Stop missing out on the life that you could be living. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. This ad was an actual advertisement in a newspaper for a church about the message that it offered, the service that it provided to the community. Powerful and easy secrets guaranteed to give you the result that you want for personal growth and achievement, whereby you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. When I read this, I wonder what they make of Jesus saying, deny yourself daily.

Take up the cross. Take up the cross and follow me for your personal growth and achievement. I want to ask you friends this morning: why are you in this church? Why are you in this church? I'd like to believe that it's not because you were born from a certain heritage, not because you were attracted by a slick looking website, or because a pastor visited you after the service or had coffee with you.

I'd like to believe that you are in this church because it teaches the word of God rightly and because it preaches the gospel of Christ and Him only. I'd like to believe that you're in this church because it humbly handles and wrestles with the full counsel of God's word, striving, even though imperfectly, to equip the saints for acts of service. Why are you in this church? Let's open to 1 John 4 as we've been doing the last few weeks, and we're going to read the next section in his letter, the apostle John's letter to the church. 1 John 4:1-6.

This is what the apostle John writes to the church: "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. This is how you recognise the spirit of God. Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but 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.

You, 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. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world and the world listens to them. 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 recognise the spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood." So far, our reading.

We're going to work through this passage and we're going to see three themes on this topic of discernment, this topic of testing the spirits that John has so much to say about. The first point that we see is that discernment is an essential part of the Christian life. It is not something that some people will have and some people don't. Discernment, evaluation, testing, studying, evaluating is an essential part of the Christian life.

There's a popular trend that you either are spiritual in our world or unspiritual. If you are unspiritual, you may call yourself an agnostic or an atheist or even secular, but to be spiritual has now become a broad designation for anyone that has some religious or some metaphysical understanding of existence. You hear people saying, "I definitely believe something is out there," or "I believe I have something divine in me." To be spiritual is considered in our postmodern world a little bit better than being non-spiritual. But that is not how the Bible shows reality.

John tells us in verse 1, "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God." We know that the apostle Paul says something very similar in 1 Thessalonians 5. He says, after saying that Christians should not despise prophetic utterances, he adds, "But examine everything. Examine everything carefully, holding fast to that which is good." In other words, true faith, friend, true spirituality is not a blind leap into the dark.

It is not holding on to something because it is spiritual and because we think there is something greater than us out there. True faith, according to the Bible, is grounded in rock solid truth. And so faith, our faith, examines. It tests. It evaluates.

It scrutinises its object carefully before putting trust in it. That's why John Stott observes in his commentary on 1 John that Paul and John assumed, as the Reformers later insisted again, that even the humblest Christian possesses the right of private judgment, and both can and should apply the objective test John is about to give in the next verse. You see, the abuses of the church in the fifteen hundreds was that no Christian could understand rightly the Bible. That is why the Bible was kept in Latin.

The educated could read it. The educated could understand it there. The educated could explain the truth held within it. But the Reformation saw the Bible translated into the common tongue. It established Bible colleges, wrote down catechisms, which taught biblical theology and encouraged, I don't think we understand this as well.

It encouraged families to read the Bible together. It said, "Dads, you are spiritual heads. Read the Bible with your kids. Grandfathers, read it with your families." Many false spiritualities exist, friends.

There are many false prophets even today. But in the context of John, they were so easy to trust because it seems that they were a part of the church. Have a look at verse 1. "They have gone out into the world," meaning that they were probably with us at one point. They have gone out into the world.

Why are you a part of this church? How highly do you view theology? How highly do you view biblical study? Do you, as is the common trend these days, say something like, "I don't need Jesus. I mean, I don't need theology.

All I need is Jesus. I don't need to believe in creeds or doctrines. I just need to read the Bible"? Be careful. That is a very simplistic understanding.

And though it sounds very humble, there's a sinister motivation, I think, behind it. Think through what that statement is saying, because simply believing in Jesus is not enough. You need to do more than simply believe in Jesus. You need to believe something about Jesus. Just believing the Bible means you have to come to a systematic understanding of exactly what the entire Bible is saying about various topics. And so in essence, you will create a theology by simply reading the Bible.

