In 1 John 4, the apostle John writes Christians about grounding themselves in truth. He writes in 1 John 4:1-6,
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 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, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 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.”
John gives us a test for what is false and what is true. His truth test has two questions.
Question #1 – What about the deity and incarnation of Jesus? John writes in verses 2-3 that the truth is that Jesus is God, and he took on human flesh.
Question #2 – What about listening to apostolic teaching? John writes in verse 6 that the truth is that the apostles’ teaching is from God.
John is saying that there will be all sorts of people claiming that they have truth, that they speak truth. But do they hold to the deity and incarnation of Jesus, and do they hold to apostolic teaching, which is found in the documents of the New Testament? We gird ourselves with the truth by holding to those two sources of truth.
We also gird ourselves with truth by learning the truth about ourselves. Since my church started recording our sermons for YouTube and Instagram, I see myself talking a lot. I sometimes don’t like what I see. Weird expressions. Strange voice inflections. I raise my eyebrows a lot, open my eyes wide a lot. My mouth makes funny shapes.
I know why. I’m emotional about I’m saying. I’m excited about it. I want to connect the word of the God with my church family. Body language speaks louder than words. I know that. But what I see on video can be very embarrassing.
I sometimes turn off the video, thinking, “I can’t watch anymore.” It’s too rough. I don’t want to know the truth about how I look when I speak. That is human nature. Unless we are being told that we are awesome and incredible, it can be very difficult for us to hear the truth about ourselves. There are some of us who don’t like hearing the compliments, because they make us feel awkward. Or we don’t believe them. We might rather hear the bad stuff about ourselves.
We can have a complicated relationship with the truth, right? We need people to speak truth to us. The good and the bad. This is the heart behind Paul’s teaching in Ephesians 4:15 when he talks about speaking the truth in love.
In the next post, we’ll conclude our six-part series on the Belt of Truth and what it means to gird our loins with truth.
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 