1 JOHN 4:1-6 - Eureka!

One of the most brilliant scientific minds of the Western world was a man named Archimedes a brilliant mathematician, astronomer, physicist and engineer who lived in Syracuse, Sicily about two hundred years before the birth of Christ. One day he was approached by the king of Syracuse who suspected that he had been cheated by a goldsmith he had commissioned to make a solid gold crown—the king suspected that the craftsman had alloyed the gold with another cheaper metal. Normally all you had to do was melt down the object to discover if there were other metals in it, but in this case the king insisted that the crown not be damaged or tampered with in any way.

The story goes that Archimedes was stumped by this demand, and so he went to the city bathhouse for a soak and a think. As he got into a very full tub of water, he noticed that it overflowed in exact proportion to the volume of his body—he realized that he could do the same with the crown to determine if it had a lower density than gold (which would prove the king had been cheated.) He was so excited about his discovery, according to legend, that he leapt out of the bath and ran naked down the streets of Syracuse to his house, shouting, “I have found it! I have found it!” (which, since he was speaking Greek at the time, was “Eureka! Eureka!”)

In our text this morning, the word John uses when he calls us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God”, is a word that is used elsewhere in ancient Greek to refer to “testing” the purity or value of metals—in much the same way that Archimedes had to “test” the purity of the gold in that crown, you are called to test the purity of the spiritual teaching and authority you find around you today—including the preacher you are listening to right now!

The spiritual leadership of Bethel Baptist Church is extremely jealous to guard the truth of the Gospel and the glory of God in this pulpit. As our vision statement reads in part, “By God’s grace we strive to be known for trustworthy Biblical teaching grounded in confident belief in God’s Word...” And every year the membership of BBC meets to affirm whether that is true of the pastoral ministry here.

We strive as a church to be like the church in Berea that Luke writes about in Acts 17:11—when Paul came and preached there, he writes that

Acts 17:11 (ESV)

Now these Jews [in Berea] were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

It’s important for a church to know how to evaluate the spirit of the teaching it is receiving. And there is another consideration too—I am perfectly well aware that I am not the only preacher you are listening to! I have no idea who you may be getting your Bible teaching from during the week; whether what you are hearing and absorbing all week from other authors or speakers or bloggers is trustworthy or not.

And frankly, I’m not interesting in policing your podcast feed to make sure you’re listening to “approved teachers”. What I would much rather do (and what I think God’s Word calls me to do) is to equip you to evaluate those teachers for yourself! I want you to rely on God’s Word—just like the Bereans did—so that you may

TEST that the TEACHING you receive is from a TRUSTWORTHY spirit

You need to be able to discern for yourself if the Bible teaching you’re hearing (whether from me or from another preacher or teacher) is pure gold or if it is mixed with alloys that are at best mistaken and inaccurate or at worst downright heretical and dangerous. And I believe that John gives us at least three questions to ask to help us discern whether we are listening to trustworthy spirits or not, whether we are listening to “false prophets” or not.

When we look at verses 2-3 of 1 John 4 we see the first test—the first thing to ask about a teacher you are listening to is

I. Who is JESUS to them? (1 John 4:2-3)

1 John 4:2–3 (ESV)

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.

John refers again to “the spirit of antichrist”, the spirit that rejects the truth that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully Man. And a few weeks ago we considered the necessity of resisting the spirit of antichrist by the Spirit of Christ and the Word of God. This is the first test, John says here, of whether the teacher you are listening to is from a “trustworthy spirit”:

Do they DENY Christ’s DEITY?

Of course, the big “E” on the eye chart, the easiest way to identify a false prophet is if they specifically deny that Jesus is God—groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who say that Jesus was a created being on the same level as Adam) or the Mormons (who deny the Trinity and say that Jesus is a physically distinct God—Jehovah—who is separate from God the Father—Elohim—and God the Holy Spirit) or Muslims (who claim that Jesus was the greatest of the Prophets but could not be divine since Allah cannot become human).

