Who Speaks for God? #2

Every spirit, every so-called prophet, every teacher that does not confess Jesus in that full, undiminished sense is expressing the spirit of the Antichrist.

How can you tell a genuine article from a fake, say like a counterfeit dollar bill? Well, thankfully, there are tell-tale signs to help you. As you'll learn today, the same applies to religious teachers. Hello there, I'm Bill Wright, welcoming you back to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Well, Don, last time you began a message called Who Speaks for God? And you highlighted two of three main points to glean from our passage in 1 John chapter 4. So how about a quick review?

Well, sure, I'm happy to do that. You know, we saw last time that the command for discernment and the need for discernment points us in the direction of what we're studying here today. Scripture commands us to be discerning because there are many false teachers in the world, and you need to know who truly speaks for God.

Today we'll see the simple tests that will give you clarity. My friend, please don't be gullible. Take the time to grow in your understanding. May Christ help you as you listen to our program now. Well, friend, have your Bible at the ready as we join Don Green now, teaching God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit. I want you to see at the end of chapter 3, verse 13, he says, Don't be surprised, brethren, my spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ. Don't be surprised if the world hates you. Verse 18, Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue.

He's probably about 90 years old when he's writing this. Everyone was a child to him by comparison, and he has that affectionate tone of a father loving his children, saying, Little children, let me tell you something else. And then in verse 21, chapter 3, verse 21, he says, Beloved, if our heart doesn't condemn us, we have confidence before God. John's apostolic love for his readers is only a reflection that points you to the love that God has for his sons and daughters in Christ. This is the attitude of God toward his children.

It is a loving, protective attitude. And so when he calls us to discernment, he's calling us that way in order to protect us and in order to bless us. And churches and professing Christians ignore this command only in disobedience to God and in putting their own souls in peril. You can't be undiscerning and be an obedient Christian, let's put it that way, because the commands come too frequently in the Scriptures to view it any other way. So that's the need for discernment.

And that's the motive behind it, is God's love for his church, Christ's love for his church, and the Apostle John's love for the particular flock that was in front of him as he was writing this letter. We're not discerning because we're hateful people. We're discerning because we're loving people, and we want to protect people from those influences that would destroy them. We want to protect them from satanic doctrine that would lead them to hell. Of course we're going to be discerning.

Of course we're going to call out false teachers when we see them. It's not that we're itching for a fight. It's that we're itching to protect the flock of God in obedience to what the Scripture says.

This isn't complicated. This is the heart of God for his people on display as we read this text. Well, the command for discernment, the need for discernment, what comes next?

Point number three, this is where we'll spend the remainder of our time. Point number three, the tests for discernment. The tests for discernment. If I'm going to determine whether something is genuine, I need a standard by which to compare it to.

I need a standard to compare it to. How can I know genuine teachers? How can I know those who truly speak for God?

I need something to evaluate them by, something that goes beyond my gut check. You know, you'll hear people say that, well, I just had a check in my spirit as that person was talking. Well, you know, did you have tacos earlier? Was that what was, you know, maybe that was the check in your gut.

That's happened to me not too long ago. Don't rely on indigestion to give you a sense of discernment. No, no, the sense of discernment is first of all objective.

It is outside of you. There are standards of truth outside of you that are independent of your existence that help us understand what is true and what is not. Those things that help us discern true teachers from false teachers. Those things that help us discern true Christians from false Christians, even if they're not in a teaching capacity. And for some of you, those tests that would apply to you to see whether you yourself are truly in the faith as you claim to be or not.

It's the same standards that are operating to give us clarity in all of these things. But John is applying them particularly to teachers in this passage. So point number three, the tests for discernment. Now, John had earlier written in the letter that you could identify false teachers and false Christians through, get this, their ungodly lifestyles and their unloving dispositions, their unloving behavior. The ungodly lifestyles and unloving dispositions expose who true Christians are and who the children of the devil are. Look at chapter 3 verse 10. By this, the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious. This is obvious.

This is plain for everyone to see. Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not from God, ungodly lifestyle, nor the one who does not love his brother, unloving nature. Ungodly lifestyle, unloving nature, clearly exposing somebody as a false professor, a false teacher. Harsh, arrogant men, even if they are speaking things that are apparently true, are not men to be followed. Now, I've seen some of them in the past.

