A Basic Test for Truth

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I know several of you are facing the same irritation that I am because several of you have been in the office over the last week or so and have mentioned it, that there seems to be a proliferation of these spam calls that we’re getting. Like, is it, I know it’s not just me, I was about to ask, is it just me, but they seem to be getting worse, where some days they will outnumber my legitimate phone calls by about 10 to 1. And Monday and Tuesday of this week were particularly bad.

I was just so frustrated with it. Now, it is neat now that the phones will tell you spam risk or spam call or telemarketer, but I was just so frustrated. I’d probably had 20 calls like that all day and got home and they’re still calling.

And after dinner, I was trying to get the little kids showered because Tuesday is one of their shower nights. I just know I’m going to have to deal with that when I get home. and I’m trying to fight with Charlie who likes the water about as much as a cat and trying to trying to get him in and out and I had a spam call I declined it and then another one called right back and I had just had enough so I answered please don’t hang up we’d like to speak to you about your vehicle warranty I bet you would I waited for a human being to come on the line and I handed my phone to Charlie and said, here, it’s for you.

And I walked away and I don’t know what was said, but he brought me my phone back about three minutes later and he didn’t ring the rest of the night. I want to know what he said to them. And that’s not just a pulpit story that really happened.

Okay. I was listening to somebody this week and they said that, uh, that a kid in their congregation had asked their dad, did that story really happen to him? No, that’s just a preacher story.

He’s just preaching. I don’t knowingly tell you stories that are not true. No, I think I’ve stumbled onto the secret here.

These telemarketers, these spam calls, they’re terrible. And they have their little tricks for trying to get you. My favorite was about three years ago, I got a call from one of these people.

It’s before it was so prevalent that we knew that they were pretending to be from the government. It’s before it was all over the news and stuff. So I was driving through the backwoods somewhere around Little Axe with Benjamin one day and got a phone call from a guy who said he was from the IRS and he had some questions about my last tax return.

And I said, well, good deal, me too. I never can figure that stuff out. So we talked for a minute.

I didn’t give him any information, but I’m mainly asking questions which irritated him, which should have been a red flag. But I’m asking questions and I finally said, wait, you should have all this If you’ve got questions about my tax return, you should have a copy of it right there. Well, it’s somewhere here in my office at the courthouse.

And I forgot to tell you that the number had said Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma when he called. I’ve got it here on my desk at the courthouse. I said, wait, you’re calling me from your office phone?

Yes, yes, sir, I am from the IRS office. Where? I’m at the federal courthouse.

I said, in Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma? Yes, sir. I don’t know if you’ve been to Paul’s Valley.

I’ve been to Paul’s Valley. there’s no federal anything that I know of I said are you sure you’re not calling from the Garvin County Courthouse no sir I’m calling from the federal courthouse I said you’re a liar how can you say that to me I’m with the IRS I’m saying it to you because you’re not from the IRS and I’ve been to Paul’s Valley and there’s no federal courthouse well yes there I hung up on him I’ve not been audited so I am assuming he was not on the up and up you see there I listened long there was a little red flag and I just started asking questions because there’s no federal courthouse in Paul’s Valley. We do this all the time without even realizing it.

We will use truth tests. We will ask questions. And like I said, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Now, my wife deliberately investigates. If the children say good morning, she goes and opens the blinds to see, is it in fact a good morning? Not quite that bad.

But we do this. We do this all the time. We ask questions.

And as people are telling us stories, I’m sure you’ve had some of these conversations where you’ll have somebody will be telling you a story and you’re listening going, wait, I’m not sure that detail adds up. And we’re evaluating all the time. We’re applying these truth tests to see if people are who they say they are.

And if their stories add up to the facts, we do that all the time. And that’s not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, I was reading today somebody complaining about all these Christians, all these religious people, you know, all the church wants you to do is shut off your brain and just believe everything they say.

I’ve never once told you that. As a matter of fact, I tell you the opposite. I encourage you to hear what I say and read your Bible and evaluate what I say according to the Bible.

And if they don’t match up, don’t believe what I say. I mean, it’s pretty much that simple. But they say, oh, that’s all Christianity wants you to do.

Just turn off your brain. No, God’s Word encourages us to use those truth tests with people we listen to who claim to be teachers of God’s Word. Because God wants us to be clear.

As we’ve been looking through 1 John, we’ve been talking about some of the places where God offers assurance in the book of 1 John. God wants to assure us so we can be confident whether we’re listening to somebody worth listening to or not. Because the bottom line is not everybody out there who claims to be a teacher of God’s Word is worth listening to.