But there are other ways that false prophets deny the deity of Christ that are not so easy to spot right away. For instance, there is an ancient Christian heresy known as Sabellianism (AKA “modalism”) that says

MODALISM: God MANIFESTS Himself three WAYS but is not one God in three PERSONS

Sabellianism was first refuted by the early church father Tertullian in the 2nd Century, but it is still recognizable as a modern day heresy. Modalist preachers deny that there really is a “Son” at all, but God sometimes “acts” as a “Son”, sometimes as a “Father”, sometimes as a “Spirit”. This teaching undermines the Gospel and makes the Atonement powerless—and is the spirit of Antichrist because it denies that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully Man. He is only a man who “appeared” as the Son of God for 33 years on earth, but no longer exists as the Son.

In their doctrinal statements they will consciously avoid the affirmation that God exists as one God in three Persons, but will say something like “One God manifested as Father, Son and Holy Spirit” or “God revealed to us as Father, Son, Holy Spirit”. Examples of modalist denominations are the United Pentecostal or United Apostolic Church. T. D. Jakes is an example of a modalist preacher, and Christian music artists Philips, Craig and Dean all belong to churches that are specifically modalist in their doctrinal statements. (https://www.challies.com/articles/the-false-teachers-t-d-jakes/)

You can test the teaching you are receiving by asking “Who is Jesus to them?” They may outright deny Christ’s deity, but there is another way to determine how reliable they are:

Do they MINIMIZE Christ’s WORK?

If heretical teachings that deny the full deity of Christ are poison, there are other ways of teaching about Jesus that are more along the lines of junk food—teaching that is sugary-sweet and full of “empty calories”. If you’re listening to a teacher who never connects his or her teaching back to the blood of Jesus Christ—that never calls you to see how Jesus Christ suffered and died under the infinite wrath of God to shield you from the wickedness and horror of your sin, that never calls you to worship Jesus for the fact that He delivered you from the eternal Hell that you richly deserved, that only wants to feed you the tasty morsels of how special you are to God and how Jesus empowers you and tells you how nice you are—that teacher is revealing that they do not have a trustworthy spirit. As one commentator put it, “Tell me what you think about Jesus, and I will tell you 95 percent of the rest of your theology” (Akin, D. L., Platt, D., & Merida, T. (2014). Exalting Jesus in 1,2,3 John (Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary) [E-book]. Holman Reference.)

One example of a teacher who brazenly minimizes the work of Jesus Christ is Joel Osteen. He has famously said on multiple occasions that he “doesn’t want to talk about sin.” In an article in the Christian Post, he tells the author, “…Most people are beaten down enough by life. They already feel guilty enough. They're not doing what they should, raising their kids — we can all find reasons. So I want them to come to Lakewood or our meetings and be lifted up, to say, 'You know what? I may not be perfect, but I'm moving forward. I'm doing better.' And I think that motivates you to do better." https://www.christianpost.com/news/joel-osteen-truth-sin-repentance.html, Retrieved 02/23/2022

Beloved, test that the teaching that you are receiving is from a trustworthy spirit, that it is not the fool’s gold of minimizing the work of Christ or the corrosive poison of denying the deity of Christ. Test your teachers by asking who Jesus is to them. And John gives us another test in verses 4-5 of our text--

II. What SPIRIT are they SUBMITTING to? (1 John 4:4-5)

1 John 4:4–5 (ESV)

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.

John gives three facts about false teachers in these verses—they are from the world, they speak from the world, and the world listens to them—the world receives and affirms their teaching. They do not trust God’s Spirit; they trust the spirit of the world.

There are a couple of ways that you can determine what spirit a teacher is obeying—consider:

Do they teach COMPROMISE or CONFIDENCE (v. 4)

1 John 4:4 (ESV)

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.

There are a lot of preachers and teachers out there who are so afraid of the spirit of this age that they are insisting that the Church needs to adapt and change its teachings and theology in order to survive. That unless the Church changes its stance on things like sexual ethics and embrace the tenets of Critical Race Theory, we will find ourselves “on the wrong side of history”. They insist that Christians must “repent” of their “white privilege” and “patriarchy” and “gender discrimination” and so on in order to fall in line.

Some notable names of teachers who are insisting we bow to the spirit of this age in these ways are former Southern Baptist Convention president David Platt, women’s writer and speaker Jen Hatmaker, and others.

