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, bedraggled, and hungry that the sympathetic manager said “Okay, 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 accidentally pulled out a $50 dollar bill. The manager saw it and suspected that he had been “had”.
So he snatched the $50 bill 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 $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 that $50 bill.”
The manager wasn’t sure what he meant by that remark until the next day when he went to the bank to deposit the cash and found out that that $50 bill was a counterfeit.
Counterfeit money has most of the attributes of the real thing, but it is worthless. In fact it is less than worthless because it leads you to think that you have something of value when you really don’t. That restaurant manager thought he had a fifty, so he gave back thirty dollars of real money in exchange. That twenty dollar meal that he was originally going to give the tramp ended up costing him fifty.
Counterfeiting is defined as copying with the intent to deceive. It’s when someone makes a realistic imitation for the purpose of passing it off as the genuine article, usually to make a profit. Counterfeiting has become big business.
Not just money is counterfeited these days. The making of counterfeit consumer products is a major industry. The United States Customs Service has estimated that about 19 billion dollars’ worth of counterfeit goods are produced or marketed in the United States each year. Many of them are made in other countries and imported. The kinds of products that are counterfeited range from shampoo, to designer jeans, to auto parts, to over the counter drugs.
Counterfeiting even extends into the world of art. The art world is flooded with forgeries. Art experts estimate that only about half of the 600 works supposedly painted by Rembrandt are genuine. The problem is, they don’t know which half!
No great artist, past or present, has been safe from having his work copied by a counterfeiter. And some of the fakes have been so deceptive that not even the experts have been able to discover them. The number of phoney paintings hanging in the world’s museums will probably never be known. That’s because the museums fear for their reputations if it is discovered that they are displaying counterfeit “masterpieces.”
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 counterfeit. That is why the passage of Scripture we’re going to look at today is so important.
You turn on your television, and you see a well-dressed preacher giving you a very attractive message in beautiful surroundings. How can you know where that person is “coming from”?
Or a friend gives you a best-selling book which claims to have a powerful, life-changing message. How can you know where that message is coming from? If only you had some sort of a diagnostic tool to help you sniff out what’s real from what’s counterfeit.
Fortunately, God has given us such a tool in the book of 1 John. I call the first six verses of 1 John 4 the Christian’s test-kit for counterfeit teaching.
In verse 1, John says that we should test the spirits. This is something that we must learn to do. We need to be able to determine what teaching is from God and what is counterfeit. But many Christians today seem to have lost the ability to do this.
We live in an age of tremendous credulity. We’re awash in a sea of information, but people seem to have lost the ability to sift and filter that information for truth. When it comes to spiritual matters, people nowadays will believe almost anything. And Christians are no exception.
Just because some TV show or some book that you’ve read or some preacher you’ve heard on the radio, is inspirational, and makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that what they’re saying 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 Nuremberg under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
The drama and the pageantry of those tremendous gatherings stirred those 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.
Just ask Moses. He came to Pharaoh with the power of God. He performed miraculous, supernatural signs. But the magicians of Egypt were able to counterfeit almost all of those 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.
The Apostle John tells us in 1 John 4:1
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God
That word “test” literally means to examine closely, to prove, or to verify. When you go to the ATM at the bank to get some money out, you always count your money just to make sure that that machine hasn’t cheated you. That’s what this word “test” means. It means “check it out, verify it.”
As Christians, we need to cultivate a healthy skepticism about the latest spiritual fads. We can’t just take this new teaching at face value. We need to subject it to careful scrutiny, because it might be a spiritual counterfeit.
The great English preacher and writer 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.
The Bible says that you can’t just believe every idea that comes down the pike. You have to have a holy skepticism, a godly suspicion. You have to test the spirits.
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 the force of a hurricane. But other times, and more dangerously, they whisper in our ears and caress our souls with lies. So we have to test the winds - test the spirits - to see where they come from.
How do we do that? God tells us how 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
A better translation of v.2 is: “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh is from God.” In other words, if a spirit attests to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth is the anointed Messiah and Savior, then that spirit is God’s spirit.
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 still consider yourself a Christian. Jesus, a man of historical humanity, is also a person of eternal deity. He is the God-man.
And the spirit that is from God acknowledges this. The word for “acknowledge” in Greek is the same word for “confess”. It means more than just simply acknowledging who Jesus is. It means putting one’s trust in Him. A lot of people are willing to agree with the statement “Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of the world.” But they have never really put their faith in him to be their Savior.
During Jesus’ earthly ministry, even the demons acknowledged his identity; they knew who he was. But they didn’t put their trust in Him.
