In his book The Gospel According to Starbucks, Leonard Sweet tells the story of Ed Faubert. Faubert is what you call a “cupper”—in layman’s terms, he is a coffee-taster. The state of New York has actually certified Faubert’s perspicacious taste buds. So refined is Faubert’s sense of taste for coffee that even while blindfolded, he can take one sip of coffee and tell you “not just that it is from Guatemala, but from what state it comes, at what altitude it was grown, and on what mountain.”[1]
Just as there are many different types of coffee in the world and it requires an expert to determine where a particular coffee bean comes from, so also in the spiritual realm there are many different spirits and spiritual discernment is required to determine where each spirit comes from.
In this next section of his letter, John tells us how to discern where a particular spirit comes from, a very necessary skill in our world today. Listen for God’s word to you from 1 John 4:1-6…
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.
The first important thing that John tells us here is: do not believe every spirit.
Imagine what would happen if we believed every spirit, every religious prophet in the world. We would never get anything done in life because we would first be turning this way, and then that.
Do you know how many different religions there are in the world today? Yahoo Answers lists twenty-one different major religions. Adherents.com lists twenty-two.
Do you know how many different Christian denominations there are? In 2011, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimated that there were 41,000 different Christian denominations worldwide.
Now consider how many different movements or denominations are within each of the other major religions of the world. Then, think about how many so-called prophets in the world today may not fit under the category of any major religion.
Clearly, there are many spirits, many prophets, speaking in the world today. If we were to believe every one of them then we would, literally, all turn into spiritual schizophrenics.
Thankfully, John gives us a remedy for the problem of spiritual schizophrenia. He says: “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”
Unlike the expert coffee taster who can tell you what mountain in Guatemala a particular coffee bean comes from, spiritual taste testing is not the preserve of a few experts. John addresses all believers in the church: dear friends, beloved. John tells us that all of us as Christians have the ability to do appropriate and accurate spiritual taste testing.
The Greek word that John uses, translated as “test,” is δοκιμαζετε. This word was used in ancient times to refer to testing metals for genuineness. Thus, the idea behind this word is that of testing something with a view toward approval. The same word is used in Luke 14:19 about a man who is going to test some oxen.
This word suggests that the Christian should not test spiritual teachings in the world in such a way that he or she hopes to find fault. Rather, we should be on the lookout for what is good.
I know professing Christians who have a very hard time finding anything good to say about any of the Christian congregations in their area. There is no church that is good enough for them. Thus, they do not attend worship services anywhere. Instead, they run their own home Bible study group and they follow the teachings of a well-known radio preacher. I often wonder if they lived near the church of that radio preacher and attended his services on a regular basis if they would find fault with him as well.
God does not want us as believers in his Son Jesus Christ to be faultfinders. He wants us to look for the good in other Christians and even in other religions.
C. S. Lewis once wrote,
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.[2]
Thus, as we test the spirits, we should not be naïve. We should realize that many false prophets have gone out into the world. However, we should not be nitpicky or faultfinding when it comes to examining religious beliefs. We should approach our spiritual taste testing with an attitude of looking for what is good, for what we can approve.
Now, here is the big question: how can we recognize a spirit that comes from God? How can we recognize a message that God wants us to listen to and believe?
John says there is one simple question we need to ask: does this spirit, or prophet, confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh? Every spirit or prophet that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit or prophet that does not confess this truth is not from God, but rather is of the antichrist.
John is saying there are actually two essential things we need to look for in the teaching of every spirit or prophet. First, does this spirit or prophet acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah?
Let us unpack that question into several sub-questions: Does this spirit or prophet believe and teach that Jesus is our great prophet, priest and king? In other words, does this spirit or prophet confess that Jesus is the one we should listen to above every other prophet? Does this spirit or prophet acknowledge Jesus as our great high priest who sacrificed himself on the cross for our sins? Does this spirit or prophet bow to the kingship, the lordship, and the leadership of Jesus? That is what is wrapped up in the seemingly simple confession of Jesus as Messiah.
Secondly, does this spirit or prophet acknowledge that Jesus has come in the flesh? This is precisely what the Gnostics in John’s day, and shortly thereafter, denied. According to the Gnostics, matter was completely evil. Therefore, the idea that God would take on human flesh was impossible, unthinkable.
Many years later, Augustine said that in the pagan philosophers he could find parallels for everything in the New Testament except for one saying: “The Word became flesh.”
As John saw it, to deny the humanity of Jesus was to strike at the very root of Christian faith.
