Believing the Real Thing – 10/8/23

Good morning, Church. My name is Matt Nestberg, and I serve as a pastor here and get to open 1 John, chapter 4. So, if you have a Bible, please go ahead and turn to 1 John 4. And before we start, I’m going to lead us as we pray.

Holy Spirit, we just ask that you would fall on us, fill this place with your presence, turning our hearts towards Christ in worship of him in praise, and that as we listened to your Word, that it would truly be the Word of God and not the word of man. I pray that you would allow us to sit under its authority and its care for us as John seeks to give us life, in Jesus’s name. Amen.

In the first part of the 18th century, a mighty work of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, began in America. The Great Awakening in America began as a spiritual revival in the Connecticut Valley in the 1730s. Most people say it reached its peak in the northern colonies between 1740 and 1742. Now, a lot has been written about the Great Awakening and the things that produced it. Some of it’s made up, and some of it is based in fact. Historians have argued a few things about the Great Awakening, that it severed, for example, intellectual and physical connections between America and Europe. They’ve said that it was the first major vehicle of early lower-class protest, and historian William Warren Sweet said it was the first inner colonial movement to “stir the people of several colonies on a matter of common social concern.” So, he argues that the Great Awakening was one of the early things that brought the colonists together to think of themselves together and as independent from Europe.

Other historians have gone on to link the Great Awakening to the Revolution that would happen just a few years later. Daniel Gullotta writes for the Journal of the American Revolution, saying,

“Revivals did contribute to the coming Revolution in important ideological, sociological, and religious ways. The revivals shattered the social order of church hierarchy, rejecting the existing power structures of the day and focusing instead on the individual. People who had normally had their voices marginalized or silenced were suddenly able to speak freely about God’s grace in their lives. It provided a millennial hope of a new age and promised damnation to those who imposed the tyranny of ‘popery.’”

That’s popery, not potpourri.

He goes on to quote John Adams, who wrote something similar. He said,

“The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”

But more than the social and philosophical and national results were the spiritual and religious. On May 30th, 1735, Jonathan Edwards wrote an eight-page letter to Benjamin Colman, who was then the pastor of Brattle Street Church in Boston, in which he described the nature of the revival he was seeing and the effects on the hearts and minds of people. Edwards wrote that letter and later a book called A Faithful Narrative, which he completed in 1736, and gives a detailed description of many of the powerful impacts of the moving of the Spirit. Edwards connected the outbreak of spiritual renewal to a series of sermons he preached on justification by faith and the unusual conversion of an immoral young lady in the Northampton community that he discreetly described as “one of the greatest company keepers in town,” if you know what he means.

He also described the emotional and physical responses that the Great Awakening produced on the people that he was seeing. He wrote,

“[When individuals] had such a sense of God’s wrath for sin … that they have been overborne; and made to cry out under an astonishing sense of their guilt, wondering that God suffers such guilty wretches to live upon earth, and that he does not immediately send them to hell.”

He went on to say,

“It was very wonderful to see how person’s affections were sometimes moved — when God did as it were suddenly open their eyes, and let into their minds a sense of the greatness of his grace, the fullness of Christ, and his readiness to save…. Their joyful surprise has caused their hearts as it were to leap, so that they have been ready to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping. Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”

Other physical accounts include things like running and laughing and weeping and screaming and jumping and more and more and more. In fact, if you saw it today, you might describe it as chaos. These kinds of enthusiastic expressions of the Spirit’s work, predictably, raised the ire and the controversy and concern of people. They called it “enthusiasm,” which I guess was the most extreme word they could think of at the time — enthusiasm and excess.

So, Edwards responded with volumes of material written, which describes and defends the effects of the Holy Spirit on the minds, hearts, and bodies of those who receive him. So, it raises the question, if you can’t see with our eyes and tell by the effect with our eyes whether or not it’s a work of the true Spirit of God, then how do you know? How do you know if it’s a work of the true Spirit? How do you know what is and is not a work of the Holy Spirit, capital S? And how do we know what spirits are from God or are not? In other words, how do you know who or what to believe?

