The Word This Week
1 John 4:1...
Since John has been teaching us so much about being led of the Holy Spirit of God, here he provides an important caution: Test the spirits you are listening to, whether they are of God.
We tend to identify all ‘supernatural’ occurrences as being of God, because we are immediately in awe of what is inexplicable in the natural realm.
There is real danger here, because God’s Word teaches us Satan is a lying spirit, full of falsehoods and deceptions. John speaks of this when he says, “many false prophets have gone into the world.”
There is a very great protection from those claiming to be prophets of God and are not.
1.Do they confess Jesus Christ has come in the flesh?
2.Do they confess Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that God abides in Him, and He in God?
Additionally - and generally - does everything they say and everything they do accord completely and exactly with the Word of God?
These are important tests to apply to everyone who says they proclaim God’s Word. Our example in the Word of God is to respond as the Bereans did in Acts 17:11. They even checked out the word Paul the apostle delivered to them by searching the Word of God daily to see if all Paul was teaching them was found there.
Rather than being upset by this seeming lack of trust in the words of the apostle Paul, the Bible records them as being, “more fair-minded.”
The spirit of Antichrist is certainly alive in the world today, as it always has been. This demon spirit has specific designs on the soul of every man. The enemy’s design is to undermine the faith of true believers, encourage the ‘faith’ of misbelievers, and to extinguish and keep extinguished the faith of unbelievers.
The Gnostics imposed their supposed intellectual superiority to intimidate new believers in the same way theological liberals do in our day. Since we regard them as intellectually superior, we are inclined to take their word when they speak because we presume their words are bolstered by years of study - and therefore they know more than we do when it comes to God’s Word.
But all of us can read God’s Word to know if what they say is true. Never trust in the words of any man, but only in the Word of God. Stay simple-minded about Christ and His great love. The true Spirit of God is the Author of the Word of God, and His guidance will always be in accordance with all and only what God’s Word declares.
Pastor Bill
Since John has been teaching us so much about being led of the Holy Spirit of God, here he provides an important caution: Test the spirits you are listening to, whether they are of God.
We tend to identify all ‘supernatural’ occurrences as being of God, because we are immediately in awe of what is inexplicable in the natural realm.
There is real danger here, because God’s Word teaches us Satan is a lying spirit, full of falsehoods and deceptions. John speaks of this when he says, “many false prophets have gone into the world.”
There is a very great protection from those claiming to be prophets of God and are not.
1.Do they confess Jesus Christ has come in the flesh?
2.Do they confess Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that God abides in Him, and He in God?
Additionally - and generally - does everything they say and everything they do accord completely and exactly with the Word of God?
These are important tests to apply to everyone who says they proclaim God’s Word. Our example in the Word of God is to respond as the Bereans did in Acts 17:11. They even checked out the word Paul the apostle delivered to them by searching the Word of God daily to see if all Paul was teaching them was found there.
Rather than being upset by this seeming lack of trust in the words of the apostle Paul, the Bible records them as being, “more fair-minded.”
The spirit of Antichrist is certainly alive in the world today, as it always has been. This demon spirit has specific designs on the soul of every man. The enemy’s design is to undermine the faith of true believers, encourage the ‘faith’ of misbelievers, and to extinguish and keep extinguished the faith of unbelievers.
The Gnostics imposed their supposed intellectual superiority to intimidate new believers in the same way theological liberals do in our day. Since we regard them as intellectually superior, we are inclined to take their word when they speak because we presume their words are bolstered by years of study - and therefore they know more than we do when it comes to God’s Word.
But all of us can read God’s Word to know if what they say is true. Never trust in the words of any man, but only in the Word of God. Stay simple-minded about Christ and His great love. The true Spirit of God is the Author of the Word of God, and His guidance will always be in accordance with all and only what God’s Word declares.
Pastor Bill