Because not everybody who claims to be a teacher of God’s Word is really teaching you God’s Word. That’s why we hear stories from time to time about, oh, I went to a church service or I listened to a sermon on TV and they just preached from a magazine article. I had preached about some magazine articles, but I’ve never preached from a magazine article.

Preached from God’s Word. Somebody’s not doing something right. This morning, I want us to look at 1 John and see what God says about these truth tests, We’re supposed to be evaluating what we hear.

And is it really coming from God’s Word or is it not? Is this teacher from God or are they not? We’re going to be in 1 John 4.

If you’ll turn there with me in your Bible, if you’re using your device for the Scriptures, there’s a link in our bulletin or it’ll be on the screen. And if you’re able to without too much trouble, if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s Word together. 1 John 4.

We’re going to start in verse 1 and read through verse 6 this morning. John writes, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the spirit of God.

Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming and is now already in the world. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

They are of the world, therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us.

He who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. And you may be seated.

He ends with this thought, by this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. He’s drawing a distinction between the two. this is what he’s talking about with the truth test. He says there is a way for us to know the difference between what is true and what is error.

God commands us. We need to understand this right off the bat. God commands us to be careful about the teachers we listen to.

We’ve gotten it in our minds somewhere along the line that it’s not nice to point out when something’s untrue, that it’s unchristian to name names. I’ve never made anybody madder at me as a pastor than when I pointed out, and I’m not just talking about a small area of disagreement. There are guys that I listen to frequently, and I know we disagree in this area.

It’s a secondary area, and I’m just going to use extra caution when I listen to you on that. We have to do that all the time. But there are people claiming to be Bible teachers that you could, if you were so inclined today, go home and flip on your television to some of the major Christian broadcasting channels and find people spouting complete heresy and saying that it’s being done in the name of Christ. And going back to what I started to say, I’ve never made anybody angrier at me as a pastor than when I started naming names.

And I didn’t do it to be mean. It wasn’t done in a hateful way. It wasn’t done out of jealousy.

Sometimes that’s the response. Oh, well, you’re just jealous because they have 22,000 people in their church. I really don’t care.

God has placed the number of people here that I can handle and maybe a few more. If you’re watching online, we’d love for you to come join us. I’m not saying we’re full up.

I’m just saying God knows if 22,000 people were here next week, I’d be scrambling going, where are we going to put everybody? All right. I’m not jealous about that.

I laid out transcripts and quotes and dates and times and made some people furious that you had somebody in particular, and I’m not going to name names this morning just because that’s not what this is about, but I’ll tell you out here if you want to know. We had a very well-known preacher who said, well, it’s not really for me to say whether Jesus is the only way to heaven or not. Excuse me, you don’t get to graduate first grade Sunday school class if you don’t know the answer to that question, let alone be in the pulpit as a preacher of God’s work.

He came back and apologized later, I misunderstood the question. I’m not sure that’s any better. I mean, I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt.

I really am. I’m probably too soft on people in that area. But come on now.

God commands us. It is not unkind. It is not uncharitable.

It is not unchristian to be aware of what people teach and to be careful about it. As a matter of fact, one of the very last things that the Apostle Paul wrote in the book of Romans was to mark those that cause divisions contrary to the truth. I’m paraphrasing a little bit.

and avoid them. Don’t listen to them. Don’t follow their teachings.

God commands us to be careful about the people we listen to. That’s why here in 1 John 4, he starts out the chapter by saying, do not believe every spirit. Now, a quick word on this concept of spirits here.

There’s about three different schools of thought as to what this means by spirits. Is it talking about actual spiritual beings? Some people will say yes.

Is it talking, is it a euphemism for a teacher? Some would say yes. Is it a euphemism for their message?

Some would say yes. I’m going to, any of those three are possible. I lean toward one of the latter two because of what he says about right after that false prophets going out into the world, that it’s either the preacher or their message.

Not everybody is true, but whether we’re talking about a spirit who inspires a message, whether we’re talking about the messenger, or whether we’re talking about the message itself, the point of it is clear that not everybody who claims to speak for Jesus Christ is actually doing so. And so John makes that clear right off the bat because God does want us to be careful. There are people who claim to tell the truth about God, but they are either deceiving you or they are deceived themselves.

And we need to understand that both of those are a possibility because a lot of people teach wrong things, Don’t think it means we have to be mad at them. Some people are not doing it to lie. They’re doing it because they really believe what they’re teaching.

