Dateline: Clive Baptist Church
Subject:
Text: I John 4:1-6-
July 13, 2014
shape the agenda for congregational conversation and action
SPIRITUAL FORENSICS
3:23 ‘believe’ 4:1 ‘do not believe’ believe JC/not every spirit.
My title…
FORENSIC: refers to anything pertaining to, connected with, or
used in courts of law or public discussion and debate.
John engages in debate, in these verses. Like a good attorney, John
is appointed to represent the interests of the true faith & authentic
Christian belief.
In doing so he confronts the reality that there are many
misrepresentations of the true faith.
In a world of contrasts John says:
4:1-6: test the spirits to know if they are of God/world. :1
The test is that they confess Jesus Christ/ do NOT. :2, 3
Means, You are of God/they are of the world. :4, 5
This is how you know the spirit of truth/of error. :6
I.
DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU HEAR
:1
God has given us his spirit, 3:24c but there are other spirits in the
world. Don’t believe them all.
Every prophet is the mouthpiece of some spirit. John declares them
the spirit of truth, or the spirit of error. So behind every prophet is a
spirit and behind every spirit is God or the devil.
**Don’t believe everything you hear.**
The essence of wisdom, an educated mind & maturity is a healthy
dose of skepticism.
Proverbs 2:11 Discretion will preserve you: Understanding will keep
you, to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks
perverse things.
13:15 The simple believes everything, but
the prudent gives thought to his steps.
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‘Skepticism’ is the idea of one who reflects upon or considers.
Rodin’s famous statue of The Thinker could apply.
The polar opposite of skepticism is gullible. Ie) don’t believe every
forwarded email you get that is inflammatory. Sometimes they are
correct, but often they are false.
Skepticism can be taken in the extreme, to the point where it is not
possible to then believe anything - becoming a philosophical skeptic,
an atheist or agnostic.
Skeptical attitude or emotional bias is more toxic than impartial
healthy skepticism. The one is predisposed to reject, the other is open
to examine.
‘Believe not’ is a construction that forbids an activity already going
on. “Stop believing every spirit.”
Christians’ are sometimes too trusting. They just want everyone to
be happy. Too often they are just plain intellectually lazy; couldn’t be
bothered, because thinking demands time and concentration.
True Christianity has always demanded serious thinkers. John is
writing to establish the true church, and he says don’t believe
everything you hear.
John makes this caution because there are lots of religious
crackpots out to promote their own agenda and lead undiscerning
people astray; “many false prophets.”
Don’t believe them because they come to you in sheep’s clothing;
they may be wolves.
Don’t believe them if they are flamboyant or charismatic
personalities; in fact, be more cautious if they do. Successful hucksters
always have magnetic personalities.
Don’t believe them if they come to you will miracles and signs.
These alone prove nothing. Moses, was not the only one to perform
miracles. Immediately following Moses’ sign of turning the Nile waters
to blood, Ex 7:22 says, “the magicians of Egypt did the same with their
enchantments; and Pharaoh’s heart grew hard.” Who was he supposed to
believe?
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Ex 8:7 Moses brought up frogs that covered the land; “the magicians
did the same with their enchantments and brought up frogs on the land.”
They duplicated Moses at every step.
Enchantments, cast a spell that take you captive.
Finally, after the third plague 8:18 the magicians could not replicate
what Moses did.
This is the greatest demonstration of signs and wonders in the OT
and for quite a while you couldn’t tell, by the miracles, who was who.
Deut 13:1-5 Moses gives direction…
In the NT Simon the sorcerer amazed people and had a following.
In Revelation many false signs and wonders come from the evil
beast. Beware of them that claim authenticity based on signs.
When someone puts on an amazing display, beware, it might not
represent who you think it does.
Satan cloaks himself in garments of light.
There are many who loudly proclaim that they speak the truth to
you, they have a word from the lord for you.
Don’t believe everything you hear.
So how are you to test the spirit actuating a teacher?
II.
THE LITMUS TEST
:2, 3
Litmus: A blue coloring matter obtained from certain lichens. In
alkaline solution litmus turns blue, in acid solution, red: widely used as
a chemical indicator.
