Today's Devotion

Wednesday, December 10, 2025 - 1 John 4:1-21

In the name of + Jesus. Amen.

“False prophets have gone out into the world.” This is a warning that we hear often from the apostles: not only John, but also Sts. Peter and Paul. Therefore, addressing us as “beloved,” St. John urges us not to simply believe everything that we hear, but to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” On the one hand, it seems like this is something that should be obvious, like something that the Holy Spirit doesn’t really need to spill ink to tell us. For in this world, we are surrounded by hucksters, grifters, scammers, and snake oil salesmen. This is hardly a startling revelation. And there are such people running religious rackets.

So how do we “test the spirits”? One litmus test is given to us by John: “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 the antichrist.” So, antichrist is not one man, but is a spirit. In fact, John speaks of “antichrists” in the plural (1 John 2:18). “They speak from the world,” says John, “and the world listens to them.” To “test the spirits,” listen carefully to their confession of Christ.

In John’s day, there were many groups that denied Jesus as God in the flesh, not only the Greco-Roman pagans and the unbelieving Jews, but also those who claimed to be Christians but were really variations of Gnostics: cultists who believed in many gods, and who incorporated Jesus into their spiritualist religion. And ancient Gnosticism was revived in our own day through mainstream psychology and psychiatry, through modern Gnostics like Karl Jung, and his contemporary disciple, Jordan Peterson. Much of modern Evangelical Christianity has fallen to a kind of modern Gnosticism that emphasizes spirituality to the detriment of the physical incarnation of Jesus and the inscripturated Word.

For us Christians, the Holy Spirit has caused the Scriptures to be inspired, written, and preserved for our use. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). The Word of God is infallible and inerrant. We can trust God and His Word. And Holy Scripture is the unchanging “canon” (that is, the standard) by which all doctrines and all spirits can be discerned. If a teacher or preacher believes, teaches, or confesses a different gospel than the apostolic witness that we have in the Bible, “let him be accursed” (Gal 1:9), and do not believe such a person. For he has failed the test. He is antichrist.

“We are from God,” says John. “Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”

Let us believe, teach, and confess with the beloved disciple, the holy apostle, the blessed evangelist, St. John, who reminds us: “Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.