The Spirit of God Confesses Jesus

God Loves Us
God's Eternal, Preserving, Renewing Love

The Source of all Love

1 John 4:1-6. The Message

Don’t Believe Everything You Hear

4 My dear friends, don’t believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.
2-3 Here’s how you test for the genuine Spirit of God. Everyone who confesses openly his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God, who came as an actual flesh-and-blood person—comes from God and belongs to God. And everyone who refuses to confess faith in Jesus has nothing in common with God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you heard was coming. Well, here it is, sooner than we thought!
4-6 My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world. These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up. But we come from God and belong to God. Anyone who knows God understands us and listens. The person who has nothing to do with God will, of course, not listen to us. This is another test for telling the Spirit of Truth from the spirit of deception.

For Reflection

The Bible is used constantly in American public discourse by people who have not studied it and are frighteningly misinformed about its content.* How can we discern among the Christian leaders who is authentic and who is not?

Grounded in Matthew, Wiersbe** offers three tests.  First, how much has your faith cost you?  Secondly, did your decision to follow Christ change your life? And thirdly, what would God say?  Do they result from your obedience to God's will?  One may use the vocabulary of Christianity, memorize Bible verses, and sing hymns an yet not be obedient to the will of God.  The ultimate measure of a teacher is found in the fruit of his or her labor.

Our souls yearn to be filled.  When filled with God's love, compassion and grace the Spirit will enable God's will. The authentic Christian will be animated by the will of God and love as God loves.

*Meyers, Robin. The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus (p. 39). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
**Wiersbe, Warren W.. Be Loyal (Matthew): Following the King of Kings (The BE Series Commentary). David C Cook. Kindle Edition. 

Pray

Pray that you will know how to love as God loves.  Pray that you will have another's best interest as your first interest.  Pray that your acts of love will be multiplied by God's presence in your life and in those lives you have touched.