1 John 4:1-6
Preached 5/26/2024 [Previous Sermon]
INTRODUCTION
We have been going through the apostle John’s first epistle for a few years now and have reached the fourth of its five chapters. Remember that the apostle John is often called “the apostle of love” because of his frequent referral to Jesus’ command to “love one another”. But love is not the only theme that fills his writings. As we will see today, two more subjects are stressed by him over and over. One theme is “truth” and the other is the reality of Who Jesus Is. Actually these are really the same point, because the truth that John emphasizes is the truth of who Jesus is. How does he describe Jesus?
In the gospel he introduces Jesus as the Word who was eternally with God and is God. He says that this Word was light, and that this Word “became flesh and dwelt among us”. In his gospel Jesus says “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (14:6) and He tells Philip that “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). He then bodily dies on a cross, rises bodily from the dead (by his own power), and bodily ascends back to heaven. When John sees Jesus revealed in his glorified state, he says that Jesus is the first and the last, and the living one… who died, and is alive forevermore.
So…
while it is definitely appropriate to call John the apostle of love, we
can also call him the apostle of truth. And the burden of his heart is
that we would know the real Jesus that he knew and be saved. John purpose
statement for his gospel was “so that you may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”
(20:31). And his first letter starts by saying that what he is talking about is
absolutely real, and that he is an eyewitness of real events with a real
person. Over and over he stresses that the apostles saw, heard, and were able
to touch the Person they were proclaiming salvation through.
John, as the last living apostle and therefore the last living witness chosen by Jesus to preach and shepherd this good news – this gospel – was preaching the same message that the apostle Peter preached in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost – the very first sermon in the history of the church, where Peter boldly stated “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12)
How
did the world react to this light, this gospel, this good news? As Jesus told
Nicodemus (in John’s gospel): “… this is the judgment: the light has come into
the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their
works were evil.” (John 3:19). And from the first day that the gospel was
preached, false prophets and false teachers arose in opposition to it. Therefore
we should not be surprised, but rather be prepared. We should be ready to do as Peter admonished:
“Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the
Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you
for a reason for the hope that is in you…” (1 Peter 3:14b-15a)
I Our Commission From God (4:1):
This brings us to our text. We are all aware of what is called “the Great Commission”, right? Jesus’ command was to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19) But there are many other commands given by Jesus, including to love one another. Here in this letter, John gives us another life-long commission:
1 John 4:1 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.
The church was around 50 years old by the time of this letter, and John warned his readers that they must be careful to discern between the true gospel and false ones, and this commission is just as important now as it was then. What is John telling us here? The commission is to be discerning in the area of truth. John’s loving motivation shows in his continued use of “beloved” (agapētoi). Like a loving parent warning their child about touching a hot stove, John warns his spiritual children about the dangers of false teachers. Let’s look closer at this verse.
The first fact that we draw from this is that there is such a thing as truth, and because of this, there are things that are true and there are things that are untrue. Amazingly we have reached a point where there are many people who now disagree with this.
Secondly, John does not say that there are different truths for different people. They must test that the prophets are “from God”. He is therefore talking about God’s truth. God is omniscient – He knows everything. God is holy and good. We read “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Num 23:19), or as Paul wrote to Titus: “in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began” (Tit 1:2). Our assurance of heaven rests on the honesty of God.
Thirdly, we see that the battle between truth and lies is a spiritual one. Two ideas come from this truth. On one hand, we are told throughout scripture that the source of false doctrine often involves spiritual forces. The apostle Paul gives two very explicit warnings about this:
1
Timothy 4:1 But
the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the
faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons,
Colossians 2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
On the other hand, the source of our victory is also spiritual, and is a feature of our salvation. This victory comes from not just any spirit, but from the Holy Spirit Himself. And John has actually introduced us to Him by name, for the very first time in the letter, in the immediately preceding verse:
1 John 3:24b And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.
The Holy Spirit speaks to the hearts of all people who will listen, but He comes to live within believers when they come to Christ. Paul wrote about this often:
Ephesians
1:13-14 In him you also,
when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in
him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our
inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
1
Corinthians 6:19-20a Or
do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom
you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
1 Corinthians 12:13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
Jesus Himself promised this gift to his disciples the night before He was crucified: (John 14:26) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (16: 13a-15a) “ “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”
So we see that there is such a thing as truth, there is only one truth - God’s truth, and the battle between truth and lies is a spiritual battle. There are spirits of error and there is a Spirit of Truth. Why do we need the Holy Spirit to discern truth from error? Again I think the apostle Paul explained it the best:
1 Corinthians 2:12-16 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
If this sounds familiar, look back at I John chapter two. Remember the warnings about the antichrist who is coming and the many antichrists “among us”? John told us two things about those people. First he said that they seemed to be Christians but they left the body. But secondly, they espoused spiritual error, specifically denying doctrines about who Jesus is. How did the believers continue to hold to the truth about Christ? Look at verse twenty: “But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.” So John actually introduced us to the Holy Spirit in chapter two, though not by name. And the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the mind and heart of a true believer in Christ is powerful!
1 Jo 2:27 But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie--just as it has taught you, abide in him.
So our commission is made clearer by both John and Paul’s teaching here. We are to discern true teaching and preaching from the false. The anointing from God draws us toward the correct answers. But there is an external standard to judge by. And that standard is truth revealed in God’s word, which is in the open for everybody to see. It doesn’t require a secret code to decrypt. The gospel is freely given to all. The Spirit just fixes our broken hearts and minds and inclines us to love that which is true and hate that which detracts from the glory of Jesus Christ. He gives us a spiritual mind that loves and appreciates the truth.
So our standard for evaluating truth is not secret. It is objective and clear. Almost always it comes down to a simple question – a question that Jesus asked the apostles during his earthly ministry. He asked them “who do you say that I am?” And when Peter gave the correct answer, Jesus didn’t praise him for his great insight or intellect, rather He said: “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal [this] to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17) And the question for all of us is the same. Jesus asks you “who do you think that I am?”
II Our Confession Before Men (4:2-3):
In
the Old Testament there are also strong warnings against heeding false
prophets. In Deuteronomy there are two
main tests given for evaluating prophets in the nation of
In the same way, we are to correct false teaching, or, if the false teacher will not accept the truth, they must not be allowed to teach in the church. In his second epistle, John tells Christians not to let false teachers into their houses. Note that this does not mean that we should be rude or fear letting a member of another religion to visit us at home! Remember that the church met in people’s homes during the first century and letting a teacher of error come into your home meant to give them a platform in your local church to teach, which would be promoting error.
How do you know a false teacher? Test their doctrine. And because the gospel is about Jesus, his person and nature are the number one point of attack by false teachers. John lays out a test in the next two verses:
1 John 4:2-3 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 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.
The question is: Who does the prophet (teacher or preacher) say that Jesus is? Remember that in chapter two the test was whether the person taught that Jesus was the Christ (or Messiah). If you look at cults today, you will see that their line of attack will almost always be to change Jesus to be more acceptable to the world. But, you may ask, who is Jesus, then? The verse above had a lot in it. Consider how Calvin put it:
But let us consider what this confession includes; for when the Apostle says that Christ came, we hence conclude that he was before with the Father; by which his eternal divinity is proved. By saying that he came in the flesh, he means that by putting on flesh, he became a real man, of the same nature with us, that he might become our brother, except that he was free from every sin and corruption. And lastly, by saying that he came, the cause of his coming must be noticed, for he was not sent by the Father for nothing. Hence on this depend the office and merits of Christ. [1]
Mostly today false cults deny the deity of Christ. They might say “yeah, he was a great moral teacher, but he certainly wasn’t God!” Consider that one of the major cults in our day declares that Jesus is the brother of Lucifer, and the son of someone who was just a man himself until he ascended to godhood and was given his own world by a council of gods (or some such story). Another cult teaches that Jesus is a created being separate from God, who was originally Michael the archangel. They even made their own translation of the bible to change the verse in which John says “and the Word was God” to instead say “and the word was a god” (with a little “g”). Other errors creeping into churches today deny that Jesus was without sin, or they say that the death He died was not a substitutionary atonement for our sins – which directly denies verses of 1 John 2 which say that Jesus was the propitiation for our sins and also the beautiful description in Isaiah 53 that talks about Him being bruised “for our transgressions” and by whose stripes “we were healed”.
The cause for most of these distortions is that the world has its own philosophies and when people hear the gospel, the first thing that they try to do is to fit it into their old world view. This will never work, as Paul told us in Corinthians 2. In the Old Testament, God said through Isaiah:
Isaiah 55:8-9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
How do we stick to the truth? We “confess”. What does that mean? Remember that word from chapter one where John talked about confessing our sins? The Greek word there, and here, is homologeō, which means “to say the same as”. When we speak truth it is by “saying the same thing about something that God has said about it”. That includes what scripture says about Jesus. We are not to mix the truth of scripture with the world’s philosophy to make it more palatable and ourselves more popular. We are to confess what God has said. What was the problem in the first century among those to whom John was writing?