By simply believing in Jesus, you will put things together. You have to. That's how we are wired as human beings, to formulate an understanding of Jesus, His mission, what His death meant, what His resurrection meant. You will have to do it because you are human and that is how you are wired. But John reminds us that we need to have discernment, not simply because we are wired and we will make sense of things regardless, but because there is an enemy who is alive and well promoting error at every opportunity.

And so discernment, friend, is not an option. It is an essential part of your Christian life. Then we come to the next point, which is the basis for this discernment, and that we find in verses 2 and 3. Discernment is based on an understanding of who God is, summed up in Jesus Christ. It is a theology of the person and the work of Jesus.

The reality is that a false teacher can be very gentle and very loving. Some of the most infamous cult leaders, if you were to go and watch some documentaries on it, and it is fascinating, were some of the most charming, influential people that you could find. They were not the mean spirited guys that were later found out to have been. A false prophet may speak prophecies that come true, the Bible says. Jesus said that they may perform miracles or cast out demons in Matthew 7.

But the question is, does he lead? Does she lead to a false god? And John lays down this rule to discern, to evaluate the end result of this teaching. Every spirit, he says in verse 2, that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

To acknowledge that Jesus has come in the flesh means that we agree with the statement that Jesus has come as a human, but it is much more than that as well. Because even the demons in the gospel accounts could say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Mark 1, Mark 3, Mark 5:7. Instead, to acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is to confess this truth that He has come as God incarnate and that we must submit our lives to Him. It will mean that you make Him Lord, as Romans 10 says.

Jesus' test requires believing in the true identity of Jesus. You must confess that He has come in the flesh, and this immediately makes a judgment call on the mission and the purpose of Jesus. It immediately makes a judgment call on His divinity and His humanity. When John says He has come, He has come in the flesh, it assumes His preexistence. It assumes that He is the Word that was with God in the beginning.

And as John begins to unfurl that, he says in verse 2 that Jesus has also come in the flesh, referring not to His deity alone, but His true humanity. And this is very poignant in this context because John is speaking to a crowd that were marked by a heresy that was starting to bubble, whereby people were saying that Jesus didn't really come in physical human nature or human flesh because in their philosophy the human flesh was evil. Everything physical is evil. And so Jesus, the Son of God, surely couldn't come in flesh. He was sinless.

So what we saw of Jesus is a spirit. He looked like he was physical, to touch, and he looked like he ate things, and it looked like he physically died on a cross, but that is spiritual. That is an apparition. But John refutes these sorts of heresies by saying that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, who was supernaturally born by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, that He had a human body and yet was free from sin because He was God. To deny that Jesus came in the flesh, that He was God incarnate, is to forfeit your salvation.

And this is the subtle and dangerous thing about this. You may wonder why it matters to believe that Jesus was physically human. To deny either Jesus' deity or His humanity would completely destroy what He had done on the cross, however. In other words, if Jesus were not God, He would have been a sinner that died on a cross and punished by God for His own sin if He was simply a man. He couldn't have given the perfect once and for all atoning sacrifice for anything beyond His own sins.

If He were not a man, however, He could not have absorbed the sin of humanity. He could not have assumed that upon Himself and died as a human representative. And so not believing in the incarnation means the cross would be utterly worthless. And so you can see why spiritual discernment, why spiritual evaluation is an essential part of the Christian life. Because saying something like, "Does it really matter whether we believe that Jesus came in the flesh or not?" "Whether we can really grasp or at least believe this difficult to understand concept that God, perfect God, could become man?"

"Does it really matter if we believe that hard concept?" But there are so many subsequent implications from that. And the difference comes down to, John says, whether a person with a false religion is going to hell or whether a true believer in Christ is having and will have eternal life. And it boils down to theology. The really scary thing is that whether you call them cultists or false believers or simply people that are lost, individuals like this are often more zealous and more knowledgeable about what they believe than we are. And that may sound very convincing, as John's church discovered about these people that left them.

But John says on the point of who Jesus was, on the point of what Jesus did, these people will stumble. They cannot accept it. They cannot hear it. In some way, they will not be able to confirm and confess and acknowledge Jesus' deity as well as His humanity, which leads ultimately to His salvation on the cross. Somehow, they will have a slight variance on this truth.

