Believe the Whole Truth

I have been thinking about my father a lot lately. No particular reason that I’m aware of — it’s just that sometimes he is on my mind more than others, and for the past few days, he has been on my mind a lot.

One thing about Dad was that kids loved him. And that’s pretty funny, when you consider that much of his interaction with children consisted of him teasing them in various ways.

One of Dad’s favorite questions for children was this: “How’s your copperostice?”

Who here knows what a copperostice is? Yeah. Me neither. It was just a word that Dad had made up to confuse and befuddle youngsters.

“How’s your copperostice?” And then, when they inevitably asked him what that was, he’d respond, “You don’t know what a copperostice is?! You’d better go and find out, because you need to be sure it’s in good condition.”

After one of my cousins had reached the age where Dad figured that such games were probably too childish for him, he asked his parents one day if Uncle Roy was mad at him. “Of course not,” they said. “Why would you think that?” “Well, he never asks me about my copperostice anymore.”

Since I was blessed to share a home with this man, I was the test subject for much of his teasing.

And I remember one incident very clearly: We were in the car, on our way to visit Washington, D.C., for a long weekend, and I was standing in the floorboard between the back seat and the front, leaning over (remember, this was before child safety seats) and peppering my parents with questions about this place we were going and all that we would see and do while we were there.

“Where are we going to stay?” I asked. “At Howard Johnson’s,” Dad replied.

“Howard Johnson? Who is he?” “He’s a friend of ours. You haven’t met him.”

As most of you have probably figured out, Howard Johnson may well have been a man, but we were not staying at his house. We stayed at the hotel named after him.

My father had not exactly lied to me. He just hadn’t told me the whole truth. And because I didn’t have the whole truth, I formed a set of beliefs there in that car that turned out to be wildly off base when we arrived at our destination in Washington, D.C.

Today, as we look at belief as a test of the depth and quality of a Christian’s fellowship with God, we’re going to examine the content of our belief in Jesus Christ — WHAT we believe, as opposed to THAT we believe.

And we will see that we can judge the doctrinal quality of what we hear people teach about Jesus not just by the things they say about Him, but also by the things they leave out.

Go ahead and turn to 1 John, chapter 4. While you are doing so, let me remind you what we’ve covered so far in this message from the Apostle John to the churches of Asia Minor.

You may recall that this book unfolds itself in three cycles and that each cycle touches on each of three different tests of fellowship with God — righteousness, love, and belief.

The idea is that a Christian’s fellowship with God — his walk in the light of Christ and with the Holy Spirit — can be gauged by how perfectly he demonstrates God’s righteousness, by how faithfully he loves his brothers and sisters in Christ, and by how rightly He believes in the name of Jesus.

Having talked about righteousness and love the past two weeks, we will conclude the second of the three cycles this week by taking another look at belief.

Let’s pick up our reading in the last verse of chapter 3, and we’ll read today through verse 6 of chapter 4.

1 John 3:24–4:6 NASB95

The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. Beloved, 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. 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, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

Now, verse 24 of chapter 3 serves as a hinge between the last section on love and this section on belief. And one of the keys to understanding what’s going on in the first part of chapter 4 is what John says in the second half of verse 24:

“We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.”

Each of us who has, by God’s grace, put our faith in Jesus Christ as the only one who could bring reconciliation between the perfectly holy God and sinful mankind has been given the Holy Spirit, in part, as a sort of down payment on God’s promise that we will have eternal life in heaven with Him and with His Son.

The Spirit also regenerates believers — He makes us into new creatures. He is our counselor and comforter. He convicts us of sin and commends us to righteousness. And He teaches us as we study God’s word.

He is, as John puts it in this passage, the Spirit of Truth, because He is one of the three Persons of the trinitarian God who cannot lie. He is the Spirit of Truth, because He is the Spirit of Christ, who proclaimed, “I am the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life.”

Now, if we, as Christians have the Spirit of Truth dwelling within us, then we should be PEOPLE of truth. If Jesus abides within us through the Holy Spirit, then His truth should influence everything about our lives.

Surely, that means that we should not lie. But it also means that we should not live as hypocrites — as people who proclaim the righteousness of God and yet turn our hearts toward worldly things — the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life that John talked about earlier in his message.

