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Thoughts of a saint and slave
by Sam Isaacson
This week’s passage is enormously important for us to understand so let’s jump straight in.
‘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. 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, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. 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. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. 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.’ (1 John 4:1-6)
Common sense
John begins with this warning to Christians: ‘do not believe every spirit’. It’s a fair warning, but one which simply asks for us to use our brains. We shouldn’t just believe everything that everyone says, but we should weigh everything carefully. Let’s take an example. I’m just at home watching the God channel and the guy who’s preaching quotes from the Bible and gives an application. Should I believe him? For that matter, should you believe me as I’m writing this? I think that John’s answer is no – he wants us to use our minds! John says, ‘test the spirits’ in the same way that Paul says ‘test everything’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
John simply tells us that there are false teachers, and that we should be wary of them. It doesn’t matter whether you like what someone’s saying or not, you should weigh it up and see what the appropriate response would be. Of course, the big question here is around how we know when something should be listened to or not.
How to discern
Well, John’s answer seems to be that the preacher who says it’s all about Jesus is from God, but the one who focuses on something different isn’t. This is fair enough, but what about those preachers who preach about good stuff like Bible study or social action? I think that John is clear here. It’s all about Jesus. A preacher may preach well about the spiritual disciplines, but if it’s not all about Jesus there won’t be the mention of grace so it will quickly turn into legalism. A preacher may preach about morality and social action but without Jesus there won’t be the mention of our eternal destiny so it will quickly turn into a false gospel in which God’s wrath is entirely overlooked or ignored. A preacher may preach an inspiring sermon about faith but if it’s not all about Jesus the faith will be misplaced, and it will quickly turn into either a false gospel of works or the prosperity gospel.
So – should you trust every preacher you hear? No. How do you tell? Ask yourself whether it was all about Jesus, and respond accordingly by submitting and fixing your eyes upon Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, or by disregarding the message as a false gospel.
What about the listeners?
John applies this passage to a wider set of people than simply preachers, but encapsulates those who follow the preachers too. We are no different to the early church in that we can have two preachers who each calls himself a Christian and the other a heretic, and people follow one, the other, or both! We must apply John’s message here to more than just preachers, we should apply it to the simple Christians we hang around with every day. So when you’re having a conversation with someone in your home group who says they’ve just read an incredible book which explains that Jesus was actually a Muslim we should not take that on board!
John explains what the simple test is: ‘Whoever knows God listens to us’. By ‘us’ John means the apostles, many of whom were involved in writing the New Testament. So John’s test for whether or not we should take the recommendations of our friends and family is: do they read the Bible and put it into action? If you’re chatting to someone who says that actually the Bible’s ‘just another interesting book’, don’t listen to them. On the other hand, you probably ought to listen to the person who’s reading and memorising the Bible every day.
That’s a message for us as well. Quite simply, the better we know our Bible, the better we’ll be able to discern whether a spirit is of truth or of error. Now, I reckon you can memorise an average of at least one verse every working day so let’s set that as our target. With less than 8,000 verses in the New Testament, that means we should have memorised the whole thing in around 2040. That seems like quite a while away but most of that will be revision – bear in mind one of the verses is ‘Jesus wept’ we already have a head start. And the overwhelming benefit of having the entire New Testament memorised is surely worth that long-term commitment. Are you with me?
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