But thirdly, how do we recognise this discernment, this truth in ourselves? How do we know that we are following in the right path? How do we know that we are going to the right church? How do we identify true discernment? And I realise I'm speaking to people here that come from different churches, may go to different churches, that you may not stay in this church, but listen to this.

Discernment is evidenced in response to the apostolic witness we find in the New Testament. The truth of Christianity is one that has taken place in time and space, witnessed by flesh and bone people, shared time and time again. Truth tested and evaluated over and over again. It is something witnessed by many, many people at some point in our history. The ones that God entrusted with witnessing this truth are called the apostles, who were the original disciples of Jesus Himself. They are the ones that wrote the New Testament.

They are the ones who wrote down the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life in the Gospels. And the apostle John is saying here, if you hold on to their teaching, you will be protected and also you will discern the other disciples of these apostles. Let's have a look at how this plays out. Verses 4 to 6, the last half of our passage, begins with three emphatic pronouns. Verse 4: "You."

That's right up in the Greek, right up first. You, dear children. Secondly, in verse 5, they. And verse 6, we. You, they, we.

Now three quick points about how we as Christians discern the truth from these three verses. Firstly, in verse 4, that the Holy Spirit will help protect you against false teaching. Without the new birth brought about in your conversion, repentance, and faith, what we call regeneration, without that new birth through the Holy Spirit, a person is incapable of understanding or obeying God's truth. God, Jesus, said to the unbelieving Jews in John 8, "Why do you not understand what I'm saying?

It is because you cannot hear my word." Christians will know the truth because the Holy Spirit has enabled them to understand. Verse 4 says, "You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, these false teachers, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world." By overcoming these false teachers, John means that his readers have resisted believing false teaching. The reason that they have overcome is not only that they are from God, that they have been born of God, but in fact that this God now is in them. That He will lead and guide and shape and even redeem bad positions, weak theologies.

Even though these teachers have been intellectually superior to John's children, which is probably the case, they were probably more intelligent and better read and more philosophical than these little children that John addresses, it is the presence of the powerful indwelling Spirit that gives these readers the ability to discern what the truth is. And so you have, because of the Spirit in you, more power than a Bible college student who has studied the Greek and the Hebrew. Because of the Spirit in you, you understand truth that some theological professors do not grasp. And Bob, who's been at Bible college, knows this.

We read fascinating insights in books this thick by nonbelievers, and you have more knowledge and insight than they do because of the Spirit living in you. The second part, verse 5, says that those who teach error and those who follow their teaching are from the world. They are not from God. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world and the world listens to them. And there's an important aspect that we should see here as well.

We've seen in chapter 2, verse 15, that the world is that evil system under Satan's dominion. It is not the neutral world. It is the world in opposition to God and His kingdom, and this world is a system built around the principle of taking glory from God and transferring it to a proud, self-willed man. That was Satan's original temptation in the garden. Satan challenged God's word and said to Eve that if she ate the forbidden fruit that she would become like God, that she would know the difference between good and evil.

And we find this pattern even before we became Christians happening over and over and over again. Any teaching that detracts from God's glory and His sovereignty and exalts man by feeding his pride is satanic at the core. Verse 5 may imply that these false teachers were drawing a big crowd. They probably had the majority on their side. The world was listening to them.

The world. How big is the world? When you tell the world what it wants to hear, you will not lack an audience. When a false teacher denies the unpopular notion that all have sinned, and when they deny that all are worthy of God's love, he tells people that God is wonderful and exists to help them to fulfil their desires. That teacher will gain a following.

But the problem is that the message is not from God. That message is not from God. The practical application for us is this: don't judge the truth and the success of a ministry by its size. Don't judge the success of a statement by how many people like it on Facebook or how many people repeat it or say it. I've said this before in a sermon, but that statement, "Come on, it's the twenty-first century.

Surely, we've moved past that," is a lie from the pits of hell. Why would we believe that because history is moving forward that somehow it makes us wiser? That somehow because we are in the twenty-first century, we are morally better than the twentieth century? To judge truth, we need to judge it by the truth giver and what He has to say on it. And we believe that is the incarnate God who's come in grace and truth.

