1 John: Testing the Spirits | Guest Speaker: Brad O'Kelley

Alright, so 1 John chapter 4, we started this month here at Redeemer with Scotty Smith, who was here, which is like Russ's mentor.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

And then Russ came back and he was hitting 1 John.

And like I said, now we're at the end of the month, and we've just completely gone to the bottom of the barrel.

And they got all of these wonderful verses about love and great things.

And then they said, Brad, how would you like to preach?

And I go, Yeah, that'd be great.

And they go, Great.

Here's your verses on the Antichrist.

You know, which is just awesome.

It just makes you, it gives you this warm, fuzzy feeling, doesn't it?

You know, to talk about spirits and evil people and antichrist.

I mean, it's just great, man.

It's just awesome.

But I gotta be real honest with you, I kind of like it because I'm a tester by nature, okay?

I don't know about you, but I I am a tester.

I married a non-tester, okay?

Mandy is uh uh allergic to testing things.

I have to test everything uh to understand whether it is good or bad, in my personal opinion.

I'll give you uh just a couple of examples, you know, like um one of which is Scott Antique Market.

Um maybe you go there, maybe you sell things there.

If you do, I hey, no offense.

However, um it ought to be called Scott Thrift Store, is what it ought to be called.

There ain't no antiques down there, I'll tell you that right now.

Because let me just tell you, last time we went down there, I we were looking, okay.

Listen, we're looking at literally, I need you to get this picture in your in your head, a window frame.

Wooden window frame, it's about this big.

And it's some, I don't know what you do with it.

I have no idea.

It doesn't have any glass in it.

What good is it?

You know, it's a you're supposed to hang it on the wall and make a decoration out of it, or something like that.

And I'm like, yes, great.

Mandy has this idea.

So I look at this lady and I'm like, how much for this wooden window frame?

And she goes, Well, and she begins in on this story of how this window came from a villa in the south of France, and King Louis VIII stayed there one day and opened this window, and uh it was uh, you know, marked priceless by uh, you know, England.

I'm like, I'm sitting here listening to this story, and I'm going, what?

Mandy's going, ooh.

She's looking at me like, that's amazing.

I'm like, lady, you dumpster dove that thing out from behind a quick trip, you put it in your station wagon, drove it down here, and you're asking$300 for the thing, you know?

Like, I mean, don't don't mess with me.

Come on.

You know, I know better than that.

We were looking when when we were getting ready to have our third child, we were uh at one of the these uh baby stores that I didn't have any business being in, and they they were showing us there were these blankets.

These are blankets for babies, okay?

I don't know how you improve on a blanket, but this lady, we we walk up and I'm like, look at look at the wonderful blankets, you know, like for children.

They look like any other blanket in our house, you know?

And the lady's like, Well, these blankets, they were hand-suned by, you know, Chilean monks who took a vow of silence, and they're soaked overnight in unicorn tears.

And I'm just sitting there, like, just taking all this in, and of course, Mandy's like, that's the one.

Like, that is cotton made in Bangladesh, if I've ever seen it, you know?

Like, you don't try me.

I will test you on all of these things.

Your story, I'm going to test your story.

And so when I read this passage of scripture, it kind of validates my testing.

You see?

Like, I use this.

Here's the only problem is that John is talking about very serious things.

He's talking about very serious stuff going on, and he's not warning believers, but what he's doing is he's reminding believers of some dangerous stuff that's going on because he's talking to believers, and look in verse 1 of chapter 4.

Here's what he says: He says, Beloved, 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.

And so the question that I have when I read that first verse is this it's gone out from where?

Where have they gone out from?

Why all of a sudden are we worried about these evil spirits?

Here's why John is worried in this passage of scripture.

Because the people that are doing the false teaching, do you know where they came from?

The church.

They were coming out of the church.

The reason he's warning believers in the very first verse of this thing is because they are literally getting 99% of the truth.

The problem is the last 1% that they don't get.

Because something that is 99% true is still what?

100% lie, right?

That's just the way it goes.

And what John is doing is he's reminding believers hey, don't forget when he says, beloved, 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.

Why would he warn believers of this?

Because it looks just like you and I doing the false teaching.

There's no way to distinguish between the two.

So he gets serious about this.

And let me tell you something.

We still have to be serious about this.

You realize that, don't you?

Now I'll give you a prime example.

Uh stay up tonight till about 11 o'clock.

