FHBC Sermon Notes

1 John 4:1-6 - Life in inherently spiritual in nature. Far beyond our mere physical being, we live in essence a spiritual life.

"May our whole body, spirit and soul be blameless in Christ." Our essence is more than physical. This is a spiritual life that is more real than this physical world even. Yet it is not some ethereal thing without substance, or something we find only in our heads and hearts.

1. Why do we need to test the spirits? (4:1,4)

We know there is a spiritual world. God is spirit. We know that Satan is a spirit. Yet, what about the little things, the "physical" things.

Matthew 18:18-20 - What about the mundane? What about our words? Our words have a spiritual nature.
Ephesians 5:15-20 - What about our time? How we use our time is a spiritual matter.
Collisions 3 - What about our entertainment? This to is spiritual. We are to turn our minds on things above, to the heavenly, to the spiritual.

Our life in Christ is not a playground, but it is a battleground. Ephesians 6:12, 1 Corinthians 15:58

Jim speaks for a moment on testing the spirits when we are in school or in college. We must discern what we are hearing in class. So true. I'd like to add to this that in discerning we must not be afraid to learn from where we are. In order to discern we must able to articulate the arguments of our foes better than they. In this we are able to speak in knowledge and in truth. We have nothing to fear in engaging in this way. To shut our ears and run is to miss a real gospel opportunity. Let us remember than each of those we find telling the lies of this world, are just like we were. Blind. We can not convince them, but God can, and he does want to use us in this revealing. His remnant is in the world, but not of it. He has left us here for a purpose, to proclaim, not to hide.

Live in your victory.

Watch for those spiritual niceties and revelations that leads us to leave our God for another. - Deuteronomy 13:2-5

2. How do we test the Spirits?
We test what we her against God's revealed truth, against his word, against scripture.
See Psalm 119. Joshua 1:8. Psalm 1:1-2. 2 Timothy 3:16. 2 Peter 3:14-18

John here also addresses the Gnostics of the time that tried to separate the spiritual Christ from the person of Jesus. They applied this to ourselves even now, trying to separate what we do and have here from our "true" spirit nature. But, this is misleading, the fruit of our lives demonstrates our spiritual nature.

We must stay true to the biblical Jesus. Not replace him with our own version.
When we spiritualize things nowadays we often do the same thing. If we treat our spiritual lives separate from our physical one, with feelings, with relativistic understandings of truth and morality, we are lead away from our savior. We replace the true biblical Jesus with a idolistic version of Jesus that is simply our own: not revealed by the Fathered, but created and twisted of ourselves. These lies are the same lies that have existed since the beginning.