How to Test the Spirits

There once was a tramp who walked into a restaurant and asked the manager for a free meal. He looked so tired and bedraggled and hungry that the sympathetic manager said “Alright, what’ll you have.” The starving tramp ordered up a full course feast.

As he was leaving, the tramp even had the gall to bum a cigarette from the kind manager. As he fished in his pocket for a match, the old tramp carelessly pulled out a $50 dollar bill. The manager saw it and suspected that he had been “had”. So he snatched the $50 and said, “Some nerve you have. You come in here, ask me for a free meal, and all the while you have money in your pocket. I’m going to go ahead and charge you twenty bucks for what you just ate.” The tramp protested, but to no avail. So the manager rang up $20 on the cash register, gave the tramp his $30 change, and kicked him out. As he left, the tramp said “Just remember, buddy, that was supposed to be a free meal. I didn’t ask you to take my $50.”

The manager wasn’t sure what he meant by that until the next day when he went to the bank and found out that the $50 bill was counterfeit.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the City of Montreal Police Headquarters. The officer who was our guide showed us a wad of counterfeit 20 dollar bills that had just been seized. He invited us to inspect them and try to discover what was wrong with them. As I held those bills in my hands, I would have sworn they were genuine. They looked exactly like the real thing: they looked right, they felt right, they even smelled like real money. But then the officer showed us a slight irregularity in the border of one of the zeros in the number twenty. That told the police that they were counterfeit.

Counterfeit money has most of the attributes of the real thing, but it is worthless. In fact it is less than worthless: it is positively harmful because it leads you to think that you have something of value when you don’t. The restaurant manager thought he had a fifty, so he gave back thirty. And the next day, he found out that that twenty dollar meal had really cost him fifty.

Counterfeiting is a very real danger in the spiritual realm as well. There are a lot of ideas out there masquerading as the truth, but they’re bogus. That is why the apostle John says that we should test the spirits. This is something that Christians must learn to do. We need to be able to determine what is from God and what is not. How can we learn to do this? How can we develop our spiritual antennae so as to know when we are picking up signals from heaven and when they are coming from somewhere else?

When we turn on our television sets, and see a very charismatic individual giving us a very attractive message in very beautiful surroundings, how can we know where that person is “coming from”? Or when we pick up a best-selling book which claims to have a powerful, life-changing message, how can we know where that message is coming from?

The book of 1 John is all about Christianity that is real. The theme of this book is authenticity. John wrote it to people who needed answers. In the world of the first century, just as in our world, there were all sorts of folks who claimed to know the truth. “Listen to us” they said, “and we’ll give you the answers to life and death and eternity.” Many of these people even wore the label Christian, but they believed strange and conflicting ideas that certainly did not come from the Bible. So John’s friends desperately needed to know who were the real Christians. And John even told them that they even needed to make sure that they themselves were real Christians.

So he gave them some tests to use on people. Just like the old litmus test you used in high school chemistry class to reveal an acid from a base, these tests were designed by God to reveal people for what they really are.

There is the test of confession. Does this person acknowledge that he is a sinner and confesses his sin before God?

There is the test of obedience. Does this person seek to follow God’s will as the overriding priority in his life?

There is the test of values. Does this person place his love for God before anything and everything this world has to offer?

There is the test of lifestyle. Does this person not allow habitual sin to be a part of his life?

There is the test of abiding. Does this person continue day by day in fellowship with Jesus Christ?

There is the test of love. Does this person love people with the quality of love that God has for us?

These are important tests that the Bible says will tell you whether a person is an authentic Christian or not. But supposing you don’t know a person well enough to apply any of these tests to his life. Perhaps you just haven’t had time enough to really get to know him. You haven’t seen him in action. Or perhaps you have no opportunity to get to know him. He comes to you through the TV screen, or on tape, or on the printed page. And he comes to you with a message. How do you know that message is true? How do you know if the spirit who empowers his message is the Spirit of God and not some counterfeit spirit?

I believe that we live in an age of tremendous credulity. People today have become more and more naive. Awash in a sea of information, we’ve lost the ability to sift and filter that information for golden nuggets of truth. This is especially so in spiritual matters. People are more and more easily taken in by spiritual deception. And Christians are no exception.

An attractive young couple stands before the TV cameras and pleads for money to be used for God’s kingdom, and the money rolls in. They spend it wildly on themselves or lose track of it altogether. A dynamic preacher cries out for forgiveness with tears streaming down his face. Then he coldly refuses to submit to the loving discipline of the elders to whom he should be accountable. And Christians continue to be duped by these people. They continue to idolize these people, even after they have shown their true colors, because American Christians today, by and large, have lost their ability to test the spirits.

Just because something is inspirational, and makes you feel good, doesn’t mean it is true. In the 1930’s, hundreds of thousands of good German people - many of them churchgoers - gathered in mass rallies in a place called Nuremburg under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. The drama and the pageantry of these tremendous gatherings stirred the German people to the roots of their souls. And in the excitement and in the spectacle and in the emotion of the moment, they didn’t realize that they were being led to their own destruction by a demon from hell masquerading as an angel of light.