Well, John, in our passage today in John chapter 4, begins in verse 1 by saying,

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

John says what we have by faith (the word “believe” is the same word for “faith”) is not blind faith or gullible faith. We are not just to believe because Christians are believers. Rather, we are to test every spirit. We don’t believe everything. We don’t believe everyone who says they’re speaking the truth or that they speak from God or that they’re communicating the will of God because there are many false prophets in the world who would love to deceive you and me. So, John says this is how you know who or what to believe.

Now here’s where we are in 1 John. If you remember Peter’s three diagnostic tools that are in your notes there that he talked about last week, most recently. They are in 1 John. The three diagnostic tools we have are belief in Jesus, love, and obedience. Those are the things that come back many, many times. This one falls under the belief-in-Jesus piece. And John says, “This is how you know what to believe.” John does this first by using a literary device called inclusio or inclusion. Inclusio is a literary device which brackets or envelops key material. So, often the biblical writers, you’ll see this throughout both Testaments, Old and New, will use a word or most often a statement, and then at the end of it they’ll use a similar or exact statement that brackets key material that describes that statement. And the device is called inclusio or inclusion. John, does it here. Look at verse 2. He says,

“By this you know the Spirit of God.”

And now scan down to verse 6 at the end. He says,

“By this we know the Spirit of truth or the spirit of error.”

The Spirit of truth is another way he’s communicating the Spirit of God (truth and God go together) as opposed to spirit of error. So, he’s using this “by this you know the Spirit of God; by this you know the Spirit of truth,” and he’s enveloping what he says in the middle to give us that guidance. Are you with me so far? Nod your head if you are or say something. So, what appears or what occurs between those brackets is the material that’s relevant to it. So, regarding belief, “this is how we know,” John gives two pieces to the belief or to the “this is how we know.”

Number 1 is subsistence. Who exactly is Jesus? The nature of Jesus Christ is absolutely essential. Now, for John in his day, his challenge was called Docetism. Peter’s talked about it a little bit. Docetism was believed and taught that Christ did not have a real or natural body, but only an apparent or phantom one. Docetism taught that Jesus’s flesh wasn’t real. It just seemed like it. Docetism is a very important part of the larger system called Gnosticism, starts with the G, Gnosticism or Gnosticism. Peter’s talked about that a little bit as well. Gnosticism was a religious dualist system that that really took root in the second century after John and claimed that matter, especially the physical body, was evil and that the spirit was good. So, Gnosticism had this larger picture that the body is bad, the spirit is good. It was this upper and lower story viewing the spirit as good and the body as bad, separating those two things, which raises the question — okay, then if you believe that and claim to follow Jesus, what do you do with Jesus? Because he had a body, and bodies are evil in that system. And so, Docetism arose to describe that Jesus only appeared human but was not; therefore, he didn’t die. He only appeared to die.

Now, you can see how this doctrine is horrific because it strikes at the very nature of the atonement. Christ’s identification with us in our humanness, in his incarnation, his perfect life, death, and resurrection is the essence of the gospel, and it’s a central belief of salvation. The gospel message is that the entire physical world will be transformed, not that it will be destroyed like a missile going into the Death Star and blowing it up from the inside out. That’s not what God plans to do. He will transform this world. We will not be saved out of the material creation. We will be saved with the material creation. That’s what God plans to do — a new heavens and a new earth. You can hear John refuting that very doctrine in verses 2 and 3. Read it with me.

John writes,

“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.”

This was John’s point that he’s trying to combat, that Docetism.

John’s disciple, one of his disciples, was called Ignatius of Antioch. He, along with another one whose name was Polycarp, in the second century, worked to carry on what John taught in fighting against Docetism. In fact, Ignatius wrote letters to combat it, and one of them was to the church that he spent a lot of time in in Smyrna. And he wrote this these words. “For I have observed that you …” This is to the church in Smyrna.

“I observed that you are perfected in an immovable faith, as if you were nailed to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, both in the flesh and in the spirit, and are established in love through the blood of Christ, being fully persuaded, in very truth, with respect to our Lord Jesus Christ, that he was the Son of God, ‘the first-born of every creature,’ God, the Word, the only-begotten Son, and was of the seed of David according to the flesh, by the Virgin Mary; was baptized by John, that all righteousness might be fulfilled in him; that he lived a life of holiness without sin, and was truly, under Pontius Pilot and Herod the tetrach, nailed for us in his flesh.”