They’re just sincerely wrong. And to those people, we need to engage them with the gospel. But his point here is that we’re not supposed to blindly follow everyone who claims to speak for God.

Do not believe every spirit. Just because I blew into town saying I was a preacher of the gospel didn’t mean you should automatically believe everything I said. The search committee here, I’ve told you this before, they were incredibly thorough.

I’ve never met a search committee quite so thorough I had to provide everything but a blood sample and if we had if we had if the process had gone on any longer we might have had to go there too but you know what I don’t fault them for that they did what they were supposed to do and we had not only did they check into my background very very thoroughly but they listened to my messages good night I don’t want to listen to me as much as they listen to my old messages but they listened to my messages. We had interview after interview after interview. They, on your behalf, wanted to make sure as much as they could do so that they were bringing somebody who really would teach God’s word.

They did what they were supposed to do. We have to be careful. We have to be careful.

I have to be careful when I’m listening to somebody. He says, do not believe every spirit. And again, if we think this is a hateful thing, he starts out too with the word beloved.

There’s a reason why John, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells them this. It’s because John loved these people and because God loved these people too much to watch them get caught up in a false gospel. Have you ever cared about somebody who was just blinded to the truth?

And I don’t even necessarily mean about our faith. Maybe they were in a situation where they were blinded to the truth, they couldn’t see that a relationship was bad for them. And everybody could see it, but they couldn’t.

Maybe somebody was blinded to the truth about their financial situation, and you knew that until they woke up and started doing something differently, that things were never going to change. There are all sorts of situations we could look at in our lives, and we don’t like it when somebody we love believes a lie, and their life is affected by that lie. And it’s not because we’re being mean to them and don’t want to let them believe what they want to believe.

It’s because we care enough about them to want them to believe the truth. So it’s very important we understand he starts this out. He starts this whole warning out by saying, I care too much.

Beloved, he calls them. He cares too much about them to let them be deceived and let astray from Jesus Christ. So instead, it’s very simple. It’s not a matter here of being paranoid.

It’s not a matter here of making everybody jump through hoops. It’s simply a matter of verifying who they are and what they’re telling us. Just listen.

Don’t do what we sometimes do when we put on a movie or a TV show at the end of a long day and we just kind of kick back and we turn our brains off and we just let it wash over us. Don’t do that when you’re listening to somebody who says they’re preaching God’s Word. Lean forward, listen, engage, filter everything they’re saying through your brain and through what you know of God’s Word.

And maybe if something doesn’t sound right, you jot down a note about it so you can go look it up later. And if it’s somebody you’ve got access to in person, go talk to them about it nicely. Go ask them questions.

He says, test the spirits, whether they be of God. Because God divides teachers into two categories. And we’ve already seen that as we’ve read through here.

There are two different categories. He talks about the spirit of truth and he talks about the spirit of error. Now again, are these the spirits that are inspiring the message?

Are they the message themselves? Are they the one carrying the message? We don’t know.

We just know there are true messages and false messages. He says here of the spirit of truth. By this you know the spirit of God.

Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. So by this point in our study of 1 John, we know that John taught, John emphasized the fact that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. We already know that.

He’s already made that clear in some of the the passages we’ve looked at. But here he’s emphasizing the humanity of Jesus. He’s saying, it is important that the teachers you’re listening to, to these early Christians, it is important that they teach and that they agree with the idea that Jesus Christ came in human flesh, that he came to earth as a person.

It’s not John here saying Jesus was just a human. You take it in correlation with everything he said elsewhere about Jesus Christ being God. Because part of the cornerstone of the gospel is the idea that the eternal son of God, the second person of the Trinity, took on a human nature in addition to his divine nature and came to earth to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

John is not teaching that only the humanity of Jesus matters, but he’s teaching that it does matter. And the reason for this goes back to our old friends, the Gnostics that I’ve talked to you several times about during this series. And the Gnostics have a lot in common with some of the cults, some world religions, and the New Age movement today.

But the Gnostics, part of their deal was that Jesus Christ did not come in human flesh, which gets into all their weird beliefs about spirit and matter and the nature of good and evil, and we won’t get into all that again today. But they believe basically that because of all this, that they believe Jesus Christ came only as a spiritual being and not in human flesh. Do you see a problem with that idea for our teaching that Jesus Christ died on the cross?

How does a spirit get nailed to a cross? How does a spirit without a body shed its blood or die? It can’t.