And then go to that channel on your television that shows all the TV preachers at night and listen to one of them.

And there's gonna be some stuff that you hear, and you're gonna go, I don't see anything wrong with that.

And if you listen just long enough, here's what you're gonna hear: something crazy.

And I made a mistake one time of, let's just say, putting my foot in my mouth.

I know you find that hard to believe.

I know you're shocked by that.

I was preaching at this church and this lady came up to me afterwards and her husband, and her husband goes, Do you ever listen?

I'm not gonna say the guy's name, do you ever listen to so-and-so?

And he named this big TV preacher.

I I mean, I didn't even think.

Like I my brain at this point was turned off.

I not even a thought about what's coming out of my mouth.

And I said, Good Lord, no, I don't listen to that moron.

And is you ever seen words come out of your mouth that you wish you could just like catch before they got somewhere and put them back in?

And I was like, that's bad.

That's bad.

Like, I I could just tell by their foot, their eyes, you know, at this point were a little large.

And I'm like, and I said, Did I say moron?

And by this point, they were they were done with me.

Um I said, I said, I don't, I said, I don't mean to be that way.

I said, he goes, well, let me ask you this, what's your problem with this guy?

Well, this particular guy he was talking about doesn't believe that Jesus actually died on the cross.

I have a major issue with that.

Does that make sense?

Like, I have a major issue that you have a what you call a church and that you are a preacher, but you don't believe that Jesus died on the cross.

I'm trying, I'm I'm struggling with the disconnect there.

You see what I mean?

Like that's that's tough for me.

So these things just came out.

And it's not that it's not that I knew any better, it's just that one of the things that I had done before I met these lovely people at this wonderful church that I was preaching at, I had heard this guy.

And I tested it by a very simple test that John lays out in the next two verses.

And if we look at verse two and three, look at what John says.

He says, By this you know the Spirit of God.

Every spirit that confesses 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, of which you have heard that is coming and is already in the world.

Do you understand that what John is doing here is he's not laying out this huge, sometimes we kind of get this big view of the Bible, right?

To where I can't tell you how many times people look at me and go, I don't really read the Bible because uh, you know, it's just too much, man.

It's too much to comprehend, it's too much to take in.

I get that, it's a lot, but here's the beauty of it.

In a lot of places in the Bible, in a lot of places in gospel accounts, a lot of places like John and John's epistles, here's what's so great about it is that there's some very simple steps laid out for us.

John doesn't come in right here and lay out a 50-point test theologically to look through everybody that comes along and says that they love Jesus.

That's not what John's doing here.

There's not this huge long laundry list of things where he goes, here's every single point that every single teacher has to hit in order for you to believe them.

That's not what he lays out right here.

What he does is he lays out one quick, simple test.

Good, bad, here's how it goes.

And this is what he says.

By this you know the Spirit of God.

Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.

Now, the other quote, the second question I have is this why would he throw in the words in the flesh?

Right there.

In the flesh.

Why would you throw that into this passage of scripture?

Back to that 99% truth, right?

What had happened at this point in the church, this is crazy.

I want you to wrap your mind around this.

At this point in the church, here's what's going on.

Outside influences from the world and from philosophy, and all of these things are coming into the church, and what they're doing is they're mixing 99% of the gospel with 1% of the world's belief in order to try to blend themselves in with the world.

Does that sound familiar to anybody?

It happens every day.

If it doesn't sound familiar, it happens every day.

We like to take the portions of God's word that we like, the good stuff, like I mentioned earlier about love and all of these things and grace and peace and all of that stuff, and we like to take all of those things and we go, look, look at this beautiful picture.

And then we get into this stuff about Antichrist and spirits and all this stuff, and we go, uh let's leave that, let's leave that part out.

Let's go back to the good stuff.

Go back to the good stuff.

John is literally, he's reminding these Christians that here's what's going on, man.

You're gonna get 99% of the truth.

But in order for you to know, everyone that you need to know that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.

Because what you were getting was a worldly view of Gnosticism going on right here.

And here's what that said.

That said that Jesus Christ could have never taken on actual flesh to take on our sins as mankind.

He would have never done that.

He stayed spirit the entire time that he was on earth.

That doesn't sound like a big deal, right?

You may hear that on TV and go, yeah, okay, whatever.

That's a big deal.

And here's why it's a big deal.

Because it's essential to the gospel that we believe.

The gospel that we believe says that Christ was not only fully God, but he was fully man, and the reason was because he had a job to do to take on our sin on the cross.