Do you hear Ignatius trying to emphasize the physicality of Jesus?

“Now he suffered all these things for our sakes, that we might be saved. And he suffered truly, even as also he truly raised up himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that he only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be Christians. And as they believe, so it shall happen to them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits.”

Ultimately, Ignatius was arrested and martyred by Emperor Trajan for his Christianity. But John and Ignatius want us to get this right, or we will only seem to be Christians. What then, is the true nature of Jesus? Well, the unity of the dual natures of Christ is known theologically as “hypostatic union.” It’s a $7 word that you can work into a conversation somewhere, hypostatic union. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon defended the nature of Christ. Again, this is in the fifth century. Some time after this, continuing to wrestle against Gnosticism, they sought to refute the errors that preceded it. If you want more information on that, in 2021 our Advent series was on those early heresies in the church and around the church, and we spent five weeks talking about that. So, 2021, if you want to go back and unpack those early councils and some of those heresies.

But the fruit of the Council of Chalcedon, which was in 451, was a thoroughly biblical definition of the nature of Christ. That definition we’ll spend some time later in the service, quoting or reading back and forth to each other. Part of that describes Christ’s two natures, that he was God and man, fully God and fully man, occurring together, as it says, “in one person and one subsistence.” The Greek word “subsistence” that they use is that word “hypostatis,” which means “being.” Hypostatic union is the union or the unity of Christ’s human and divine natures in one person. It’s the human and the divine, 100% and 100% brought together.

Now, in the New Testament, we see these two natures described in the one person Jesus Christ. And so, I have this little chart in your notes for you to see how the New Testament writers spoke of Jesus as a real human being and spoke of him as if he was God, as he is God. And so, I’m going to give you three examples. In John 16 and 17, we see the New Testament writers describe Jesus bodily ascending to heaven. And in Matthew 18 and 28, Jesus himself says that

“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”

So, you have Jesus in a body ascending into heaven, and you have Jesus still present here with us. He is human, and he’s divine.

The second example is that he aged. In Luke 3, he aged just like we do. He had year ages as every human being does. And in John 1:1-2 it says that Jesus was there before the beginning of the world.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

And in John 8:58, you have one of those really great stories where Jesus is talking to the religious leaders and they’re questioning him, and they pull out Abraham as the trump card — we know Abraham; he’s our father. And Jesus says,

“Before Abraham was, I am.”

And they knew exactly what he was doing. And they picked up stones to try to kill him for blasphemy because he was saying, “I am the great I am.” That’s what he was saying. So, he both aged and he’s ageless.

And then the third example is in one passage of scripture, Matthew 8. Jesus was tired. It’s the one where he’s sleeping in the boat, and you see a tired, physical body, somebody who gets tired and needs to sleep, sleeping. And then when the disciples woke him up, you see the omnipotent one get up and rebuke the wind and the waves. He was both tired and omnipotent because he was both human and divine, both together in one person. He was, as one of my favorite Christmas carols “Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming” says, he was

“true man, yet very God.”

I love those adjectives. True man. Very God. That’s who he was, his two natures. So, what somebody says, John says, about the nature or the subsistence of Jesus is a crucial test to discern whether or not we believe them.

Now, I believe that the doctrine of hypostatic union remains very important today because Christian anthropology is under attack by false prophets. John insists that the body of Christ was real flesh, an actual body, and in doing so, he defends the value of the human body, that it’s not evil, it’s good. Your body, my body that you are in right now is good. It’s not evil. And I believe that we need a revival of Christian anthropology in our day. Christ’s physical body reminds us that the body is good.

Carl Trueman, who is a professor at Grove City College, recently asked,

“Do peculiar times not call for specific emphases in our teaching? As the fourth century wrestled with the doctrine of God, the fifth with Christology and the nature of God’s grace, and the Reformation era with the sacraments and salvation, so our age wrestles with the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be human? More specifically, what does it mean to be an embodied human? For now we find ourselves not so much in a battle for the Bible, but in a battle for the body.”

