Week 50 1 John 4
John says do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God.
Two things: a) don’t believe everyone/everything you hear and b) assess what you hear.
I don’t know how much of what I hear from day-to-day isn’t true…how much is lies half-truths deceptions misrepresentations falsities and like that. Maybe 50%. Who really knows? But sifting truth from lies is a pretty big task. In this case John is thinking about a subset of All Lies in Total and talks specifically about Religious Lies. A guy might seem to be a religious guy (says John) but don’t buy everything he’s selling.
That means there’s a second pretty practical question: how do I test what’s true & what isn’t? John gives what looks like a basic litmus-test for Religious Truths & Religious Non-Truths. The test for knowing what’s true and what’s false is to consider-the-source: if a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ became a human being (then) that person has the Spirit of God.
There’s a guy who’s ‘from God’ and a guy who isn’t. The acid-test I can use to distinguish between them is the question: what do you think about Jesus?
The gospels say lots of things about the Lord but the one about Jesus Christ being God and coming to earth in a material-human form moves to the very top of the list of Key Things to Believe.
Note: quotes from 1 John 4:1 2 (NLT)