In order to do that, he had to be fully human and also fully God.

I know that's crazy, I know it sounds crazy, but listen, when you mix it with 99% of the truth, and you say, well, maybe he was just spirit and never took on that flesh.

And guess what?

All of a sudden you're into a pretty big-time heresy right there.

Because that means that all the work that Christ did was for nothing.

That one little twisting of the tree.

So when John looks and says, if they confess that Jesus Christ in verse 2 has come in the flesh.

This is from God.

He turns around and lays out the opposite.

He says, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

This is the spirit of the Antichrist, of which you've already heard that is coming and is now already in the world.

This is John circling back.

This is his classic way of doing things.

He liked to circle back over points that he already made.

The whole Antichrist thing and all of the stuff saying you already know this.

The reason they already know it, because he already wrote about it in the first couple of chapters of 1 John.

He's circling back to what he's already told him.

We do this all the time, right?

I do it.

It's real simple.

I, in my mind right now, have a running list of good and bad.

You probably do too, right?

I mean, for me, um, Home Depot, good.

Lowe's, bad.

Yeah?

Um I'm sure I could come up with some others.

You know, like in Mandy's case, there's a there's there's Chick-fil-A is good, right?

Until you forget the salad dressing.

Chick-fil-A, bad.

You see what I mean?

Like, we keep this running list of very simple things.

It doesn't take much, right?

It only takes a little bit for us to determine something good or bad.

And even the things that we that we know were good.

When we when we get into a situation and all of a sudden that situation changes our view of that thing, it turns into bad really quick, right?

So, what John's doing is he's going, hey man, this is happening fast.

This is a reminder because of what's going on so quickly.

And the quickest thing that's happening is these outside influences coming into the church and then going back out the door, and what they're doing is they're taking some of these good parts, but they're mixing it with some of the worldly parts, and all of a sudden, when those two worlds collide, people find it appealing.

But the problem is that it's bad.

Because it's not the truth, it's not the truth.

What he's doing here is he's laying out a real simple good and bad.

Not a 50-point checklist of theology that you have to have 10 degrees to figure out.

Do they confess Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, or do they not?

Because if they don't, we got a big time issue.

But see, then the next verse, it really, it really gets us.

Look at verse, look at verse 4.

It says, You are from God, little children, and have overcome them.

Because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

This is the verse, right?

This is the verse right here that we, you know, if if you're old school like I, you want to cross-stitch this, don't you?

On a pillow.

Put it on your couch.

So when everybody comes in, you can go.

Look at this beautiful cross-stitch.

I forgot, I don't even know how to cross-stitch.

I don't even know where I just came up with that.

But that's what this that's what we do with this, right?

We like to we like to take this one out of context and go, greater, see who's in you.

Yeah, I mean, we love to throw that out.

We love to pull that that portion of this out.

Now, don't worry about that antichrist part up there at the beginning.

Let's just let's take this good part right here and let's see this.

Let me let me just help you out.

I just I'm just gonna be real with you on this point and in all seriousness.

So, uh, let's see, five months ago, I go with my mom.

I was raised by a single mother.

I go with my mom to the doctor, and I watch a doctor look at her and say it's cancer and it's bad.

And let me just let me help you out here.

Because I'm the one standing behind the desk today, right?

This is me.

Got my Bible, got my notes, I'm the one standing here.

That means I've got it all together, right?

When that doctor looks at my mom and says that, says those words, can I tell you what my first thought was not?

It was not, well, greater is he?

No.

My first thought was, what have you done and why?

You see how quick that happened?

You see how fast that went down?

The greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

Do you understand what the world, what the word world means?

Do you understand how broad of a spectrum that is?

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

Compile every single thing that you can think of in the world, and greater is he who is in you.

The Jesus Christ, the true Christ, fully God and fully man, who bled and died on the cross for us.

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

But when a doctor looks at your mama and says, It's cancer and it's bad, he don't seem so great then.

And you have to be reminded over and over and over and over again.

And no matter what that outcome is, no matter what it looks like, no matter how it comes off, that stuff greater is He who is in you than He who is in the world.

And in that moment, you don't remember that.

And in the moment right here in this passage of scripture, do you know why John had to slip this incredible verse that you want to cross stitch on a pillow into the middle of this crazy insane passage?

Do you want to know why he had to do that?

It's real simple.

It's because that right there is the most easily forgotten thing in all of Christianity.