Brothers and sisters, we are made in the image of God and therefore the body has intrinsic value that cannot be dismissed or ignored or destroyed. The war against the Christian anthropology lies at the heart of many of the things that we debate in our society today. It includes debates about abortion and the value of the body of both mother and child. It includes questions about euthanasia and capital punishment and so-called just wars that destroy bodies. It addresses sexual and gender politics that see traditional sexed bodies as an oppressive social construct. And Christian anthropology answers what a man is and what a woman is. Trueman goes on to write,

“Dismiss the intrinsic importance of bodies and everything, from medical ethics to the definition of a woman, becomes confusing.”

In all candor, the conservative evangelical church hasn’t always valued the human body either. At times in the name of modesty or other things, our churches have treated the human body as if it’s something shameful. Sometimes we’ve unintentionally led our precious sisters in Christ to believe that their bodies are mere objects of sexual temptation and desire and are to be hidden away and behind something like an evangelical burqa. But the human body is made in the image of God, and it has intrinsic beauty and value and is something to be prized and respected and cherished. In fact, the human body is so important…. I thought about having you stop this morning and look at the person beside you and say, “You’ve got a great body.” But I thought that would be a little controversial maybe. But it’s actually true. What if we viewed this thing that we’re in, not as evil, but what if the church was the champions of this, not in just issues that we pick and choose, but we actually viewed your body as God’s gift?

In fact, the human body is so important that God himself put it on. He was crucified bodily. He came back in a bodily resurrection, which is the first fruits of our bodily resurrection. Jesus ascended in his body, and he remains in his body today, and one day he will appear in the clouds in his body and rip our cold bodies out of the ground as resurrected bodies! Somebody say something! That’s what Jesus will do. He’s in his body today. It’s not evil. It’s not gross. It is made in God’s image and his likeness. And yes, we are broken, no doubt, no doubt. But our ultimate hope is not that we will shed these things, but that God will redeem them and everything else with it, right? The nature of Jesus Christ is absolutely essential. That’s the first point.

The second point is source. The subsistence is the first — what do we say about Jesus? And the second is source. And I’ll move quicker through this one. The basic options for source are either from God or from the world. So, in verses 4, 5, and 6 every verse begins with a pronoun, and the pronoun is emphatic in Greek. “You, they, we” begins each verse. Now, if you’re looking at the ESV verse 4, it says, “Little children, you.” That’s actually not correct. They did that for flow. It’s actually, the first word in Greek is emphatic “you,” and it reads like this:

“You are from God, little children, and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We [the Apostles] are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us.”

So, I love charts. I have another chart in your notes. They just help me see what I think is the flow of the argument. So, basically, I think John is describing two sources here, and each source has an identity, an origin, an audience, and a spirit behind it. So, source 1 is false prophets, the origin. They come from the world. Their audience is the world, and behind them is the spirit of error. Source 2 is the Apostles. Their origin is from God. Their audience is also people who are from God, those who know God; that’s believers, Christians. And the spirit behind them is the Spirit of truth. Therefore, these three little, what I think are, conclusions. Therefore, I think what John is saying is, the “you,” the “they,” the “we,” you are not helpless victims. He says,

“Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.”

Notice he says, “You have overcome them,” not that you will overcome them, but “you have overcome them.” Why? Because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

Number 2, they are the mouth and ear of the momentary. I get that from 1 John 2:17, where John describes the world and says that the world is passing away along with its desires. The world speaks for the world and listens to the world. And it’s momentary.

Three, we, the apostles, are the mouth and the ear of the eternal.

“Whoever knows God listens to us.”

So, Church, why would we take our cues from the spirit of error or from the world we’ve overcome? The world has a lot to say about what it thinks Christians should do. The world wants to tell us what compassion is, what justice is, and what is right and wrong, what love is, what life is, what marriage is. The world wants to tell us what a human being is, what sexual perversion is or isn’t, what faithfulness is, what stewardship is and on and on and on.

