Christ-Centered Discernment | 1 John 4:1-6
Notes
Transcript
[Scripture Reading]
1 Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world. 2 This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God: If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. 3 But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here.
4 But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. 5 Those people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. 6 But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.
As many of y’all know I also have the privilege of serving as worship pastor of our church. And the other day the worship team was having practice after church working on some vocal parts and something was said that I felt really applied to our message tonight.
The phrase was, “The only thing worse than being wrong is being almost right.”
I know that might sound crazy, but before you completely write it off let me illustrate this for you.
(acoustic guitar illustration) 2 mins
In tune chord
Slightly out of tune chord
Very out of tune chord (if I said I thought that was right you’d correct me)
In the same way, if I came to you and said Jesus is a flying spaghetti monster, you’d look at me like I was crazy and tell me who Jesus actually was. But there are many people today who sound like they’re telling the truth about Jesus when they actually have it all wrong. And that’s what our passage today is all about.
1. The Warning (v. 1)
1. The Warning (v. 1)
1 Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world.
John starts here saying, “do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit,” and he even goes on to write, “for there are many false prophets in the world.”
John uses this word prophet here. I want us to take a minute and just define what a prophet is. A prophet is referring to someone who speaks on behalf of God. We see many people in the Bible referred to as a prophet. In fact, many books in the old testament are accounts of people who God spoke through to His people.
20 Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself.
So this office of prophet is important because the church is built on the office of prophet and apostle.
We see many prophets in the Bible telling the future, or foretelling. This foretelling was used in the old testament to prophecy of events that were coming, the Messiah (or Jesus), and the eventual end times or the end of the Earth as we know it.
We see prophets in the new testament as well; even after Jesus died and came back to life. As soon as Jesus died and rose from the grave, the complete Bible was not written and compiled together and it wouldn’t be until the century 300 AD. So God continued to speak through prophets to spread the gospel. Then God, through the church, established the cannon of the Bible around the 390s. Whenever the Bible was compiled together by the church, it was established as authoritative and the whole truth of scripture.
Because they had the Bible, there was now no need for God to speak through people to establish new truth. John even wrote at the end of Revelation:
18 And I solemnly declare to everyone who hears the words of prophecy written in this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book.
The cannon of scripture was closed. So the office of prophet was no longer needed.
160 The entirety of your word is truth,
each of your righteous judgments endures forever.
So if someone comes to you and claims they have new truth. Point them to the Bible and say this is the entirety of truth.
When John was writing this, there were many people in his day who were claiming to be a prophet who were actually leading people astray. People would take the truth of the gospel and distort it and the people didn’t have the Bible at the time to check what they were saying so they just believed them.
This is actually how Islam started. In the 600s, Muhammed claimed to be a prophet from God and brought a distorted version of the Bible into his culture. The Bible was already compiled by this time, but the culture he lived in didn’t have it translated in their language yet. So all these false claims by Muhammed could not be tested by the truth of the Bible in their language and were believed. This resulted in Islam where there are now 1.8 billion people who believe this false gospel.
So this is a big deal! What can seem like a small group of people believing in a false gospel can turn into something as big as Islam today.
So we know that John was writing to people who were faced with many false prophets in their culture. Because we have the Bible, this has a little bit of a different application to us today.
1 But there were also false prophets in Israel, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will cleverly teach destructive heresies and even deny the Master who bought them. In this way, they will bring sudden destruction on themselves.
Peter says there WERE false prophets in Israel just as there WILL BE false teachers among us.
Because we have scripture we know that someone claiming Jesus was a big green giant telling you to eat your vegetables is false. And we know the office of prophet is closed so anyone who claims to be a prophet nowadays is a false prophet because we have the whole truth in the Bible. Back then though, the office of prophet was still open so there was a great need to test to see if someone was a false prophet.
However, we do have many today who are taking the word of God and teaching heresy from it.
And if we want to walk in love like we have been talking about in 1 John, if we want to bring the truth of God to others, it is our responsibility to be able to discern who these false teachers are.
2. The Test (vv. 2-3)
2. The Test (vv. 2-3)
John provided a test for us to discern who is speaking a false gospel.
2 This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God: If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. 3 But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here.
Jesus is how we know truth. It is only through knowing Jesus that we can discern what is true and what isn’t true. And we are able to know who Jesus is through His Word.
Let’s go back to what we talked about with the acoustic guitar. If a guitar is slightly out of tune, how do you think the one playing is able to tell? They know how the guitar is supposed to sound in tune so they are able to tell even when it is slightly off. Then they can tune the guitar.
