How to tell Truth from Error

Perhaps you recognize some of these names: Auburn, Troy, Utica, Rome, Rochester. All of them are towns in upstate New York, right? Perhaps you didn’t know that 150 years ago, these places were the scene of a great spiritual revival. In those rough, pioneer days, tent meetings flourished in upstate NY, and thousands of people’s lives were changed as they met God. Great preachers like Charles G. Finney of Rochester fanned the flames of revival, so that by 1840, people were calling upstate New York the “burned over district” because of the intensity of the Spirit’s movement there.

But something very strange happened in upstate New York in the years to follow. I believe that it has a lot to do with the passage we are going to look at today in 1 John.

John has been telling us what an authentic Christian looks like. So far, he’s given us three characteristics:

1. An authentic Christian is one who deals biblically with sin in his life. The person who really knows God is the person who understands that he is a sinner. He doesn’t gloss over it. He doesn’t blame other people for his sin. He doesn’t try to rationalize it. He agrees with God when God calls it sin. He repents of it. And God cleanses him. The truly authentic Christian is the one who deals with sin this way.

2. The authentic Christian is one who desires to do the will of God. He wants to obey God in everything. He keeps a “weather-eye out” for the will of God every day. One of the ways that this shows itself is in the area of love. The man who obeys God is the man who loves others. This is the second mark of authenticity.

3. The authentic Christian loves the Father, not the world. He understands that the world is a system controlled by Satan and that it is arrayed against God. So he doesn’t buy into the world’s values or the world’s priorities. He doesn’t let the world press him into its mold. He resists the pull of his own fleshly appetites. He resists the love of beauty divorced from the love of goodness which the Bible calls the lust of the eyes. And he resists the temptation to lift himself up while he puts others down: the pride of life.

Now these three marks of an authentic Christian all have to do with how he lives. They are behavioral. He acknowledges and confesses his sin. He seeks to obey God. He resists the world.

Today we are going to look at a test of authenticity which has to do with what we believe. This characteristic has to do with doctrine, with truth. But it is vitally important for how we live because what we believe in our hearts to be true determines how we will live our lives. Let’s look at our passage for today:

Read 1 John 2:18-23.

The people to whom John was writing in the first century AD had a problem. The problem was that there were a lot of false teachers out there. There was a lot of false doctrine going around under the name of Christianity. How could they tell what was true and what was false? How could they determine authentic Christian teaching?

Well John gives them a very simple test. It is found in verse 22

1 John 2:22 Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ.

You want to know who the authentic Christian teacher is? It’s the one who acknowledges that the man Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Messiah, the Son of God. It is the man who believes that Jesus Christ is God. Not just in touch with God, not just a part of God, not just sent by God, not just related to God. Jesus was a man who was, and therefore is, God. This is the acid test of authentic Christian truth.

Now there were a lot of people in those days who went around calling themselves Christians who didn’t believe this. Remember the Gnostics? They called themselves Christians, but they taught that Jesus was just a man who was indwelt by God for part of his life. They said that “the Christ” came upon Jesus at his baptism and left just before his crucifixion. These Gnostics said that they got this knowledge as a special anointing from God. But the Bible says they’re liars. They’re not Christians at all. As a matter of fact, they are antichrists.

The word antichrist is a very powerful word, with some pretty awesome connotations. Verse 18 tells us that it is the last hour and that many antichrists will be around in the last hour. It is very important for us to understand exactly what that means.

Sometimes when we hear a term like “the last hour”, we immediately think of the end of time, the Tribulation Period, the Battle of Armaggeddon, and the Second Coming of Christ. Well, that’s understandable, but that’s only part of the picture. When the Bible refers to this present age - that is, the time from the First Coming of Jesus Christ right up to the Second Coming - it calls this period the last days, or the last times, or the last hour. It is a time of transition. It’s the beginning of the end. Satan’s sentence has been pronounced but not yet executed. God’s kingdom has been inaugurated, but not fully realized here on earth. So far, that period - the last hour - has lasted almost 2000 years. We are living in the last hour. Christians a thousand years ago were living in the last hour. The original readers of John’s letter were living in the last hour in the first century AD.

But it is also true that the Bible says that at the end of this period called the last hour will be a special “last hour” when those catastrophic events will take place. That special last hour at the end of the last hour will be like a microcosm of all that went before. Only much worse. While there are many little antichrists running around during the last hour, there will come The Antichrist at the end. And you don’t want to meet him!

The best analogy I can think of to help you understand this has to do with the Second World War. When did Nazi Germany lose the war? You could argue that she lost it on June 6, 1944, the day that the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy. Hitler’s fate was sealed on that day. It was the beginning of the end - the Third Reich entered its “last hour” on that day. But of course the war went on for almost another year. Finally, on April 30 of 1945, with the Russian army at the gates of Berlin, Hitler entered his last hour. With the bombs crashing down on his chancellery, holed up in a bunker deep underground, the madman put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. That was the last hour at the end of the last hour.