But what does the Scripture say, Christian? The Spirit who is in you is greater than the spirit of this age! As we have said many times before, we would far rather fall on the “wrong side of history” than on the wrong side of eternity! The Spirit of God has already overcome all of that opposition, and when you stand in His Spirit, you have already overcome them as well! If your teacher is more afraid of contradicting the spirit of BLM than contradicting the Spirit of God, they are a teacher you must avoid.

Ask of your teachers—what spirit are they submitting to? Do they teach compromise with the spirit of this age or confidence in the Spirit of God? And John gives us another question to ask in verse 5:

Do they teach SANCTIFICATION or SELF-IMPROVEMENT (v. 5; John 16:8; Galatians 5:16, 22-23)

The spirit that the world accepts and “hears”, the spirit that false teachers speak from, is a spirit of “self-help” and “self-improvement” and “self-care”. It’s the spirit that says that you’re basically a good person, and all you need is to “believe in yourself” (or for someone to “believe in you”) and you can be happy and well-adjusted and “live your best life now”. That you possess the power within yourself to transform your life.

The spirit of the world eats that kind of thing up—and if you take that spirit and dress it up with a few Bible verses here and there, you will be absolutely accepted, lauded and celebrated by the world! (Norman Vincent Peale and his disciple Robert Schuller are excellent examples of this; it’s no coincidence that the first chapter of Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking is titled “Believe in Yourself!” (https://www.challies.com/articles/the-false-teachers-norman-vincent-peale/, retrieved 02/25/2022).

The Scriptures teach a reliance on a very different Spirit, though—the Holy Spirit, who is the One who convicts us of our sin and need for Him:

John 16:8 (ESV)

And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment:

The Spirit who transforms us into the holiness that God calls us to:

Galatians 5:16, 22-23 (ESV)

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh… The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Who does your teacher tell you to rely on—your own “can-do spirit”? Or the Spirit of God dwelling in you to make you holy?

Who do your teachers say that Jesus is? And what Spirit are they submitting to? Test your teachers to see that you are receiving teaching from a trustworthy spirit—listen to them to discover

III. Where is their FOUNDATION (1 John 4:6; Eph. 2:20)

1 John 4:6 (ESV)

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.

At first, this sounds like a red flag—if you hear a teacher saying, “I am from God—anyone who does not listen to me is not from God!!!”, well, then, you probably ought to put some distance between you and them, and in a hurry!

But we have to remember who is writing this epistle—it is John the Apostle. John was not just another Bible teacher—he was specifically authorized and commissioned by Jesus Christ Himself as an authoritative teacher. John is part of the very foundation of the Church itself—as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:20:

Ephesians 2:20 (ESV)

built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,

So for John to say that he is an authoritative voice and that whoever rejects him rejects God Himself is true. (But that’s not true for modern-day teachers who take the title “Apostle” for themselves—unless they are actually two thousand years old, they can’t be Apostles!)

But John says something very important here about how we can test the teachers we hear. If they listen to John and the rest of the writers of the New Testament, they are from God. If they don’t listen to John and the rest, they are not. One of the ways to detect this in where a teacher stands is to ask:

Do they promise NEW TRUTHS?

In other words, are they standing on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets found in God’s Word? Or are they claiming that they have discovered something absolutely new! Something that “organized Christianity has been hiding for centuries”, something that nobody has ever recognized until they came across it! Sometimes they will claim they have evidence that the Bible was changed at some point to hide this new truth, that the Apostles and Church Fathers were deliberately hiding something about Christ or about salvation (that was the whole plot of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code a number of years back). If the teacher you’re listening to goes on and on congratulating you for discovering his (or her) teaching and promising that you will learn something about the Bible that no one else has ever known—you are listening to a false teacher. You are listening to someone who does not listen to God, someone who is filled with the spirit of error.

John says that you will know the Spirit of truth from the spirit of error when you find a teacher who listens to the testimony of the Apostles and prophets found in the Scriptures! So listen carefully to the teachers you follow to see--

Do they love the OLD PATHS?