It means that we should not live as hypocrites by proclaiming the God who IS love and then failing to love one another sacrificially, as Jesus loves us. It means that we should have a special affinity for truth and a great aversion to that which is not truth.

Here, in these first six verses of chapter 4, we see the Apostle John reminding us that there are many who speak in God’s name who do NOT hold such an affinity for truth.

They come from the world, and they speak as from the world — their message is one that tickles the ears and says things the world wants to hear, and so the world listens to them.

Whatever false prophets John had in mind when he wrote this message, we know that this problem is alive and well in the world today.

We know it as the prosperity gospel — that God wants you to have your best life now, that God wants you to be wealthy and prosperous in this life. We know it as the name-it-and-claim-it gospel.

We know these false teachers as universalists, proclaiming that salvation is not just available to all, but that it will be experienced by all. We know them as purveyors of the self-help gospel, giving us lots of good advice about living but very little good news about eternal life.

We know them as preachers of a therapeutic gospel, one that says Jesus came to make us special, that Jesus came to meet our needs, not that Jesus came to save our souls.

We know false prophets who proclaim an American gospel — one that mixes a little Jesus with a lot of Uncle Sam, one that uses faith in Christ as a bludgeon to promote American exceptionalism instead of a springboard to sacrificially serving others.

We know false prophets who teach a social-justice gospel whose sole purpose is to feed the poor, help the sick, end racism and stand up for those who have been marginalized — all of which are good things that Christians should participate in doing, but none of which are the point of the true gospel.

And each of these false gospels sounds good to our ears. Each of them is appealing in some way. That’s why the world listens to them.

But how can we discern that they are false? John says here that we should test the spirits. We should examine what these folks say about Jesus, along with what they do NOT say about Him.

“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.”

To confess something is to admit that it’s true. If I confess that I have been snacking on bacon at midnight when I’m supposed to be on a diet, then I’m admitting something that’s true.

So what is it that John says teachers who are from God will confess? “That Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.”

Now, there’s a lot of theology packed into those eight words, and I want to spend most of the rest of this message unpacking it, because WHAT we believe is even more important than THAT we believe.

If you spend your whole life believing the wrong things about Jesus, then you could spend eternity in Hell, rather than in Heaven.

So, first of all, take a look at how John refers to the Son of God. He is called Jesus Christ. Now, we sometimes have a tendency to think of this as Jesus’ whole name, but it’s really a name and a title.

Let’s look at the name first: Jesus. Yeshua in the Hebrew. It means Yahweh our Savior, and it reminds us that salvation is from the Lord.

Each one of us is a sinner. We were made in the image of God — made to display His righteousness — but each one of us has failed in that account. Each one of us has fallen short of the glory of God.

Instead of displaying God’s kingdom as we were created to do, each of us has rebelled against Him; each of us has sinned against Him in ways great and small.

And because of that rebellion, each one of us was condemned to suffer the just penalty for our rebellion. Each one of us has earned the appropriate wage from the master we chose to serve, and the wages of sin is death.

Before a perfectly holy and righteous God, there is no good deed — no mountain of good deeds — that could cover up even one of our sins.

And so we were lost. But Jesus. But Yeshua. But God is our Savior.

Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of God, who said of Himself, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father,” is everything that God is. As the second Person of the Trinity, He is equal to God. In the words of an ancient Christian confession, He is very God of very God.

Jesus is our Savior.

And that brings us to the title here in verse 2: Christ. Christos in the Greek translates the Hebrew word “mashiyach,” which we know as “Messiah.” It means “anointed one.”

In the Old Testament, it could be applied to anyone who was set apart for any special function, such as priests. But it came to be used more particularly for kings, and especially for kings from the line of David, whom God had promised would be the ancestor of a King who would rule Israel forever.

So, when we see biblical writers referring to Jesus as “Christ,” what we should understand is that they mean He is the One God anointed to be king, and not just of Israel, but of all the world — King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the one to whom the Father promised in Psalm 2 to “give the nations as Your inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as Your possession.”