They're not around here. But in past church experience, I've seen men like that in leadership, liars, arrogant, abusive. Those are men that need to be kicked out, not affirmed, just because they happen to speak things that are true. So John tells us, watch out for ungodly lifestyle.

Watch out for the arrogant men and be discerning and let it be obvious to you who's true and who's not. Because if they live that way, you can tell that they're not true believers. Get this, if they tell you that you can live that way and still be a true Christian, they're false teachers. Because true Christians are loving, true Christians are obedient to God's word, true Christians hunger after Christ. And someone tells you that you can profess Christ as a child and live unchanged for decades and still be a true Christian and go to heaven when you die, that is an absolute lie, no matter what else they say. Because this is obvious, John says. God says in his word that someone who does not practice righteousness is not from God, and the one who does not love his brother is not from God.

Let's not make this more complicated than it is. Let's not make excuses for people that we see or loved ones in our family who are living godless lives and yet profess Christ. Don't give them the comfort of saying, well, I'm sure you're just, you know, the Lord just needs to, you know, you need to come back to the Lord. Well, they need to come to the Lord, but it's not come back. It's because they're not saved that they're living that way.

This is obvious, John says. Now, as we move into chapter 4, he's dealing with a different aspect of discernment. He's dealing with two doctrinal tests to aid our discernment. And remember, we're trying to answer the question, who speaks for God? Well, think about this.

I was thinking about this just a little while ago. There are two places that come immediately to my mind where the Scripture particularly says that God has spoken. One of them is in Hebrews chapter 1 verse 2 where it says that in these latter days God has spoken in his Son. God spoke in Christ. God spoke in the incarnation. Elsewhere, 2 Timothy 3 16 says, all Scripture is inspired by God. God breathed. God breathed out and the Scriptures came into existence, as it were. God speaking in his Son. God speaking in the Scriptures. Now, get this. This is so simple.

This is so simple. The man who truly speaks for God is going to be a man who speaks where God has already spoken. He's going to be a man who speaks on Christ and exalts and glorifies Christ. And he's going to be a man who speaks and explains the Scriptures because that is where God has spoken. And when you read this passage in 1 John 4, you see that that is exactly where John points our attention as well.

Point number 3 is the test for discernment. Subpoint number 1, examine their view of Christ. What is their view of Christ?

Because a person's teaching about Christ is the acid test. Those who rightly confess Jesus prove that they possess the Spirit of truth, that the Holy Spirit is truly speaking through them. The Holy Spirit, whose ministry is to glorify not himself, but to glorify Christ.

That's what you look for. Look at verses 2 and 3. 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. 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 it is coming and now it is already in the world.

Now I want you to notice something here. First of all, when he says that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, he's speaking about the incarnation. He's speaking that this man's view of Christ is that Jesus Christ is God from all eternity past, God come in human flesh.

He's saying that is what it means. This is a spirit that confesses Jesus. Look for a man who confesses the true incarnation, that doesn't try to diminish Christ by saying he was a God, or he was a created being, or he was someone else supernatural, or he was a really good man, or he was the greatest of all the prophets.

No, anything that pulls Jesus down off his deity by any degree whatsoever is a mark of the Antichrist, because a false Christ cannot save you. You must believe in the true Christ in order to be saved. The Gospel of John says in John 1, verse 14, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

How simple, how clear is that? The Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John 1.14. The teachers in John's day didn't teach that. There were men who were saying that Jesus, the man Jesus, was an ordinary man born by ordinary means of procreation to Joseph and Mary, and that a Christ spirit came upon him at his baptism, that abided on him, and that gave him the power for his earthly ministry, and then that spirit departed Jesus before he was crucified. And so Jesus, under this teaching, was born as an ordinary baby to ordinary parents, and he died as an ordinary man.

There was just this parenthesis in between. They denied the incarnation. They taught a false Christ. Notice they were talking about Jesus. They were attributing supernatural things to him, but in the end they denied the incarnation. They denied that Jesus was the Christ from God who came in flesh.