Verse 6: the standard by which to measure discernment is based on a person's response to the apostolic witness of the Bible. Some understand the we of verse 6 to refer to all believers that John is speaking to, that we have the power to have people listen to us, but most scholars believe that this stands in contrast to verse 5, the they of the false teachers. And so John is not talking merely about every Christian. He's actually talking about himself and the apostles. We who have seen Jesus Christ, who have been taught by Jesus Christ and therefore are teaching you now, we have a message that you need to hear.

And so what he says is that the people of God will listen to the apostles, which means that they will listen with understanding and obedience. They will accept as truth the witness of Jesus Christ as God in human flesh. And as we have seen, the one who is not of God does not hear this word. They reject this message. Again, John Stott in his commentary points out that John's claim, "Whoever knows God listens to us."

This would be the height of arrogance if he was speaking as an individual, but the apostles were trusted with the special authority to lay the foundations of the church. They died for this truth, laying the foundation of the church through their witness, through their writings, through their teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ. And we have this teaching preserved for us in the New Testament. And so the standard by which anyone should be discerned and judged, including our own spiritual discernment, is, "What is this person's response to the teaching about Jesus Christ found in the apostles' writings?" Without that standard, every person can become their own measurement of truth.

They can be filled with all sorts of criteria along their narrow thinking, filling with vain motivation what they think the message and the truth of life is, and it is not in submission to Christ as Lord. So friends, please believe me when I say that it is important. It is eternally important what you believe about the message of Jesus Christ, the truth contained in His word, and whether or not you obey that and believe that. I encourage you to seek it, to pray for it, and when you find it, to uphold it and defend it. Discernment is an essential part. It is not a side show.

It is an essential part for your life as a Christian. The discernment of truth must be calibrated when you consider the work in the person of Jesus and when you hold the witnesses of Jesus in high esteem. Please pray. Please seek the Holy Spirit's guidance. Please open your hearts and your minds to the guiding of the Spirit, correcting your understanding.

And fathers, read your Bible to your kids. But then also trust, as dearly loved children, that the one who is inside of you is greater than the one that is without you, the one that is in this world. One of the more memorable stories of the Old Testament that really is dramatic and sticks in my mind is the story of the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 6, where Israel is being attacked by the Assyrian king and Elisha finds himself in a city that's being besieged by thousands of men, thousands of horses and chariots. They're all along the ridge line on the mountain ready to attack. And Elisha's servant sees this and he runs to Elisha in a panic and he says, "What can we do?

We're done for." Elisha's answer is famous. "Don't be afraid. There are more with us than there are with them." What does he mean by this?

Elisha prays that God opens the eyes of the young man, and He does so, and the boy sees the reality. The mountain is full of horses and chariots in heavenly light and fire. It's God's army. And as if the veil to the supernatural world is lifted just for a second, God's power is seen for a moment, and the servant's perspective is changed forever. Needless to say, the battle is a shocking defeat for the Syrian empire.

"The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world." Have that perspective. Pursue the truth. And come to the God who will guide you in that truth. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, help us to be unbelievers in error, but believers in truth. Father, we are prone, we are so tempted in our society we find ourself in with a new philosophy that truth is relative and far too personal to be questioned. Father, help us to know the parameters, the discernment that we need. Father, Your truth is so precious to us. It is our ultimate comfort and peace.

Lord, when it is understood and when it is accepted and when it is in our bones, it provides so much joy and freedom. Oh God, how often we give that up? How often we chase after lies? Father, I pray for these dear children of Yours that You will guide them into all truth. That we as a church will love Your word and so humbly and earnestly desire to follow it.

Father, we thank You that You have given us truth, that You have not left us to our own devices, that there is a hope. And based on our failing perceptions, we would be so lost. Thank You that You open our eyes, that You lift the scales, that You peel back the veil, that You set us free. Help us to defend and protect. And then, Father, also guard our hearts against pride and harshness and self-righteousness.

Guard our hearts against that, oh God, showing to us that we only understand by Your grace. Help us walk that line. Keep us close to You, oh Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.