I saw a meme online a while ago that said something to the effect of “If you think you are smarter than the previous generation… 50 years ago the owners manual of a car told you how to adjust the valves. Today it warns you not to drink the contents of the battery!”

Far too many preachers and teachers at large in our society today suffer from what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”:

the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited (Lewis, C. S. (2017). Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Reissue ed.) HarperOne.).

In their view, whatever the previous generation of Christians thought and practiced and taught is by definition old, worn out and dated, and the current beliefs, practices and consensus of Christianity are by definition superior.

Now, that’s not to say that every preacher who takes all of his sermon illustrations from Netflix is a false teacher, and every preacher who constantly references the Westminster Divines and St. Basil of Caesarea is trustworthy. But it is worth considering where your teachers’ hearts are drawn to. Do they love the communion of the saints down through the centuries of the church, do they delight in having the clean sea breezes of other centuries regularly blow the stuffy modernist fogs out of their minds? Are they casually dismissive (or even scornful) of the work and witness of previous generations of Christians simply because they sang hymns out of hymnbooks with an organ and all the ladies wore hats to church?

Again, that’s not to say that only churches with hymnbooks and organs are trustworthy and churches with worship bands and drum sets are suspect. Not at all—the spirit of error is alive and well behind the mahogany pulpits of many a stained-glass sanctuary, and the ancient glories of the faith once for all delivered to the saints is faithfully proclaimed under a lot of lecterns set up under basketball hoops!

The question that John would have us ask is, Where are their spirits drawn? Do they love to listen to and be challenged by voices from past centuries of faithful Christians? Do they love to wander down those old paths, or do they only want to run around in the little tight circles of early 21st Century thought? Do they listen first to the Word and then let the Word interpret what they hear from the world, or do they let the world determine what the Word says to them?

Test that the teaching you receive is from a trustworthy spirit—see whether your teachers and preachers are from God. Perhaps it feels like hitting below the belt to name names of false teachers and foolish teachers in Christianity today—but this is precisely what John calls us to do in these verses. So test the spirits that you hear—and let God’s Word here in these verses test you as well. Who is Jesus to you—is He God in the flesh or just another “good teacher”? Is His death, burial and resurrection of first importance in your life, or is His atoning work kind of shoved off to the back burner in your mind? Don’t

What spirit are you obeying today? Are you tempted to compromise God’s Word in order to “go along to get along”, or are you confidently standing on what He has revealed? Are you trying to clean up your life on your own, “believing in yourself” the way the spirit of the age tells you to, or are you relying on the Holy Spirit who dwells in you, creating in you the holiness and righteousness of Christ Himself?

Where is your foundation? Are you tempted by new and novel teachings, and a Christianity that has been “re-imagined” for the 21st Century, or are you standing on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, all built on Jesus Christ the cornerstone?

John reminds you here—there are a lot of false prophets who have gone out into the world. There is a lot of “testing” to do—some of the gold crowns out there are alloyed with the corrosion of a false prophet that will eat away at your faith. Some are the fools’ gold of a teacher who has been seduced by the spirit of the age who will blunt and cripple your faith with a spirit of error.

So test the spirits of the teachers that lead you. Confess Christ as Lord, lean on the Holy Spirit within you, stand unapologetically on the Word of God. And in all things, look for your strength, your safety, your salvation is found in the good confession of faith in the death, burial and resurrection of your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

1 Thessalonians 5:23–24, 28 (ESV)

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it… The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

Why is the question “Who is Jesus?” at the heart of true Christianity? How does this question help you wade through all of the religious ideas prevalent in our society?

Look again at the definition of Modalism cited above. How does this differ from the true definition of the Trinity? For instance, why does saying that God is sometimes “manifested” as a “Son” destroy the work of Christ’s sacrifice for us?

What are some examples of teachings you have heard that demonstrate some of the errors that John warns about here in these verses? How can you develop a habit of “testing” the spirits of teachers and preachers you hear?

(For more information and further reading on some of the most significant false teachers in historical and modern times, we recommend the online article series by Tim Challies on “The False Teachers”, accessible at https://www.challies.com/series/the-false-teachers/)

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