In the same way, it is only by knowing Christ through reading the Bible that we are able to discern what is and isn’t truth.
I know I’ve said that reading your Bible is important to y’all countless times, but that’s because of how important it is. It’s necessary if we are to know Christ more fully and not be led astray.
I’ve used that term “know Christ more fully” quite a few times in different sermons, and I want to explain what I mean by that.
When I was a younger Christian wanting to learn more about God, I remember thinking to myself all the time, “I know about what the gospel says, but I want to move on from that and learn more about the other stuff.” I wanted to move on from the gospel. And as I matured, I realized that was the wrong mindset to have.
It’s easy to sit through a sermon on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings and think, “Yea I know about the cross, I know about the Ressurection, let’s move on to something else,” but I’m telling you from experience, that’s not a healthy way to view Christianity.
You see we never move on from the gospel. We can’t just declare that we’ve heard about Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the grave and don’t need to hear about it anymore. We need to grow deeper in the gospel. The only way you grow in your relationship with God is through knowing Him more fully. And we do that through understanding the gospel more fully.
That raises another question: if all I need to grow in my relationship with God is to know the gospel more fully, then why would I need to read the old testament? Or anything other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for that matter.
So I want to ask you, why is it important to read the old testament?
The entirety of the Bible is one story. From start to finish the Bible tells the story of the Jesus. It’s a salvation story. We start in the old testament with a picture of what happens when fallen humans are left to their own devices without God. Destruction, murder, sacrifice of babies, terrible things. But then in the prophets in the old testament, we hear about this Messiah that is coming to save Israel.
The Messiah comes at the climax of the story, and we have four accounts of this Savior who is fully God and fully man; fully righteous, yet came to this Earth to die. He dies on a cross and rises from the grave 3 days later so that the penalty of our sin might be paid for and we might have a relationship with God that was severed by Adam in the Garden of Eden and continued through the heinous acts of humanity in the old testament.
Then we have the letters, including the one we’re reading now, where we dive into exactly who Jesus is, why He died for us, and how we are to respond to that. Then we have a picture of what the world will be like in the end when Jesus comes back to establish a new heaven and a new Earth in Revelation.
It’s all one story. And when you begin reading the Bible with that mindset, you pick up on things you didn’t originally see. You notice how the whole Bible points to those four accounts of the life of Jesus.
That’s what I mean when I say grow deeper in the gospel. Understand this Bible through the lens of it all being about Jesus. Read it. Study it. Know it. It’ll change your life.
3. The Victory (v. 4)
3. The Victory (v. 4)
4 But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world.
This is great news for us as believers. John writes here that because we belong to God; because we are His children, we have victory over false teachers. Because of the Spirit that lives within us.
So 100% the Bible is how you are able to discern truth from deceit. But it is only by the Spirit of God that you are able to know truth in the first place. It is by the Holy Spirit’s working in your life that you were able to understand the gospel and respond to it. And it is only by the continued work of the Holy Spirit in your heart that you are able to have a deeper understanding of the gospel.
The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the Son, Jesus lived on this Earth, He always pointed back to the Father. He always gave glory to the Father and pointed people to worship Him. And the Holy Spirit does the same thing in our hearts, except the Spirit points us to the Son.
So the Son points back to the Father, and the Spirit points back to the Son. And we see this explained in John 16. Jesus says this to the apostles:
13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future. 14 He will bring me glory by telling you whatever he receives from me. 15 All that belongs to the Father is mine; this is why I said, ‘The Spirit will tell you whatever he receives from me.’
The whole purpose of the Spirit is to make the Son known. So in your life, as the Spirit works in your heart, He will point you to Jesus. To understand more fully who He is.
So yes, it is a tough thing to discern truth from error. And it’s a big task. But we can trust that the Holy Spirit is at work in our hearts, pointing us to Jesus. And guess what? We know from John 1 that Jesus is the Word of God. And the Word became flesh,” referring to Jesus. So the Spirit is going to point us back to the Word of God.
Who are you listening to? (vv. 5-6)
Who are you listening to? (vv. 5-6)
5 Those people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. 6 But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.
False teachers speak from the world’s point of view. We speak from God’s point of view. That this is a world of lost people who need Jesus. And we will see the Holy Spirit work in the lives of others as we surrender to Him and let His will be done in our lives.
But it all goes back to who you are listening to. Are you listening to the world? Are you listening to false teachers? Or are you listening to God? Are you reading the Bible? Or are you casting it aside?
Who are you listening to?