But if you confess Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord, then you are speaking with the Spirit of God.
1 Corinthians 12:3 …no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.
Now if the teaching in question is not saying this; if it is not exalting Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord of all, then you know that it cannot be coming from God. You know that it’s counterfeit.
And there’s a lot of teaching like that. A lot of it is masquerading as biblical Christianity, but it’s counterfeit. Remember, a counterfeit looks like the real thing but it’s worthless.
Jesus said in Matthew 7: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘Depart from me. I never knew you.’ “
Any teaching which does not put the person and work of Jesus Christ at the center is not of God. It may sound wonderful. It may have all the trappings of spirituality. It may even look like Christianity from the outside. But if Jesus Christ and his saving work on the cross isn’t at the center of it, it’s not of God.
The most important thing to remember about false teaching is that it’s content will always reveal its source. The Gospel that comes from heaven has Jesus Christ at the center of it. But the gospel that comes from hell has self at the center of it.
So if somebody comes to your door telling you that the way for you to get to heaven is by undertaking an elaborate program of good works, use this test. Ask yourself what’s at the center of that teaching. Is it Jesus Christ? Or is it self; human effort? Then you’ll know where that teaching is coming from.
If you pick up a book that teaches you how to get in touch with your inner feelings and find true happiness in life, use this test. Does the message of that book focus your attention on Jesus, or on yourself? Then you’ll know where that book is coming from.
If some hallelujah preacher comes on your TV telling you that the will of God for you is to be rich and healthy and successful and drive a pink Cadillac, use the test. Then you’ll know where he’s coming from.
If some politician tells you that the way to solve America’s problems is by giving people more education, information, motivation, or medication, use the test. Then you’ll know where that message is coming from.
Content determines what’s counterfeit and what’s not. That’s the first test. But there’s a second test. The second test is to ask “Who’s listening?” You can test the spirits on the basis of their audience: Who’s listening 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.
If I read this verse correctly, it means that there will always be an audience for counterfeit teaching. Just because a book sells a million copies doesn’t mean that it is true. Just because the Mormon Church is the fastest growing church in America doesn’t mean that its doctrine is biblical.
The world will always listen to a counterfeit. So beware of measuring the validity of a message or a movement solely on the basis of how many people it is attracting.
A few years ago, on Long Island, not far from where we lived, a new church started up with just a handful of people. Pretty soon, in a matter of just three or four years, there were over a thousand people attending. That church grew so rapidly because they offered great entertainment, a feel-good message, and low commitment.
But I began to encounter people who had been involved in that church and had left. They left because they found out that there were inconsistencies in the way that church was being run. There were illegalities in the way that the staff was being paid. There were problems with the way that the finances were being handled. Promises weren’t being kept. Commitments were being broken. And today, that church is in bankruptcy.
We’ve got to be very careful how we measure spiritual success. Just because there’s a crowd, doesn’t mean that God is there, too. Flies are attracted to honey. But they’re also attracted to rotting meat. The world will follow a false teacher.
Jesus was talking about counterfeit teachers when he said in Matthew 7: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
So our test-kit for spiritual counterfeits has taught us two things:
1. The content of a message determines where it came from
2. A large audience for a message doesn’t mean it is authentic
There’s a third thing that we learn in this passage. God hasn’t just given us this test-kit to use on our own. He’s given us his Spirit to help us discern truth from error.
John says in v.4 “you have overcome them because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” He’s talking about the Holy Spirit. And in this context, he’s talking about the fact that the Holy Spirit living in us enables us to overcome and not be deceived by the counterfeiting spirit of error that permeates the world.
If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living in you. And the Holy Spirit, among other things, is in your life in order to protect you from counterfeit spiritual truth. You see, it’s not enough just to have this spiritual test-kit for counterfeits in 1 John 4. You’ve got to have the Holy Spirit in your life in order to be able to use it properly.
The great theologian John Calvin said “Unless the spirit of wisdom is present, there is no profit in having God’s Word in our hands.”
But for the Spirit to do his work, you’ve got to let him control your life. If he’s not in control, he can’t be on patrol.
A lot of Christians fall into false teaching. They run off after counterfeit preachers and they just can’t seem to see how they’ve been deceived. Why does this happen? It happens because they have not been allowing the Spirit of God to do his work in their life. They have been quenching the Spirit, or grieving the Spirit by some unconfessed sin.
If you are harboring sin in your life, you are a prime candidate for spiritual deception. Because you’ve made it impossible for the Holy Spirit to be your protector.
On the old police drama Hill Street Blues, there was a 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.