It’s impossible. So they were coming along with these really interesting, thought-provoking, spiritual-sounding insights, and people were saying, oh, that sounds good, but they weren’t thinking about it. They weren’t evaluating the teacher according to what they already knew, and so they were just buying these things that ultimately, if you take them to their logical conclusion, they undermine the very foundation of the gospel by which we’re saved.

It was a huge deal. And so he said, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. He says, here’s the spirit of error. Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

He said, if they are telling you that Jesus Christ did not come in human flesh, then they are not speaking God’s truth, period, end of paragraph, end of story. They’re just not. As a matter of fact, he says this is the spirit of the Antichrist. This is the message that the Antichrist would have you to believe.

This is the kind of stuff that he will use one day to try to lead people away from Jesus Christ. False teachers, he said, were going to deny that Jesus Christ was God in human flesh. And not only are they wrong, but they’re doing the work of the Antichrist. He says they are opponents of Christ, whether they realize it or not. Some people who claim to teach God’s word are actually his opponents.

and they may not realize it. And Jesus warned us about these people. Please understand my heart in this.

I’m not telling you any of this to be mean to anybody today. Like John, I’m telling you this because I care about you, because I love you, and because it’s what God’s Word says, more importantly. But don’t take it as, well, the preacher, God all hopped up about false teachers today.

Jesus warned about this too. In Matthew 24, 24, He warned that false Christs and false prophets would rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. Jesus warned that there were going to be people coming promoting false ideas about who he was, so that if it were possible, they would try even to drag God’s people away into false teachings.

This is something Jesus worried about and warned against. And so it should be clear to us then that not every teacher is a good teacher. By that meaning, they’re not all teaching God’s truth. and God’s children are going to desire to listen to godly teachers.

We should want to fill our minds full of the teachings of godly teachers who are sharing God’s word with us. Because he says in verse 5, those who don’t love Jesus will be open to listening to false teachers. He says, they are of the world, therefore they speak as the world, and the world hears them.

He said those who were leading people astray, those who didn’t belong to God, they were going to be glad to hear this message. If somebody came preaching a message that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross because He came as a spirit only, and He did that because He didn’t need to die on the cross because there’s no such thing as sin, and that we can eventually stumble into the hidden truth ourselves and be reconciled to God on our own, doesn’t that sound like a message that the world would want to hear? He said the world was only too glad to listen to what the Gnostics were saying.

But He shares here too that God has done incredible work in His people. So that what’s appealing to our natural sensibilities, this idea that we can do whatever we want and we’ll eventually be fine with God anyway, what naturally appeals to us no longer appeals to us because he says greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world. You are of God, little children, verse 4, he says, and have overcome them because he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

If you and I are able to stand against these kinds of teachings that will lead us astray, it’s because of the work of God in us, not because we’re smarter, not because we’re more spiritual, not because we just know more. It’s because of the work of God within us, because the Holy Spirit guides us to all truth. And as a consequence of what He’s done, and we need to understand that because otherwise we’ll get a little arrogant about it.

But as a consequence of what He’s done, we will end up seeking to listen to teachers who are faithful to God and His truth, because we’ll want to know God and His truth. We’ll want to follow those people who God has given insight into what we find in this word and things that we’ve never noticed before but are there. We’ll want those things.

That’s why he says in verse 6, we are of God. He who knows God hears us. He who is not of God does not hear us.

So he’s warned us to be careful who we listen to. He said there’s two different kinds of teachers. He said God’s people should pay attention to the godly ones.

How do we know the difference? There’s a simple truth test that he gives us. Truth tests are what I introduced this message to you with.

The things where we’re listening and evaluating and going, does this sound right? Is the answer to this question right? I knew immediately the man was lying when he said he was at the federal courthouse in Paul’s Valley.

That was the truth test. So here’s the truth test when it comes to somebody who claims to be a teacher of God’s Word. It’s a simple truth test. Does he get the gospel right? Now there are people that teach things that I think are wrong, that I disagree with them on.

but they get the gospel right. And so I might say they’re a little confused or they might say I’m a little confused. I might be wrong, but neither one of us are false teachers and God will straighten out the differences between us by and by.

To give you a couple examples of what I’m talking about, I am absolutely not a Calvinist. My Calvinist brothers, I think are confused and they would say the same thing about me, right? It’s God, God will straighten that out. But if they’re preaching salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, because of His sacrifice on the cross.

They’re not false teachers just because we disagree on an issue. There are people with, I’ve been in churches where there were camps of people divided over the end times. I’m pre-millennial and pre-tribulation, but I also understand I don’t know everything and God could show me something different.