Jesus himself. It wasn't that the Christ spirit came into a pre-existing man. No, the man Jesus was a human expression. He was the God in human flesh. Jesus came from heaven and became that man.

He didn't come into somebody pre-existing. He was that man. He was incarnated, as it were. Now the Apostle John says that true teachers affirm that. True teachers affirm that God became flesh in Jesus Christ.

True teachers affirm that deity and human flesh were fully wedded together forever in Christ, and that this was done for the work of our redemption. Jesus was a full human being so that he could die in our place. He was fully God, uncreated, co-equal with the Father, with the Father through all of eternity. There was never a time where Jesus was not. There was never a point in the history of all time where Jesus was not pre-existing eternally, you could say. Jesus was fully God so that his sacrifice on the cross could have infinite value to redeem his people. He died as our substitute. He died to save us.

Anyone who does not teach those things is a false teacher inspired by the devil himself. That's what John is saying here. What I want you to see here in particular at this point, notice in verse 3, every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. Understand that he's simply saying confess Jesus there in verse 3 as a shorthand reference to everything he had just said in verse 2. It's the full confession of verse 2 and you need to make that full confession in verse 3. It's not simply that he acknowledges the historical existence of a man named Jesus and therefore if he confesses that minimum amount, then you can give him a pass. No, he's using that as a shorthand reference to bring into verse 3 everything that he had said in verse 2. And every spirit, every teacher, look at it, it's just right there on the pages of Scripture.

I am not making this up. Every spirit, every so-called prophet, every teacher that does not confess Jesus in that full undiminished sense is expressing the spirit of the Antichrist. The spirit of the Antichrist is speaking through that man.

The spirit of the Antichrist is speaking through that man who week after week, month after month, stands in a pulpit and simply tells his funny stories and never gets around to really teaching truth about Christ. Because this confession is an open confession. It's an open thing. It's not something the teacher hides in his heart and he says, yes, I believe that but my ministry is something else so I'm going to talk about these other things as I supposedly speak for God. No.

No. If a man is a pastor, if a man is called to teach and proclaim the Word of God and he truly believes these things that we're talking about, he will have to speak about them because his heart compulsion is such that he couldn't speak about anything else. When you truly love Christ as a minister of the Gospel, you can't get up and talk about stupid, silly, earthly things because you're so compelled by the greatness and the grandeur of Jesus Christ and the greatness and the grandeur of the Gospel and you're so compelled by the urgent need of the people in front of you to believe and to be saved from their sins. You're so compelled by that that you can't talk about anything else. It's an open and free confession. And so if a guy gets up and puts on a show for you week after week to entertain you and to make you laugh, to look like a good storyteller, and then just tacks Jesus on at the end of it, get out.

Run from men like that. Because the little bit of Jesus that they talk about is simply a way to inoculate you against the truth, to lower your standard of discernment, say, well, he must believe it because he mentioned Jesus at the end. Please. If a man truly believes these things, Jesus is front and center. The Scriptures are front and center. And that's all wrapped up in that verb, confess.

It's open. This is his declaration. You don't give men room to say they have these private beliefs that never work their way out into what they say in their ministry. That's even more damnable than anything else.

To say you believe it and then to never talk about it, to hide it, put yourself forward. False teachers are going to face a greater condemnation, James 3.1. I wish these men would tremble and fear God because the Scripture says they've become a mouthpiece for the Antichrist. Those who teach falsely about Christ or who stay silent about Christ are giving voice to demons. They are forerunners of the Antichrist who will appear at the end of the age. That's what it says, verse 3.

Look at it again. I'm not making any of this up. Every spirit that does not openly confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, of which you've heard that it is coming and now it is already in the world. If you read on in the Bible and you read about the outcome of the career of the Antichrist as he's cast into eternal hell, you don't want to go there. You don't want to follow men like that. You don't want to follow men who are expressing the spirit of the Antichrist.

So be on guard. Be discerning. Keep your mind in the Scriptures so that when these men come along, you can recognize them and turn away because true teachers openly proclaim the true Christ. Their view of Christ and what they say about Christ and what they don't say gives you grounds for great discernment. Secondly, as our time starts to get away from us, the other test that John lists out here going beyond their view of Christ is their view of Scripture, their view of Scripture. You can recognize true teachers by their attitude and their submission to apostolic teaching. True teachers affirm the Bible as the inerrant word of God. When I say the Bible, I'm talking about the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament.