Trueman again says,

“While Isaiah and his colleagues [which would be the prophets is what he’s saying there] saw their task as calling the people away from the anthropology of a wider world and back to that of the covenant God, today’s prophets seem to see their task as being religious mouthpieces for the priorities of the wider culture, calling the church away from a Christian anthropology and toward that of the world around.”

There are many false prophets in the world that are calling the church to be more like the world. There are some that are standing in pulpits today who are looking at their churches and calling them to be like the world. May it not be so! That’s not what God has called us to do. Here, I think John is saying “They are they; we are we, and what fellowship is light with darkness?” to quote Paul. Or to quote John,

“If you walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

Those things don’t go together. We listen to God’s Word as delivered by the Apostles. We take our cues from there, not the world. The world loves to redefine God’s priorities.

Those who know God listen to the Word of God. We measure every teaching or spirit by it. We are to be like the Bereans of Act 17, who, after hearing the words of Paul and Silas preach, Acts says that

“they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”

They’re listening to the Apostle Paul, and they still said, “We’ll check it out. We’ll see if this jives with what the Bible says.” Isn’t that what God is calling us all to do? Don’t listen to a word I’ve said today if it doesn’t match with this. Don’t ever listen to Peter or Ryan or any other teacher like this is the bottom line. At the end of the day, the question is “Is that what God said? Does it jive with what the Scripture says?”

You know, when you stand up in front of an audience and teach or preach, people tell you what they think of it. And that’s okay. And sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes people might say, “Well, I’ve never heard of that. I’ve never thought of that.” And that’s okay. At the end of the day, isn’t the question “What does God’s Word say?” I might believe something for thirty years, and then Peter stands up and preaches it, and I go, “Well, I don’t know if that’s what I think.” Well, that’s fine, but at the end of the day, isn’t what matters what this says. So, if I’ve thought it for thirty years and just been out of sync with what God’s Word says, then the goal is to get back in sync with what God’s Word says, not to say, “Well, I don’t like that.” John says,

“Many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

Our assignment, then, Church, is to test the substance and the source of any prophet or spirit to see whether he is from God or if he’s antichrist.

Reflecting on the works of the Spirit, during the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon from 1 John called “The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God.” Edwards gave five positive signs from 1 John 4 that something is the work of the Spirit. I’m going to end with this and read some scripture and be done. But this is a nice little summary of really trying to apply 1 John 4 in Edwards’s day. So, he gives 5 positive signs.

One, a work of the Spirit of God raises people’s esteem of Christ. Two, it works against Satan’s kingdom. Third, it stirs greater love for the Bible. That’s from 1 John 4:6, what I just talked about. Edward says,

“Would the spirit of error, in order to deceive men, beget in them a high opinion of the infallible rule [that’s one of his words for the Bible], and incline them to think much of it, and be very conversant with it? Would the prince of darkness, in order to promote the kingdom of darkness, lead men to the sun? The devil has ever shown a mortal spite and hatred towards that holy book the Bible; he knows it to be that light by which his kingdom of darkness is to be overthrown.”

Number 4, does it lead people to the truth rather than the spirit of error? And number 5, that it stirs love to God and man. Edwards said,

“Love and humility are two things the most contrary to the spirit of the devil, of anything in the world; for the character of that evil spirit, above all things, consists in pride and malice.”

Brothers and sisters, Christianity is not only a system of belief. However, what we believe about Jesus has everything to do with eternal salvation. We must know what to believe, who to believe, rather than being deceived. The Apostle Paul wrote similar things in his letter to Timothy, which was 2 Timothy, the last letter Paul wrote before he was killed. He wrote these words.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Turn our hearts, we pray, God, to your Word that we may know it and love it so that we are not deceived and carried away by the volumes of false teaching. I pray, Lord Jesus, that your people here … I was just thinking that that phrase that “greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world,” that we would live not in fear, not cowering in a corner, but rather with the hope of the gospel, knowing that you are greater than anything we face in the world. Thank you, God. Help us to love our bodies, love the bodies that you’ve created because you created everything good, and thank you that you will redeem them. We look forward to that in Jesus’s name. Amen.