Sermon Text: 1 John 4:1–6
Date: April 21, 2024
Event: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B
1 John 4:1–6 (EHV)
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3and every spirit who does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming and is already in the world. 4You are from God, dear children, and you have overcome the false prophets, because the one in you is greater than the one in the world. 5They are from the world. That is why they speak from a worldly perspective and the world listens to them. 6We are from God. The one who knows God listens to us, but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. That is how we can distinguish between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
You Know Your Shepherd
God often uses the picture of a shepherd and sheep to picture his relationship with his people. And while there’s a lot of comfort in that, it’s also not particularly complimentary toward us. Sheep, perhaps more than any other animal, really need a caretaker, a shepherd, because without that caretaker, they will be in danger. They will not have enough food or water, and predators will threaten, hurt, and kill them.
If God compares us to sheep, that means we need a shepherd. It means we cannot take care of ourselves. We need help. And that's true. We can't save ourselves from our sins. We need Jesus to do that. We need him to lay down his life and then take it back up again to give us the forgiveness of sins.
However, Jesus, in our Gospel this morning, mentioned that sheep are not entirely helpless. He said, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me” (John 10:14). Sheep may not be the brightest animals in the world, but they know where it's safe. They know it is safe with their shepherd. And because they know they are safe with their shepherd, they stick close to him.
But what about someone pretending to be the shepherd? Will the sheep follow him? Jesus said the hired hand would just run away because he doesn’t care for the sheep. But can the sheep be deceived into following someone who is not the shepherd? “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”
We are focused this morning on our Second Reading, in which the apostle John, writing near the end of the first century, not long before he would die, encouraged the next generation of Christians. His first encouragement and direction in our reading is, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God.” What does it mean to “test spirits”?
John is not focusing his readers on spirits such as angels and demons, but on “spirits” as in anyone who comes with a spiritual message. John says that when another person comes and talks to you about God, you should test him. Does what he says agree with God’s Word? Determine if this person is trustworthy and reliable. Does he speak for and represent your Good Shepherd? Or is this just an intruder, someone seeking to harm?
False teaching is always dangerous, whether it is intentional or not. If someone is maliciously trying to lead someone astray, to exploit and take advantage of them, clearly, that is a massive problem. But just as much of a problem is the person who proclaims false teachings that they truly believe. They may be even more dangerous because their sincerity may gloss over the falsehood, and they may not have tell-tale signs of deception, greed, or other things that may go along with consciously deceptive spiritual teachers.
When dealing with spiritual things, we're not just dealing with something relatively trivial like your favorite sports team or movie. Nor is it even dealing with things that we would, in this life, say are very important, like: how long should you cook this food before it's safe to eat, or what kind of medication can you take that will be safe and offer some relief from the problems you're experiencing? Spiritual teaching has a bigger impact than anything else because spiritual teachings are not dealing with temporary things that will come to an end, but with eternal matters that will never end.
At the time John was writing, there was a growing line of thought among Christians that the words of the Bible were just the beginning. People began to teach and think that the real knowledge was hidden, was secret. And so only the truly enlightened could know the secret things of God. They would often ignore the simple words put on the page of Scripture that God inspired and instead look for alternative and secret meanings within them. If you ever heard someone try to explain something from God’s Word by counting letters or pinpointing something like the exact center of the Bible and trying to make a point from that, or even trying to claim that the historical accounts of God’s Word are just stories to teach spiritual truths that we should learn rather than things that actually happened, these are all versions of this line of thought (known as Gnosticism) that live on today.
And so this is why John’s metric for who is and who isn’t a teacher from God might seem relatively basic: Every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. That’s it? All we need to know to determine if someone is teaching the truth is if they teach that Jesus came as a human being? Well, it’s at least step one—and that question is perhaps more complex and important than we might think at first.
Some teachers in John’s day or in our day might say something along the lines of, well, Jesus came as a spirit. Or maybe Jesus is more of an idea or philosophy than a real person—some sort of ideal character for people to aspire toward. When thinking about Easter, such teachers might claim that Jesus “spiritually” rose from the dead (whatever that means). They might claim that you need to dig deeper to understand the resurrection. It's not as simple as a man coming back to life after having been crucified and a stone being rolled away to show he was gone. John’s point is that actually, yeah, it is that simple. It is that easy. That's exactly what has happened. John should know; he was there.