Nothing more, nothing less. They affirm that as the inerrant word of God. They heed it. They teach it.

They obey it. Look at verses 4 through 6 with me quickly. He says, you are from God, little children.

There it is again. You see that pastoral note of assurance? In the midst of talking about these false teachers, he immediately comes back to his audience and says, you're from God, little children. He affirms them. He loves them. He doesn't want them to be in a place of doubt and confusion and questions.

He is affirming them just like he was at the end of chapter 3. You're from God, little children, and you have overcome them because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world. Therefore, they speak us 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.

I have to go through this fairly quickly, but I want you to notice something. Notice in verse 4, in the English text, you. Verse 5, they. Verse 6, we. It's a very emphatic contrast in the original text. He's drawing sharp lines of distinction between you, the true Christians who were his audience and the intended recipients of this letter, they, the false teachers who were in a separate group, and then us, we, he says, talking not about Christian teachers in general, but specifically talking about the apostles.

These verses are making emphatic contrasts. And in verse 4, as he says you to the true Christians, he says you have overcome the false teachers because the Holy Spirit has guided you into the truth. If you have turned away from false teachers, if you have stepped out of a cult and now are following the true Christ, understand it wasn't because of your superior intellect or superior perception. It is because the Holy Spirit had mercy on you and led you out of that and taught you and gave you discernment and led you away from them. He says that's how you've overcome the world. And when you are truly a Christian, that verb overcome, it's in the perfect tense.

It's an accomplished fact with ongoing results continuing on. You have overcome them and you abide in the continuing results of having overcome them. The Holy Spirit who led you out will not let you go back.

He will keep you. You have overcome them. They are a vanquished and defeated foe. These false teachers are, he says to these true Christians, you escaped their lies because of the goodness of the Holy Spirit on your life. Now, in verse 5, he refers to the false teachers. He says, you know why the world listens to them? He says they listen to them because the world listens to its own kind. When a religious teacher, I don't want to call him a Christian teacher, when a religious teacher rises to prominence and has vast people following him or even a lesser-known man who has congregated around him a bunch of unbelievers as he's teaching on supposedly spiritual matters.

Understand that the audience of these teachers is exposing you to their true reality. The world listens to people who speak from the world. They listen to their own circle. Sinners like false teachers because the sinners themselves are rebelling against the true God and the teaching of the false teacher allows them to continue in that rebellion. It never calls them to repent.

It never challenges them in their sin and calls them out of it. And the apostles, he says, here in verse 6, we are from God. We apostles are from God and he who knows God listens to us. The test of listening to apostolic teaching, submitting to, obeying, explaining, affirming apostolic teaching, that's the test here. This view of scripture, any teaching from that day forward, from the time of Christ forward, must be consistent with apostolic doctrine or it is to be rejected. This passage is a gift of mercy from God to the church. He gives us these tests so that we can know that we are of the truth, that we truly have eternal life and so that we can walk in joy during our time on earth. My prayer is that the Holy Spirit would guide you to true teachers and keep you from those who would undermine you in the faith.

That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, with part 2 of a message called, Who Speaks for God, here on the Truth Pulpit. Well Don, as you reminded us today, how a teacher relates to and measures up against scripture is really the key test in discerning a genuine biblical teacher. And Jesus himself warned about false prophets in no uncertain terms.

He certainly did. In Matthew 7, verse 15, Jesus said, Beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. That passage will be the subject of our next study and I encourage you to be with us next time. It will build on what you've heard today. Until then, let me encourage you to take a moment to send a note to our website.

We'd be glad to pray for you if you have some things on your heart. Bill can tell you where to find us. Well friend, just before we go, let me remind you again to visit thetruthpulpit.com. There you can hear today's program again at your convenience and learn much more about our ministry. That's all at thetruthpulpit.com. And now for Don Green, I'm Bill Wright. We'll see you again next time when Don continues teaching God's people God's Word from the truth pulpit.