Origin: 1495–1505; < Old Norse litmosi dye-moss, equivalent to
lit- color, dye + mosi moss
The spiritual litmus test reveals that the HS (blue), not the spirit of
error (red), is actuating the teacher/prophet.
John has provided moral tests, now he provides a doctrinal one.
This is the doctrine.
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“Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” This is the one unchangeable
tenet of Christianity. This is the core doctrine. This is the invigorating
belief; the essential confession.
I means … Jesus the man, is the Christ/anointed one. He came,
materially, really as a man, being God.
Wuest p160. “The God of the OT, in the person of His Son became
incarnate in human flesh without its sin, died on the Cross to satisfy the just
demands of His law which man broke, and raised Himself from the dead in the
body in which He died, to become the living Saviour.”
This is the one unreducible refrain of the true church.
J C is not just a great thinker, philosopher.
J C is not just a moralist and social revolutionary.
J C is not an early Robin Hood, legendary hero of folk lore.
J C is not the fabrication of disciples distraught at his death.
J C is not a man upon whom the HS descended for a while.
J C is not God raised only in a spiritual/mystical sense.
He is Jesus, Christ, the anointed one. God come in the flesh. Come
in complete humanness. Yet being fully God. Raised from death in the
body he died in. He continues to be fully God/fully human in ascension
to the Father.
You cannot fully explain this.
This is what Jesus claimed of himself.
The OT prophets all point to someone like this
This is where all the evidence points if you examine in w/o bias.
Many have set out to prove it wrong and ended up convinced.
This is the spirit of the doctrine.
Now think of spirit in the sense of attitude.
Spirits as beings have a spirit or attitude about them.
- The spirit of Christ has the attitude of Christ
- The against-Christ spirit does not have the attitude of Christ.
How does the prophet come across; loving or pandering, truthful or
manipulating, holy or self righteous….
Heavenly or worldly…
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III.
THE WORD OR THE WORLD
:4-6
World x6. In paragraph
There is a real contrast between those who believe in God and
those who believe in the world.
: 4 “you have overcome them.” Past tense, encouraging. Recall
2:14 They have overcome the delusion; overcome the pull; overcome
the pressure to conform to the world’s truth, world’s morals.
They overcome by practicing righteousness, being in the light, in
the way of truth.
Ultimately we do not overcome on our own. We participate in the
accomplished victory of Christ by faith. He has overcome the world.
He has defeated the evil one. He is the light, the truth, the way. As we
abide in him we belong to the fellowship of his victory.
John can say it past tense, overcome, because it is completed in
Christ’s work even though we are engaged in ongoing reverberations
of that battle. The battle has been decided, even if it is not yet quite
over. The decisive blow has been struck.
It takes courage and strength to swim upstream in the flow of the
world. It takes real work to paddle upstream instead of drifting down
stream in the flood and flotsam of the world.
Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world- so you have
overcome.
:5 world is a code word here. 3x /sentence.
Refers to the place of human life, and especially to the people who
are hostile to God.
Those who are false to God are from the world. Their principles,
zeal, values, goals and existence are rooted in and full of this world.
Notice John doesn’t give them a lot of press. He says nothing about
what they actually teach; only that they do. And so we should beware.
:6 John is reassuring. He knows God and his people are one.
‘We’ refers to the true teachers of the gospel - apostles.
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CONCLUSION
8x “by this we know”.
Because John wants to build our confidence. We can know what
we need to know. We should know.
We know:
-that we know him, -love, -we are of the truth, -He abides in us,
-:2 the spirit of God, -:6 the spirit of truth, -we abide in Him, -that we love the
children of God.
True faith is not blind, it knows the evidence.
True faith is prudent, a bit skeptical, so it tests the spirits, for
evidence.
The test is Doctrinal, and moral.
It is a test of authenticity, is this the apostolic doctrine?
The test applies first to the teachers; secondly to the listeners.
Jesus taught that the sheep would hear His voice, they would
follow him because they know his voice; they would not follow a
stranger, but flee from him.
If you don’t recognize the voice of Jesus in those who speak to you
in His name don’t follow them.
You teach your children not to talk to strangers and not to take
candy from them. Neither should you listen to the voice of strangers.
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“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with.
It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices.
It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true.
But our preferences do not determine what's true.”
― Carl Sagan
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