Why is that so important to get right? Why is it important to know that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh? Why is it so important that we surround ourselves with spiritual teachers who would teach this truth? This is the core of Jesus’ work. Jesus didn't come to give some hidden knowledge. He didn't come to drop breadcrumbs for the truly perceptive to follow. And he certainly hasn't given you the secret to wealth and happiness in this life. Jesus came for the exact reason that he said he came: to offer his life for the forgiveness of your sins and mine; he came to give himself in the flesh to rescue us from hell. He literally died and literally rose to assure you that you will be in heaven with him. Someone who's trying to sell you a more complicated explanation of God's Word, someone who's trying to add something extra, or warp and distort the clear, simple words of the Bible is not a spirit sent from God.
John is not calling out specific people here. Rather, John condemns messages rather than messengers. John is establishing principles that will not just address specific false teachers in his day, but throughout history. Johbn isn’t just speaking to his first centruy audience with these words. He’s speaking to you and to me. “Test the spirits to see if they are from God!”
Are you up to that task? Are you up to testing the spirits? Do you feel capable of evaluating spiritual ideas when they are presented to you? And not just on social media or the television or a tract given to you when you go to the grocery store, but even here, now, as words come from this pulpit. Are you testing the spirits? Is this a message from God or not? That’s a big, daunting task. Do you even know enough to test the spirits?
I can say without any doubt, “Absolutely you do.” And that's not because I know each one of you so well, and I know exactly all of your strengths and all of your blind spots, and I know exactly how well you understand the concepts of Scripture or how much time you spend in God's Word, or have spent in Bible class, or have sat here listening to God’s Word proclaimed in this sanctuary. You can test the spirits because you know your Good Shepherd even as he knows you. You recognize his voice, his accent, so that when someone starts using words that kind of sound like something Jesus might say and yet seems to be making different points, your ears perk up, and maybe even the hair on the back of your neck stands at attention. Perhaps you recoil just a bit because suddenly it sounds like someone who is not your Shepherd is trying to lead you to a place that may not be safe.
You don't need a degree from a religious school. You don't need a certain number of hours having studied the Bible. You don't need to read the Bible cover to cover so many times to do this work. Several years ago, I can vividly remember explaining to someone some problems in another congregation centered around some false teaching. It was a sad and scary situation, and the person was concerned about what was happening and wanted to understand the details. There was a five-year-old sitting near us where we were having the conversation. He looked up from what he was playing with or working on as I explained this false teaching, and he looked right at me and said, “That's not right.” He, as a five-year-old, could recognize that what was being summarized was not what his Shepherd would say.
And so your ability to test the Spirit has nothing to do with your age. It has nothing to do with your experience. It has everything to do with what God has worked in you. You may be that silly sheep, plodding along the path, tripping through the field, falling into holes, and needing to be rescued by your Shepherd. But you know him. You know his voice. You know his accent. And when someone starts pretending to be your Shepherd and is not, you know. When John said in v. 2 that you’ll be able to recognize the Spirit of God, he used a word in Greek that very specifically means knowing something through experience, not through book learning. This comes from the experience of following your Good Shepherd. The experience of knowing his preservation, knowing his love, knowing his forgiveness, knowing what he's promised.
Anything that tries to take the place of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the very definition of the spirit of the antichrist. Antichrist is someone or something that tries to be a substitute Savior. That may be seen in teachings that proclaim my works as important instead of or in addition to Jesus’. It might be someone focusing our attention on earthly joys rather than looking ahead to eternal life.
We don’t need a replacement, alternate, or substitute Christ. We don’t need any other shepherd other than our Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for us—only to take it back up again. You heard him proclaim it on Good Friday, “It is finished!” And your Shepherd does not exaggerate or lie. That is how we can distinguish between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
My dear fellow sheep, you know your Shepherd, and he knows you. Continue to follow your Good Shepherd, who came in the flesh, who died, and has risen, risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen.
