Text: 1 John 4:1-11                                                                              U Rogate (6^th Sunday of Easter)

Test the Spirits

            In the name of him who loved us and gave his life for us, dear friends in Christ: a few years back there was a saying that I kept hearing all the time that went, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  It’s one of those statements that first strikes you as sort of a nice thought; and because it’s easy to remember, rolls off the tongue smoothly, and seems to contain some profound wisdom, it’s no wonder that people kept repeating it.  Unfortunately, however, it’s one of those profound worldly truths that doesn’t hold up well under analysis.  I mean, what’s it supposed to mean?  Does it mean that if I say that I love you, I shouldn’t have to apologize if I hurt you by my wrong or negligent behavior?  That’s awfully presumptuous, don’t you think?  Or does it mean if I say, ”love you”, then you get a free pass to abuse me as you please without ever having to concern yourself about how your behavior affects me?  I don’t care how loving a relationship is; that can’t be healthy, can it?  I mean look:  God loves you – he loves you more than you can possibly imagine – and yet at the same time, he calls you to repent of your sins; that is, he wants you to say you’re sorry and mean it.  I think one of the reasons we don’t hear that statement so much anymore is because the people who said they loved each other and tried it found out that it didn’t work very well. 

Of course these days it seems the world has moved beyond that trite statement to a new and even more elastic definition of love.  Now it’s widely held that if you love someone, you’re never to say anything critical to them, anything that might be construed as negative, or anything that might possibly wound their self esteem.  You must never challenge the validity of their ideas, the logic of their thought processes, the quality of their work, or the ethics of their actions.  And nowhere is this standard of love to be applied more rigorously than in the Church of Jesus Christ.

And perhaps I’m overstating it a bit; but in one month a delegate from this congregation and I will be attending our church’s district convention.  And what I’ve discovered is that when the larger church assembles at a gathering like that – which are held, not incidentally, largely to ensure that we continue to be theologically united in our confession of the faith – the one thing we cannot discuss is theology.  The moment anyone takes the floor and raises a concern about our increasingly diverging doctrine and practice, he’s immediately accused of being unloving and shouted down.  Any possibility that we might have a frank and open discussion about the matters that divide us is barred for fear that something critical or negative might be said.  So problems are allowed to fester and grow even worse because we are deathly afraid of having a theological argument, as if that were the worst thing that might happen.  I know some families avoid discussing theology for the sake of unity – but how much sense does it make to avoid talking about theology in the church? It’s like going to a convention of Republicans or Democrats and not talking about politics.  It doesn’t make sense; but still the majority seems to think it’s better to maintain the outward illusion of unity and brotherly love than to do the hard but loving work of actually achieving it.  They’ve bought into this notion that love means avoiding conflict at all costs.  And sometimes I sense this same kind of resistance to confronting divisive issues and doubtful doctrines even within the congregation.

            But this is a work we must do; we really have no option.  If the church is to stand on anything solid, it has to be the truth.  And standing upon and declaring what is true necessarily entails declaring and avoiding what is false.  And in this morning’s Epistle lesson, St. John, who is widely known as the Apostle of Love, tells us to test the spirits. Don’t believe everything you hear just because it claims to be of Christ.  Test it to see if it’s really from God.  Why?  You must, the Apostle tells us, because many lying prophets have gone out into the world.  And wherever they have gone they have sowed their seeds of deception and lies. They’re everywhere.  And so you are called to exercise discernment and to listen to what’s being taught with a measure of healthy skepticism.  You’re not to absorb everything you hear uncritically and without question.

            You have to test it.  And how do you do that?  The general answer is that you have to compare it with what God has given us as the objective standard of truth.  In the book of Acts we read about the missionary adventures of St. Paul as he goes from place to place sharing the Gospel.  At some places they rejected Paul’s message out of hand, other places he got a more positive reception; but there was one place called Berea where the Holy Spirit singles out the members of the congregation for a special commendation.  We read that they had a more noble character than the others because they compared what Paul was preaching to the Holy Scriptures.  They studied the Scriptures diligently to see if what Paul was teaching them was the truth. You see, they understood that the Bible is truth.  So if anyone claimed to be teaching the truth, he had to prove to them that what he saying was found in and consistent with the Scriptures.