Just because something is inspirational doesn’t mean it is true. And just because something is supernatural doesn’t mean it is from God. Ask Moses. He came to Pharaoh with the power of God. He performed miraculous, supernatural signs. But the magicians of Egypt were able to duplicate and counterfeit almost all his signs with their own black arts. So just because something is supernatural doesn’t mean it is from God. It may be diabolical, not divine.

John tells us in 1 John 4:1-6 that the Christian faith cannot be mere credulity. It’s not a blind leap in the dark. True faith examines its object before putting confidence in it. You must test before you trust. And testing implies using your mind. When John says in v.1…

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God

…he’s using a verb - “to test” - which literally means to think, to examine closely, to prove. Christianity is an intellectual execise, not just a moral, or an emotional, or a spiritual exercise. But our problem today is that too many Christians check their brains at the door of the church upon entering.

The great English preacher and author John R. Stott puts it this way:

Behind every prophet is a spirit and behind every spirit is either God or the devil. Before we can trust any spirits, we must test them whether they are of God. It is their origin that matters. Unbelief can be as much a mark of spiritual maturity as belief.

There is nothing wrong with a holy skepticism, a godly suspicion. When John uses the word “spirit” in these verses, he’s using a word which literally means wind. There are many winds blowing today: winds of philosophy, winds of ideology, winds of popular culture. Sometimes those winds beat on us with hurricane force. But other times, and more dangerously to us I believe, they whisper in our ears and caress our souls with lies.

One of the winds of popular culture is a gentle breeze which whispers to us that we can somehow fit Jesus into the way we’ve already decided how to live. We can add Christianity to an already full and busy life. Jesus becomes to us something of a mascot, a holy hood ornament. We wear his cross as a medallion around our neck when what he really wants is to take possession of our heart. We like the nice “spiritual” feeling of having Jesus around to come to church with us on Sundays, but we show him to a closet the rest of the week. We refuse to make him Lord, but we hope he’ll be grateful just being our lapdog.

We have to test the winds to see where they come from.

God gives us that test in v.2-3:

This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist

The truth that Jesus of Nazareth is God in the flesh is the central fact of Christianity. You cannot deny or in any way alter this fact and consider yourself a Christian. Jesus, a man of historical humanity, was and therefore is also a person of eternal deity. He is God become man.

Now the Spirit of God acknowledges this. The word for “acknowledge” in Greek is the same word for “confesses”. It means that when the Spirit of God speaks, He speaks about Jesus. He always draws attention to the Son of God; He glorifies Jesus. He doesn’t glorify Himself.

John 15:26 “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.

Have you ever seen people getting all excited about the Holy Spirit? Well I almost hesitate to say this, but it isn’t the Holy Spirit who is motivating them to get excited about the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit’s job is to get them excited about Jesus Christ, the Son. His ministry is described in…

John 16:14 He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.

So when you apply this test to the spirits, you only find one who confesses and glorifies and draws attention to the Lord Jesus Christ: that is the Spirit of God. All the rest try to de-emphasize, or draw attention away from Jesus. This is the spirit of antichrist. The word antichist doesn’t only mean against Christ, it can also mean instead of Christ.

John goes on to say that you can also tell the spirits on the basis of who listens to them.

1 John 4:5-6 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

When Jesus stood on trial before Pilate, he said something very unusual. He told Pilate that he was a king and that he had come into the world to testify to the truth. And then he said…

Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

Jesus was saying that you could recognize God’s people because they the ones listening to God’s truth. In this passage, John tells us that you can recognize God’s truth because God’s people are the ones listening to it.

We need to beware of popularizing the gospel. Because in order to popularize it, we have to corrupt it. In order to make it acceptable to the world, we have to sugar-coat it and water it down and gut it of its central content so that it is a mere shell with no real power to change people’s lives. The tragedy is that Christians have tried to do this. So today we have a gospel of self-esteem. We have a gospel of human potential. We have a materialistic gospel which says that you can have anything you want. We have a feel-good gospel that says you can live however you please and still call yourself a Christian. Those are the kinds of gospel that the world wants. But the world as a whole is never going to listen to the true gospel. Because the world is at war with God. When we seek acceptance by the world, we’re in treacherous territory.

Test the spirits to see whether they are from God. Don’t be a fool, don’t be a dupe. The spirit that is from God is the spirit that leads you to Jesus Christ. And it leads you to him on His terms, not yours. And it asks you to follow him on His conditions, not yours.

If you’re fond of the television program Hill Street Blues, you’ll remember the kindly Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, played by the late actor Michael Conrad. Esterhaus was a kind of father-figure to all the characters in the station-house. Every shift, after roll call, Esterhaus would send the officers out with the words “Hey - let’s be careful out there.”

This is what John is saying in this passage to his young Christian friends. It’s a rough world out there. Many false prophets. The spirit of the antichrist is on the loose. Be careful. Test the spirits. But be confident because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

Careful but confident. This is my prayer for you.