And it was for this reason that the psalmist warned:

Psalm 2:10–12 NASB95

Now therefore, O kings, show discernment; Take warning, O judges of the earth. Worship the Lord with reverence And rejoice with trembling. Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

So what we can glean from simply seeing this name, Jesus, and this title, Christ, together is that the God who is our Savior came in the Person of His Son, whom He has anointed to be King of kings and Lord of lords and to whom He has given the authority of life and death for mankind.

But that’s only half the story about who Jesus is. We see the other half in John’s statement that Jesus Christ “has come in the flesh.”

He who is very God of very God is now also a man with a human body. He was born of a virgin, conceived by the Holy Spirit, and though He is equal to the Father in all respects, He emptied Himself of His divine form and glory and, while retaining His divine nature, took on the additional nature of a human, excepting sin, with both natures existing unmixed and unconfused.

This is important, because it was only as a man — and a man who lived without sin — that Jesus could represent mankind on the cross, taking on the just, divine punishment for our sins and dying so that those who believe in Him would live eternally.

The innocent died for the guilty. God Himself, through His Son, Jesus, is both justified and justifier for those who will follow Jesus in faith that His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection are their only means of reconciliation with Him.

God is our Savior through Jesus, the anointed King of kings and Lord of lords, who lived as a man and then gave His life so that man could live.

But there is a condition. And what is that condition? We see it in verse 2. The condition is that we must confess these things about Jesus. We must admit that they are true.

The Apostle Paul wrote in the Book of Romans:

Romans 10:9 NASB95

that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;

We know that universalism is a false gospel, because we know that not all will confess these things.

We know that some choose to reject Jesus Christ as their Lord and that some choose to reject the historical fact of His resurrection. We know that some choose to reject His deity and that some choose to reject His humanity.

That breaks my heart, and it breaks God’s heart, too. In fact, it is because God wants all to be saved from the just punishment for their sins that He has delayed the return of Jesus and the beginning of His judgment of all the earth.

The Apostle Peter put it this way:

2 Peter 3:9 NASB95

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.

What you believe about Jesus matters. Sure, you can believe that He was a historical figure in Israel. Sure, you can believe that He was a great moral teacher.

But believing those things alone will not bring you eternal life. If you believe only those things about Jesus, then you are in no better a position than the religious leaders of Jerusalem who demanded that He be crucified.

They were prepared to admit that He was a great teacher. But they did not want to believe that He was very God of very God. They did not want to believe that God had come in the flesh of a man. They did not want to believe that their own good works were not sufficient to earn them a place in heaven.

If you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ as your sole means of salvation — your only way to be reconciled with God — then this passage from the Book of 1 John can serve two purposes for you.

It can be a test of those who speak in the name of God, a test of those who preach and teach.

Whether you see them in person, or on television, or hear them on the radio, what do they say about Jesus? Do they teach His moral lessons and leave out the sticky parts about sin and repentance and redemption? If so, then they’re simply speaking as from the world.

But this passage can also be a test of your fellowship with God. Do you believe the things that are inherent in John’s words in verse 2? Has your belief been manifested in righteousness and love? If so, then you are walking in the light.

If not, then you need to reassess where you stand with God. You are either walking in darkness, because you have turned away from the light of Christ, or you are still in darkness, because you have never turned toward His light.

God is patient toward you, but the time for your repentance could end at any moment.

The opportunity for you to turn to Jesus Christ in faith could be gone the moment that semi hits you head-on or the moment you heart seizes in your chest or the moment when Jesus returns to take home all who have believed in Him.

Are you waiting for the right time?

2 Corinthians 6:2 NLT

For God says, “At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you.” Indeed, the “right time” is now. Today is the day of salvation.

John wrote this passage to a group of people he knew to be followers of Christ. He wrote it so they would know how to discern between false teachers and true teachers — between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

But I want to encourage you today not just to test the spirits of those teachers but also to test your own spirits.

Do you believe? Do you know WHAT you believe? Do you believe the right things about Jesus?

We all face any number of tests throughout our lives, and the truth is that failing any one of them will probably not ruin your life.

But failing THIS test — failing this test of belief — can ruin your eternity. You need to believe the whole truth to pass this test.

Who is Jesus to you? Will you let him be you Savior and Lord? God is patient, but your time is running out.