Of course, the Bible is a pretty wide ocean; so we could get a little more specific.  The apostle John in his day was dealing with false teachers who were trying to infuse elements of Greek philosophy into Christianity.  And because these teachers (who would eventually be called Gnostics) held that matter and the physical components of the universe were inherently evil, they tried to spiritualize everything about Jesus.  They wanted to remove the physical, human side of him because they thought it wasn’t possible that a God who is a perfect spiritual being could have anything to do with something so low and disgusting as a human body.  It’s in response to this kind of thinking that John writes that anyone who denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is teaching against Christ.  Now, understand that these people thought they were saying nice things about Jesus when they denied his humanity.  They meant to honor him.  In fact, they thought they were honoring him even more than people like us who say that he is both divine and human.  But John says that by denying what the Scriptures teach about Jesus, they show that they possess the spirit of antichrist.

Now, understand that John’s test about Christ coming in the flesh is not meant to be comprehensive. He goes on to say that anyone who does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.  John understands that the person and work of Jesus Christ is really what the Scriptures are all about.  He means that anyone who does not acknowledge what the Scriptures say about Christ speaks against him.  So, anything that denies his true divinity or his true manhood, anything that detracts from the full atonement he made for our sins by his suffering death on the cross, anything that goes against his teaching, denies his miracles, whatever, any of these things reflects the spirit of antichrist.  

            And it’s important to understand how little leaven it takes to infect the whole lump.  We tend to look for the deceptions of Satan in the obvious places:  in things like witchcraft, in false religions and cults, and in brazen attacks on Christianity like The Da Vinci Code – the popular book now made into a movie that says blasphemous things about Jesus, like he wasn’t really the Son of God, that he didn’t die for the sins of the world, that he was married to Mary Magdalene, and that he intended that she and her children after her head up a religion that was more like the fertility cults of the ancient Canaanites than anything else. These things are full of dangerous and false ideas, sure; but they have the advantage of being clearly identified as such.  They are practically labeled with bright red tags that say: “Warning:  Contains the spirit of antichrist.  Harmful or fatal if swallowed”; so there’s little chance of any of us being taken in.

            But Satan doesn’t usually go around wearing a red suit and carrying a pitchfork so that he’s so easily identified.  We’re told that he disguises himself as an angel of light to work his mischief. And because we’re usually busy concentrating on the obvious, we often miss him where he does the greatest damage – and especially now that his movements are protected by this false idea of love that says it’s wrong to test, to challenge, or to analyze or criticize what’s being taught and done in the church.

            Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.  This is from the local newspaper last week.  There’s a column called “Ask the Pastor” that allows readers to get a pastor’s response to their theological questions.  A reader asks (and I’m quoting now), “If I am a good person, will I go to heaven?”  (Great question, by the way.)  The pastor replies, “Whether we’re ‘good’ or not is not the core issue; the critical question, instead, is this:  ‘who sits on the throne of our heart—God or self?’  If we refuse God his rightful sovereignty over our lives, then we are guilty of self-aggrandizing idolatry.  We must have no gods above him (Exodus 20:3), including ourselves.” 

            Now, I can verify that the person responding to the question is a Christian pastor.  He’s a really swell guy, and I have every reason to believe that he’s a faithful man. Certainly the answer he gives here sounds like a perfectly biblical answer.  But if you follow what he really said, it’s not being good that will get you to heaven – it’s obeying the first commandment (which is being good, isn’t it?). He started off just fine, but in the end he throws the questioner back on the law and his own works.  He says nothing here about Christ and his work to save us from sin.  You see, though I’m certain he did not intend it, the answer he gave reflects the spirit of antichrist.  It’s an easy trap to fall into.

