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It continues to be an honor and privilege to serve this church through the presentation of the Word of God.
I must say that I am highly encouraged by the vitality I am seeing around the church.
We are gearing up on efforts to advance our missional and evangelical efforts in the church and that is always excited.
I am thankful for each and every one of you and hope that all of us are eagerly willing and ready to serve the Lord in this next season of our ministry at Durbin Memorial Baptist Church.
May everything we do be centered on giving God the glory and professing Jesus as Savior and Lord.
Today we are going to continue on in our look at the book of 1 John.
I shared with you last week a quote from Pastor Warren Weirsbe that equated the book of 1 John to a spiral staircase that wraps around the ideas of obedience, love, and truth.
John uses all three of those concepts to give the reader assurance of their personal salvation while at the same time, he is equipping the reader to be able to discern false teachers.
I’l remind you that you have been tasked with evaluating your self and the voices that you listen to for teaching.
It is not your job to evaluate every person you know’s spiritual position.
They must work that at themselves.
Rather you are to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling at seek to honor God by listening to or being influenced by voices that share the goal of honoring God.
In a recent sermon I shared the phrase, “All that glisters or glitters is not gold.”
Before we get in our text today, I want to return to this idea.
I once bought a pair of sunglasses that I really liked.
I bought them off a friend who got them from somewhere online.
These were designer sunglasses.
One of the big names, you know like oakley or ray ban or one of those.
My friend had an extra pair and so they asked me if I wanted to buy them.
Now these glasses would normally go for upwards of $200 but these were going to be less than $50.
I jumped on the deal.
It was too good to pass up!
So I got the glasses and I took them home and I started to inspect them.
I really liked them and couldn’t believe that I got them for such a low price.
I wanted to make sure that they were properly cared for, so I went to the manufacturers website and found the pair that I had received.
As I was looking at the website, I started to notice some differences between the image on the screen and the glasses that I had in my hand.
Very minor differences, but differences nonetheless.
I was alarmed so I started up looking up the identifiers of fake sunglasses.
And wouldn’t you know it, but the glasses in my hand were not authentic at all.
Now, in the case of sunglasses this wasn’t a big deal.
The glasses I received from my well meaning friend worked well for my needs and were still worth the discounted amount that I had paid.
When it comes to receiving fake sunglasses the worst that can happen is potentially overpaying for an inferior product.
That wasn’t really the case in my situation.
But I use that story to illustrate how easy it is to bring in something that is fake.
I didn’t know.
My friend didn’t know.
It wasn’t until I looked to the authentic source that I was made aware of the truth.
Once again, that’s no big deal when it comes to sunglasses.
But when it comes to our theology, our eternal position and destiny authentic, true belief is not only a big deal, it is the biggest deal!
Jesus says in
Matthew 7:22–23 (ESV)
On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ (LORD DIDN’T I HAVE IT RIGHT?
DIDN’T I DO THE THINGS I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO? DIDN’T MY GOOD WORKS MUSTER ENOUGH RIGHTEOUSNESS?)
And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Counterfeit faith will never be sufficient.
But as we have seen throughout our look at 1 John, there is much of it going around and it is easy to be deceived.
But even still, every person will face judgement one day.
So then, we must not be deceived.
We must take effort right here right now to know what is true.
But when I say we, I am talking about each every one of us individually.
When your time of judgment comes, you will be answering for yourself.
Weirsbe shared a story about George Whitefield.
George Whitefield, the great British evangelist, was speaking to a man about his soul.
He asked the man, “Sir, what do you believe?”
“I believe what my church believes,” the man replied respectfully.
“And what does your church believe?”
“The same thing I believe.”
“And what do both of you believe?” the preacher inquired again.
“We both believe the same thing!” was the only reply he could get.
A man is not saved by assenting to a church creed.
He is saved by trusting Jesus Christ and bearing witness to his faith (Rom.
10:9–10).
We are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
That is the message that you must know to the core of your being.
We must watch out for those who would distract from that message.
Open up your bibles to 1 John 4.
All of what we have been talking about thus far sets the stage for the purpose of this message.
Today we will be looking at verse 1-6 and I have entitled this message, “Check Your Sources”.
What I love about this section of Scripture is that it is actionable.
By that I mean that it does not just tell us what to do, but gives us the blueprint to do it.
I’ve heard many sermons and probably given many as well that tell you what the problem is, but do not give you the plan for how to actually address the problem.
That won’t be the case today.
John gives us the clear criterion for checking our spiritual sources.
Read with me verse 1
In this first verse John relays both the problem that we have and the response that we need to address it.
He says that many false prophets have gone out into the world.
We will expound on the nature of these voices and what they are saying a bit later on, but for now all we have to know is that false prophets exists.
This means that there are false messages circulating in the world.
So then, because it is a reality that nor every message is true, we have to test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
We can’t just believe everything that we hear.
Allow me to share some of the context of what they were dealing with when John wrote this letter and then we will look at our context today.
At the time of writing this letter, the New Testament had not been collected in the systematic way that we have in our Bibles.
The church service would be less formal than ours today.
So it wouldn’t be uncommon for a visitor to stand and claim to speak by the Spirit of God and the members of the church wouldn’t have all of the full collection of Scripture that we would to point out the errors.
So in what we will soon see, John gives a very binary test to distinguish between true and false.
We must also note that as one pastor wrote, (Daniel Akin) “behind every prophet, every proclamation, there is an energizing spirit.
Their message will inform us as to the origin and source of their message.
They are not all from God.”
So John tells his readers and us today to test the Spirits.
He says do not believe every spirit.
Some suggest that the greek used here could be rendered “STOP BELIEVING” every spirit.
The truth is that there are many voices vying for attention, but most of them are not worthy of your belief.
Back then, and still today we have to stop believing everything we hear and test it.
This means that just because you found a book at a Christian Book Store that does not mean it is true.
Just because there is pastor on television, that does not mean they are preaching truth.
In fact as we will see later, that should maybe even give you pause.
Just because someone claims the name of Christ does not make them a good voice to listen to!
There are many disguised as an angel of light or servants of righteousness that are being used by Satan to spread confusion and condemnation.
And so we must be on alert.
We must be Bereans, and I’m not talking about that city south of Richmond.
In the Bereans we get a glimpse of how we should test the spirits as John says.
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