Easter 6 (4)
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1 Dear friends, 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. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. 4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. 7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
How particular are you when purchasing a new item? Especially if it is expensive and you realize you will be using it for a long time? In fact, it may be the last item of that type you purchase for the rest of your life? (Hopefully it is not batteries that are guaranteed to stay fresh for ten years.)
I mean like furniture, a computer, maybe a new camera, and certainly a vehicle of some sort. Although most of you are committed to the home that you live in, my wife and I are facing the daunting prospect of having to decide on which house will be our first (and most likely last) house we ever buy.
Deciding what to purchase can be a difficult decision and warrants careful investigation and prayer.
How particular are you when it comes to how you will spend an hour or two watching something on TV? Even though most of us have access to more than the standard four channels we grew up with (CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS), it can take a long time to decide what to watch especially if more than one person is involved.
How do you decide what news source to listen to and whether or not that source is factual and reliable? Or do you really believe the joke that “If it is on the internet, it must be true.”?
Making the right decision on these matters can have consequences. Some are more critical than others.
In some cases, the consequences are minimal and have no long lasting results.
In other cases, it can be the decision of a lifetime and you will be pleased with or regret your decision the rest of your life.
In our text, the Apostle John commands his readers/listeners to be very careful and intentional when it comes to making a choice that can impact them for eternity. John had taken seriously the words Jesus had said to him the He alone is the way, the truth, and the life and that no one came to the Father except through him and the command to make disciples by baptizing and teaching everything Jesus had commanded. John believed that his eternal future depended on believing the promises of Jesus for eternal life and that a person could not be saved except through Him.
In the early Christian church, you would think that there was only one message that was being preached and taught in the name of Christ, but the fact is that not everyone who said, “Thus says the Lord”, was teaching what God had revealed.
Old Testament Warnings
1 If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, 2 and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” 3 you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. 4 It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.
7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” 8 Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. 9 They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the Lord.
Jesus’ Warnings.
4 Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.
Paul’s and Peter’s Warnings.
17 I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. 18 For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people.
1 But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. 3 In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.
Just as we are vulnerable (and even more so now with the media) to conflicting teachings, even the early Christians were vulnerable to 1)spirits not from God, 2) false prophets, 3) anti christs. These are all ways of saying the same thing. There are those who teach falsehood and pass it off as being the truth.
What could they do?
Censorship? It may come as a surprise to modern Americans who are against banning books that the early Christians did exactly that. (Example of book burning).
18 Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. 19 A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. 20 In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.
History of rejecting pseudepigrapha documents. (Documents written by false teachers but claimed to be by reputable apostles and other early Christians.)
Refuse to listen to them. “Keep away from them”
17 I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them.
Test the spirits.
1, 2 & 3 John (Distinguish Truth from False Teaching / 4:1–6)
Dear friends, 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. The test believers (John’s “dear friends”) are to use is given in 4:2–3. The responsibility for testing the spirits rests not merely on scholars or church leaders but on every Christian. “Do not believe every spirit” means that the believers should not believe everything they hear just because someone says it is a message from God. They should test the message to see if it is truly from the Lord. One way is to check to see if it matches God’s Word, the Bible. Other tests include the teachers’ commitment to the body of believers (2:19), their lifestyles (3:23–24), and the fruit of their ministries (4:6). The most important test of all, however, is what they believe about Christ (4:2). Do they teach that Jesus is fully God and fully man? The first-century world was filled with many false prophets who were claiming to speak for God. The believers needed to apply these tests in order to discern truth from error.
The term “false prophets” is another name for the many antichrists (see 2:18–19). Whereas a true prophet is one who receives direct revelation from God, a false prophet only claims to have received direct revelation from God, but has not. The test is similar to that administered to false prophets in Deuteronomy 13:1–5; 18:15–22.
Compare all teachings to the Word of God which we believe to be true. If there is a contradiction, the Word of God must stand. This is why when Luther’s Small Catechism has been expanded and augmented over the years, the editors have included many proof passages (many of which we were required to memorize). My own sermon writing style is to seek to support what I am saying with familiar passages to demonstrate that I am not teaching or preaching what is not in accordance with sound doctrine.
St. John may have very well be referring to a specific false teaching which was gaining headway in his day.
Gnosticism was the specific error John is referring to.
1, 2 & 3 John (Distinguish Truth from False Teaching / 4:1–6)
Most of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry had died by the time John composed this letter. Some of the second- or third-generation Christians had begun to have doubts about what they had been taught about Jesus. Some Christians with a Greek background were having a hard time believing that Jesus was human as well as divine because in Platonic thought the spirit was all-important. The body was only a prison from which one desired to escape. Heresies developed from a uniting of this kind of Platonic thought and Christianity.
A particularly widespread false teaching, later called Docetism (from the Greek word dokeo, meaning “to seem”), held that Jesus was actually a spirit who only appeared to have a body. Thus, he cast no shadow and left no footprints, for he was God and not man. Another heretical teaching, related to Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”), held that all physical matter was evil, the spirit was good, and only the intellectually enlightened could enjoy the benefits of religion. Both groups found it difficult to believe in a Savior who was fully human.
John answered these false teachers as an eyewitness to Jesus’ life on earth. He had seen Jesus, had spoken with him, and had touched him—John knew that Jesus was more than a mere spirit. In the very first sentence of this letter, John established that Jesus had been alive before the world began and also that he had lived as a man among men and women. In other words, Jesus was both divine and human.
Through the centuries, many heretics have denied that Jesus was both God and man. In John’s day, people had trouble believing Jesus was human; today more people have problems thinking he is God. But Jesus’ divine-human nature is the pivotal issue of Christianity. Before you accept what religious teachers say about any topic, listen carefully to what they believe about Jesus. To deny either his divinity or his humanity is to make him less than Christ, the Savior.
What are modern day errors? Instead of denying the humanity of Jesus, there are popular teachers who deny the deity and even the reality of Jesus and of the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Example for a professor from The Great Courses
When Bart Ehrman was a young Evangelical Christian, he wanted to know how God became a man, but now, as an agnostic and historian of early Christianity, he wants to know how a man became God.
When and why did Jesus' followers start saying "Jesus as God" and what did they mean by that? His new book is called How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.
"In this book I actually do not take a stand on either the question of whether Jesus was God, or whether he was actually raised from the dead," Ehrman tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I leave open both questions because those are theological questions based on religious beliefs and I'm writing the book as a historian."
St. John continues by emphasizing that the way to test whether or not a teaching is true goes beyond academic knowledge. He points to evidence in a person’s life that they believe in God and those who have come from God. 1 John 4:4–12 (NIV84)
4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
Those who are from God demonstrate it by their love for God and their love for one another.
He reminds them of God’s great love for us — shown by sending Jesus to save us from our sins by his death on the cross.
He encourages them to respond to God’s love for them by loving one another. John may have been recalling Jesus’ new command that he gave on Maundy Thursday.
In verse 12 John admits that you can’t prove God exists by claiming to have seen God — the Father. “No one has ever seen God.” And yet, God makes his existence known not only by the revelation of the Bible but by how his children live. “If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
Conclusion: We live in a world of choices. Recall the introduction to the sermon. I can be daunting to make the right choice. When it comes to our relationship with God, isn’t it reassuring to believe that God has chosen us to believe in him? May we always rely on his and his Word and live in love as he lives in us. Amen.