1 John 2:18 Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.

The word antichrist not only means “against Christ”, but also means “instead of Christ”. These false teachers, these little antichrists, offer up a doctrine that not only is against Christ but is a substitute for Christ. If you believe their teaching, you don’t need Christ anymore. Their way of salvation doesn’t depend upon the sacrifice of the Son of God on the cross .

1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

This is perhaps the most disturbing thing of all. These false teachers, these people who are antichrists started off in the church. And they went out from the church to follow their false doctrine. But notice that the Bible says that though they were in the church and went out from the church, they were never of the church. They never really belonged to the Body of Christ. Their going out proved it.

There are always people in the church who are not of the church. They look like Christians, they talk like Christians, they may even act like Christians at times. But they are not Christians. They do not belong to Christ. They have never put their trust in him for salvation. They are living a lie. They may be fooling themselves and everyone else, but they are not fooling God. Sooner or later, they go out from the church.

Remember the burned-over district of upstate New York? In the years that followed those great revivals, some pretty strange things happened. In 1820, a young man named Joseph Smith attended one of those revivals. He was stirred spiritually. But instead of getting into his Bible and looking for the truth there, Smith began to follow visions and dreams. He claimed that he had been given a special revelation from God on golden tablets. He wrote a book called the Book of Mormon which superseded the Bible. And the rest is history. The Mormon church today is one of the fastest growing churches in America. Though the Mormons would like you to believe that they are Christians, they are as antichrist as you can get. They deny the deity of Jesus Christ.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us.

Maggie and Kate Fox were sisters. They lived in the little town of Hydeville in upstate New York. They were respectable church-going ladies, well thought of in their community. One day in 1848, they heard some knocking sounds in their bedroom. They assumed that these sounds were coming from the spirits of dead people who were trying to communicate with the living. So they founded a movement called the Spiritist movement. At its peak, this movement claimed 10 million adherents in North America. People like Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada, and Episcopal bishop James Pike practiced Spiritism. Apparently none of these respectable church-going people knew or cared that the Bible says that spiritism is abomination to the Lord and plays right into the hands of Satan.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us.

In 1848, again in the burned-over district of upstate New York, a man called John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious commune near Utica. It was known as the Oneida community and became famous for producing fine silverware. This commune was made up of very devout people who had come from many churches in the area. Soon, they began to practice communal marriage. They even tried genetic experiments in an attempt to introduce the kingdom of God on earth. John Humphrey Noyes, the leader of the commune, came to believe that he himself was sinless.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us.

In nearby Allegheny, PA, a young man named Charles Taze Russell had been studying his Bible. But he didn’t like everything he read there. He didn’t like the idea that there was a place called hell. He refused to accept the doctrine of the trinity, because he couldn’t understand it. Russell took what he wanted from the Bible and mixed it with his own ideas. In 1879 he began to publish a magazine called Zion’s Watchtower. This was the beginning of the Jehovah’s Witness movement, a movement which denies that Jesus Christ is God and which believes that salvation is dependent upon human works.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us.

The point I am trying to make here is that it does not matter if you go to church or are in the church, or stand under the umbrella of Christianity. That is not what makes you a Christian. The authentic Christian is one who believes that Jesus is God. And if you believe that Jesus is God, then you believe that what he did on the cross is the only thing that’s good enough to save you. You enter a personal relationship with Him.

Do you believe this? Have you really faced up to your sins in light of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you come to God in repentance, owning up to your guilt and admitting your iniquity? Have you really cast yourself upon Him and only Him for your salvation? Is there evidence in your life that you really belong to Christ? Do you really love the Word of God? Do you really want the Word of God? Is it your bread, your meat, your drink? Do you really want to obey what you read there? Do you really love others? Do you really love Jesus?

We need to ask ourselves these questions. The Bible teaches that the authentic Christian will have these things in his life as evidence of the fact that he has been born again. It’s time to stop playing church. It’s time to stop the charade. If these things do not characterize your life, you may not be a Christian. I believe in the security of the believer, but I also believe in promoting the insecurity of the make-believer. If you are sitting here in this service and you are a make-believer, I want you to feel insecure. I want you to feel so uncomfortable and insecure that you’ll put your trust in Jesus and Him alone for your salvation and settle this matter once for all.

We live in a world where there are a lot of lies going around masquerading as the truth. Television preachers like Robert Schuller, under the mantle of Christianity, tell us that “possibility thinking” is going to enable us to become all that God wants us to be. Hollywood celebrities from Shirley MacLaine to John Denver proclaim the New Age gospel of human potential.

How can we know the truth? How can we know that we ourselves are in the truth? By the test of authenticity:

1 John 2:22-23 Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

An authentic Christian is one who believes that Jesus is God and is trusting Jesus for life and eternity.