In the early years of Christianity there was a collision between Greek philosophy and Christianity. The Greeks believed that the spiritual part of man was totally unspoiled and good but that the physical nature was completely corrupt and unredeemable. So the people raised in Greek influenced culture had a problem. They just could not accept the idea that Christ was an actual person. If the physical was evil, Jesus could not become a physical man and be a savior. Also, the physical resurrection of the body of Jesus was completely unacceptable and absurd to them, if they looked at the gospel through the lens of their existing religion.
So when they heard the gospel, they accepted parts of it, specifically denying the incarnation. Instead, they floated the idea that Jesus was just a regular guy until at his baptism the spirit of Christ came and rested on him during his public ministry. Then that spirit left him at his crucifixion. This is the error that John mentions in verse two: “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God”. There were other similar Gnostic heresies during this time that plagued the spread of the gospel.
But the gospel (and John) are clear. “And the word became flesh”. The old Adam brought in sin, Jesus became like us so that, as a sinless example of humanity He could take the punishment for our sin. As Paul put it: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) So if you take away the humanity of Christ, you take away his identification with us and thus the atonement for our sins that we need. In Hebrews we read:
Hebrews 2:17-18 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
In
the same way, our salvation is impossible if Jesus was not divine, because a
mere man would need eternity to pay for the sins of one other person, let alone
the millions who have trusted in Him for salvation. If He sinned, He would not
fit God’s own standard of the sacrificial lamb being without blemish or spot.
He would have had to die for his own sins. Every corruption of the question
“Who do you say that I am” destroys the good news of the gospel and renders it
useless, with nothing to place our faith in.
III The Confirmation of our Salvation (4:4-6):
So how does this commission fit into John’s overall purpose for this letter? Remember that John wrote this letter to those who believe in Jesus, so that they might have confidence in their salvation. We see the answer to that in the three verses that follow:
1 John 4:4-6 4 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. 5 They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 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.
As can be seen, just as in chapter two, the thing that true believers do is to abide in Christ. They stay. “You have an anointing”, wrote John, and God “abides in us through the Spirit that He has given us”. Jesus said of his sheep “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” (John 10:27-28) Those who know Jesus, and are chosen and saved by Him, who have been indwelt and sealed by the Spirit of God, will not leave Him. As Paul promised: “… I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil 1:6) As a believer, I will be kept in Him for eternity.
Of course I am not excused from working through this process. Paul told the Romans to “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2) It is sometimes a long process to let the Spirit give us the mind of Christ. We are all somewhere along the path. Even Paul said “I have not attained it yet” (Phil 3) and expressed frustration at what seemed to him to be too slow of a change (Romans 7), but he said “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” And he added: “Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” (Phil 3:13b-15) This makes me want to press on like Paul. And the closer I get to Him the more his word will be my delight and change the direction of my thinking to be like his.
So where is the victory? It is in the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Because He is greater than any spirit in this world, a true believer will not be shaken in the end. Jesus predicted rough times in the last days. He said
Matthew 24:24 For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
That
sounds bad, but notice the little words “if possible”. They contain a great
sense of confidence for us. Jesus says, these false prophets will try
and try to lead his chosen sheep away from Him, but it will not be
possible. If you are saved, greater is He who is in you than he who is in the
world. We have a
Conclusion
Was John’s confidence that God would keep his spiritual children safe from the spirit of error justified? Look at how his next two letters begin:
2
John 1: 4 I
rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we
were commanded by the Father.
3 John 1:3-4 3 For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in the truth. 4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.
There is a battle, but the outcome is sure for all believers. What is the current conflict? The battle for truth!
It is time to get with God’s battle plan because there are spiritual forces arrayed against us. Paul wrote:
2 Corinthians 10:3-5 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
So,
Test the spirits.
Study to show yourself an approved workman.
Let your mind be transformed by the word.
Don’t quench the Spirit by whom you are being
sanctified.
Trust the One who is in you and the world will
never confuse you.
Thank God for his wonderful salvation!
[1] Calvin’s Complete Commentary, John Calvin, pg 15638 (1 John 4:2)
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