There were people that are post-millennial and this and that over here. There’s And I’ve seen, which is fine until we start fighting about it and excommunicating each other, right? That’s a secondary issue.

I can disagree. One of my heroes in ministry had a completely opposite view of the end times than I had, but he’s preaching the gospel. And when I say we’re evaluating them as a false teacher or not, it doesn’t mean that we have to agree with them on everything, that this is how you tell whether somebody’s on the up and up or not.

Does he get the gospel right? Does he get the gospel right? All of John’s talk about Jesus coming in the flesh was not because the flesh was the, and Jesus coming in the flesh was the be-all, end-all issue of all time.

It’s because that’s the issue they were dealing with right then. As John’s talking about Jesus coming in human flesh, what he’s doing is defending the gospel against the attack that it was facing in that day. Now the gospel faces different attacks in our day.

Some of the attacks it faces today, there are teachers out there who teach that you need Jesus plus works. That’s gone on from the beginning. That you need Jesus plus works.

That is not the gospel. That is works-based salvation. There are people who teach that there are certain groups of people and certain sins that just are inherent to people because of their nationality or the color of their skin or whatever, and those sins can never be forgiven.

That is not the gospel. That is an attack on the gospel. The attacks on the gospel are different today.

I could go on and on and on. Preached a whole series about counterfeit gospels a few years ago. And when I started looking for them, they’re everywhere.

The attacks are different. But John’s point remains. If you want to know whether somebody’s speaking according to the spirit of truth or the spirit of error, look and see whether they get the gospel right or not.

That was the part that was missing in their day, was the idea that Jesus Christ had come in human flesh so he could be sacrificed. If a teacher denies or distorts the gospel, he is not worth listening to, period. If there ever came a time where I began to deny or to distort the gospel, I am no longer worth listening to.

Vote me out. Actually, get me a brain scan first because there may be something going on there for me to change that drastically. But don’t sit there and excuse it.

We have to treat the gospel like the non-negotiable truth it is. Now, some of you sitting here this morning may be wondering, what does the gospel mean that he keeps talking about? The gospel is a simple message.

We make it hard, but the gospel is a simple message. it starts from the premise that we’ve sinned against god god is holy and mankind we disobey him anything that we say do think or or don’t do that displeases god is sin I keep getting those out of order but you get the idea any of those things that we do that are disobedient to god they’re called sin and because god is holy our sin separates us from him and in eternity there are two possible destinations where we could end up. We could spend eternity in the presence of God in heaven, or we could spend eternity separated from Him in hell.

Hell was not created for humans. It was created as a place of torment for Satan and his angels, but mankind sided with Satan and his angels through sin. And so we are spiritually separated from God, and we’re destined to be eternally separated from Him.

And there’s not enough good that you or I could do to right the wrong that we’ve done. The only way that we could be forgiven, that that slate could be wiped clean and we could be restored into a fellowship with God was for that sin to be paid for. The only way it could be paid for was a perfect sacrifice.

And Jesus Christ came to earth. God, the son, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth as a human being. And he was nailed to the cross there and he shed his blood there and he died there taking full responsibility for every wicked thing that I’d ever done or said thought.

And for you too. He took that responsibility on himself and he was punished in our place. He died on the cross and he rose again three days later to prove it.

And now God offers forgiveness. He offers reconciliation. He offers eternal life with him.

Not because of anything we can try to do to earn it or deserve it, but because Jesus Christ paid for it in full. And so if we will simply believe that and we will ask for it, God can and will save anybody who asks because of what Jesus did. That’s the gospel.

And that’s his message for you this morning. If you’ve never taken advantage of that, is that your sin can be forgiven if you’ll believe in Jesus and what he’s done and if you’ll ask for it. And in just a few moments, we’ll stand and sing together as we prepare to close out the service.

But when we do that, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior and you know you need to do so, do it. Take that time. If you have questions, if you need to talk with somebody, you’re more than welcome to come forward.

We’ll be glad to answer your questions or walk you through this more, whatever we need to do, come forward and talk to me or somebody else. But also right where you are, you can ask his forgiveness. That’s if you’ve never trusted him as your Savior.

But if you are a believer this morning, then John’s message to us is clear. We need to use better discernment about who we listen to and who we promote. Because if they don’t get the gospel right, if they don’t get that very simple message right, I don’t care what else they’re right about.

I don’t care if they’re right about all the cultural