             Now, I’m not quite sure how to respond since this case crosses denominational lines; but this same sort of thing happens even in our own LCMS.  I read a lot of sermons written by fellow pastors on line, and many of them are chocked full of all kinds of helpful advice and encouragement for living a good life; but they say nothing about Christ.  Or again, we had a wedding here yesterday.  One of the recent graduates from Concordia Seward who did an internship at a LCMS school in a large city told me that most Sundays she sat in the pew and felt like crying because the pastor there routinely pounded his people with the law and told them how to be better Christians; but he never gave them the Gospel of Christ and the assurance of their forgiveness in him – or if he did, he gave it with conditions – the things they had to do to make it effective.  My friends, that’s the spirit of antichrist.

            It’s a spirit that constantly hovers around the church and that needs to be challenged, confronted, and driven out.  If you read through the Old Testament, one of the things you soon discover is how short-lived are the periods in which God’s people are faithful.  Following some mighty act of salvation, everybody will be praising God and trusting in him – but it never lasts.  You turn the page and find the same people abandoning their trust and sinking into worse sins than before.  What this should impress upon us is the constant need for renewal, reformation, and revisiting and reinforcing in the church the old truths that never change precisely because they are continuously being corrupted by the influence of the world and the spirit of antichrist.

            It is the way of this fallen world that everything good is subject to corruption. Silver tarnishes, iron rusts, wood rots away.  If you want to preserve them, it takes hard work.  If you till the soil and plant a garden you’ve got to do more than plant good seeds.  You’ve also got to pull out the weeds.  Their seeds are already in the soil or they come floating through the air.  So it is with the seeds of antichrist.  They’re already in our sinful flesh.  They also come through the philosophies and ideas of the world and the false teachers who have gone out into it.  It takes constant work to keep the weeds out.  You can’t do it just once because they keep coming.  It takes a steady guard – constantly testing the spirits to see if they are indeed from God.

            And this is what makes the false idea of love I mentioned before so insidious.  In that view, it’s wrong to be suspect, wrong to demand proof, wrong to question or to criticize.  The cry goes up, “That’s mistrustful, that’s argumentative, that’s divisive. Why are you bent on this incessant purification of doctrine all the time?  It’s so unloving.” 

            No it is not.  You can look at our text and see that it’s right after saying “test the spirits” that St. John calls upon us to love each other.  There’s a connection.  True love, godly love is all about self sacrifice.  It means being willing to suffer for the good of others.  But listen, what keeps people from speaking up in the face of false or doubtful teaching is the threat of being labeled unloving.  If I stay silent when I should be standing up for the truth in the face of falsehood, it’s because I fear what people will say or think about me. I’ll be called a fanatic, a theological Nazi, or who knows what else.  But if it’s fear of that sort of thing that keeps me silent, then whose interest am I really looking out for?  Mine or the people who may be led astray by the spirit of antichrist?

Do you see it? Christian love demands that we be willing to take the lumps and suffer the consequences that will surely come when we test the spirits.  But it’s necessary that we do this because we are all vulnerable to being deceived.  Yes, even me.  That’s why it’s part of your mission as a member of this congregation to test the spirit of what I teach.  Believe nothing just because I say it.  Believe it because you’ve tested it according to God’s Word and are convinced that he said it.  And if by your testing you believe that I am teaching something amiss, don’t worry about hurting my feelings.  I’d rather you corrected me than allow me to go on saying something that does not square with the Word of God.

            So let us resolve to show this loving service to each other and test the spirits to verify that they are in fact from God – and let each of us begin with the spirit within him or herself.  Yes, even our own spirits, our own beliefs, must be tested to ensure that they accurately reflect God’s teachings.  And where we find doubt, or uncertainty, or the spirit that says, “Yeah, I know that’s what the bible teaches, but I don’t believe that”, or this false notion of love that says that doing the testing is wrong … well, let’s pull up the weeds.  Let’s confess these things to Christ Jesus our Lord, and receiving his forgiveness, let’s pray for his Spirit to help keep us in his Word.  And then, with his grace and strength, let’s assist each other in testing the spirits that all of us may walk together unified in God’s truth.  In Jesus’ holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!