How great God is.

You'll forget that in a second.

When they look at you and say it's cancer, or when they look at you and say something's happened, or when they look at you and say, it's bad.

And over and over and over again, as believers, we have to have that reminder.

And John slips it into this passage right here because even in the amongst the talks of spirits and testing and antichrist and all of these things, the one thing that he doesn't want believers to forget is greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

Look at verse 5 and 6.

It says, They are from the world.

Therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them.

We are from God.

He who knows God listens to us.

He who is not from God does not listen to us.

By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

That can come off a little harsh sometimes.

That can come off as when you read that, John really kind of drawing a line in the saying, this kind of fork in the road of here's who's good and here's who's bad, and especially when you get into like verse 6, where he says, We are from God.

He who knows God listens to us.

It kind of kind of gives you this idea that he's being very um, you know, exclusive, right?

That he's going, now, now don't forget, uh, I'm right.

But see, that's the problem, is right there, okay?

Just in that simple mindset of what we just did right there, if you read that verse and your first thought was, well, that's, I mean, we, we are right.

Listen to us.

You, you know.

If you listen to us, you know God.

If you don't listen to us, you know.

If it comes off as that in Scripture, then what has happened to us that read it that way, you know what that is?

It's kind of that world's view, right?

Of coming in and mixing it up with Scripture a little bit.

What John's doing here is he's not going, we as in, we're the only ones that are correct.

Well, I'm the only one that you need to listen to.

It's not, as a matter of fact, that can be super dangerous when you have somebody that does that.

What John is saying is when he uses we and us and those uh those those terms to describe what's going on here, what he's saying is true believers.

We, us as believers, those who know that Jesus Christ came in the Flesh, who know what he did on the cross for us.

We, he's not saying just me or just my apostles, or just we, the believers that are out in this world, the believers that know the full gospel of Jesus Christ and understand how great he is and the great things that he did for us and how he fully came to this earth in flesh and took on our sins.

He's saying, listen to us, to those that believe.

He says, We are from God in verse 6.

He who knows God listens to us.

He who is not from God does not listen to us.

By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

This entire passage is a fork in the road.

The whole thing is a fork in the road.

He's going, here's the quick test for good and bad.

Here's the quick test for right and wrong.

And in the world that we live in today, I understand, believe me, I told you, come back next week and I promise it'll all be right with the world.

If you have a Bible, I can prove to you it's gonna be right with the world.

Because the very next passage, you know, you want to know what the the title is above the next passage?

God is love.

Please come back next week.

It's gonna be awesome.

You won't hear a thing about the Antichrist.

You won't hear a thing about evil spirits, you won't hear a thing about right and wrong because those are things that we don't enjoy talking about, right?

We don't like it.

It's not fun.

As a matter of fact, our world tells us don't do it.

Just don't do it, just stay somewhere in the middle and just kind of stick it out.

But what John's doing is completely contrary, and he's not warning believers, he's reminding believers.

And the reminder is 99% truth is still 100% a lie.

He's reminding believers that this quick test of knowing Christ and knowing that he took on flesh and took on our sins on the cross, that is what determines right and wrong.

Don't make it about anything else.

So, what does this mean for us today?

Why did I get stuck with this?

What's the point of even having to crack open the Bible and try to figure this thing out?

It's because do you see the similarities between what's going on there and what's going on right here, right now?

It's the same.

It's the exact same.

The same false teachers come out of the same church, they come out of the same belief that they are right and you are wrong, and all of these worlds collapse on top of each other, and there's even other religions that come out and go, we believe the same thing that you believe.

And and then they come out and tell you, well, all of you know, we're all just in the same boat, it's not a big deal, all that blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.

Do you understand what's going on?

It's the very same thing today that John dealt with when he wrote this passage of scripture.

And he says, By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

Brothers and sisters, the spirit of truth and the spirit of error is determined by one thing, and that is Jesus Christ taking on flesh and dying on the cross for my sins and for your sins and for the sins of all mankind.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer this morning.

Lord, thanks for today.

I don't know that uh I don't know that I can I can do this passage any justice.

I don't know that I can teach anybody anything on it.

I know that you put it in my hands to preach for some reason, and I just pray that it landed the way it was supposed to land.

Lord, as we continue to worship you this morning, continue through having communion, I just pray that you'd be exalted in this place.

And that all that we do would bring you glory and honor.

First, in Jesus' name.

Amen.