William Barclay notes five consequences if we deny the humanity of Jesus. First, to deny the humanity of Jesus is to deny that Jesus can ever be our example. If Jesus was not a real human being, living under the same conditions as other human beings, then he cannot show us how to live.
Second, to deny Jesus’ full humanity is to deny that Jesus can be our high priest who opens the way to God. The writer to the Hebrews says that the true high priest must be like us in all things, knowing our weaknesses and temptations (Hebrews 4:14-15). To lead human beings to God, the high priest must be human, otherwise he will be pointing us down a road that is impossible for us to take.
Third, to deny the humanity of Jesus is to deny that he can, in any real sense, be our savior. To save humanity Jesus had to identify with humanity, and that is what Christians believe the Son of God did in the fullest sense.
Fourth, to deny the full humanity of Jesus is to deny the salvation of the body. Christianity is quite clear about the fact that salvation is for the entire human person. Jesus saves our bodies as well as our souls. If we deny Jesus’ full humanity, then we deny that our bodies can ever become the temples of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, to deny the humanity of Jesus is to deny that there can ever be any real union between God and human beings. If spirit is completely good and the body is completely evil, as the Gnostics claimed, then God and human beings can never meet. They might meet when humanity has gotten rid of the body. Human beings and God might meet in some rarefied, disembodied, spiritual experience. However, what Christianity teaches is that because of God taking on human flesh in Jesus there can be real communion here and now between God and human beings.
In his book Unspeakable, Os Guinness tells the story about a well-known Christian leader whose son died in a cycling accident. Although the leader was devastated, somehow, he managed to suppress his grief, even preaching eloquently at his son’s funeral. His display of hope in the midst of tragedy earned him the admiration of many.
However, a few weeks after the funeral, the man invited Guinness and a few friends to his home. According to Guinness, this man spoke and even screamed “not with the hope of a preacher but with the hurt of a father—pained and furious at God, dark and bilious in his blasphemy.” In his agony, he blamed God for his son’s death.
Rather than rebuke him, one of Guinness’s friends gently reminded the enraged father about the story of Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb. On three occasions in that story, Jesus expressed anger, and even furious indignation, in the presence of death. When Jesus came to earth, he became a human being just like us, feeling the abnormality of our suffering. In Jesus’ humanity we see God’s perspective on our pain: the beautiful world God created is now broken and in ruins. Jesus will heal this broken world and our broken lives, but first, he came to earth in order to identify with our anguish.
Guinness concludes that when we understand Jesus’ humanity, it frees us to face the world’s brokenness just as Jesus did. Like Jesus, we are “free to feel what it is human to feel: sorrow at what is heartbreaking, shock at what is shattering, and outrage at what is flagrantly out of joint… To pretend otherwise is to be too pious by half, and harder on ourselves than Jesus himself was.”[3]
How do we overcome the spirits in this world who would deny the full humanity of Jesus? We can overcome the false prophets of this world by the power of the one who lives inside us. For the one who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world.
Who is the one who is in us? John does not mention his name here, but he did at the end of chapter three…it is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of God is greater than every other spirit and can overcome the one who is in the world, the antichrist. In fact, the Holy Spirit will one day overcome every anti-messiah spirit. In Philippians 2:9-11 we read about Jesus…
Therefore, God exalted him
to the highest place
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God, the Father.
I like what William Barclay says about this….
We have seen again and again that it is characteristic of him [the author of 1 John] to see things in terms of black and white. His thinking does not deal in shades. On the one side there is the man whose source and origin is God and who can hear the truth; on the other side there is the man whose source and origin is the world and who is incapable of hearing the truth. There emerges a problem, which very likely John did not even think of. Are there people to whom all preaching is quite useless? Are there people whose defences can never be penetrated, whose deafness can never hear, and whose minds are for ever shut to the invitation and command of Jesus Christ?
The answer must be that there are no limits to the grace of God and that there is such a person as the Holy Spirit. It is the lesson of life that the love of God can break every barrier down. It is true that a man can resist; it is, maybe, true that a man can resist even to the end. But what is also true is that Christ is always knocking at the door of every heart, and it is possible for any man to hear the voice of Christ, even above the many voices of the world.
[1] Leonard Sweet, The Gospel According to Starbucks (Waterbrook Press, 2007), p. 54; submitted by David Slagle, Atlanta, Georgia, to preachingtoday.com.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 43.
[3] Os Guinness, Unspeakable, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 144-145, accessed from preachingtoday.com.
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