Test the Spirits (1 John 4:1-6)
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Verses 1 through 6, you can go ahead and flip there. There should be a Bible around you. You can go on the Blue Bibles to page 592. 1 John is in the back. We're working our way through 1 John, and we've got six more verses to get through this morning. So, when I was 17, I came to faith in Jesus.
And I was a part of a youth group that really was into this one particular popular preacher at the time, this kind of Christian figure whose name was Rob Bell. And we, like our youth group, we loved him. And I was a new Christian, and I was like, man, I like what this guy has to say. He had kind of a punk rock type of vibe. Like, he dressed a little edgy, said some edgy things. And at 17 years old, the stage of life I was in, I kind of dug it.
He wasn't like kind of a stodgy, boring, Baptist pastor. And I was like, all right, like I kind of am into this guy. So, I devoured his stuff, loved it for about a year and a half, and then I got to college. And my freshman year, stepped on campus. I met some people who were Christians, and I met this girl. And I was like, man, she's a Christian.
I'm going to try to impress her, kind of show some game here. And quote kind of something like Rob Bell, which kind of tells you the kind of guy I was in college. They're thinking that was how you impress girls, just to quote your favorite preacher. But whatever. So, I did. And she went, Rob Bell, that guy is sketchy.
And I was like, what? And we had this whole conversation. She started to point out all these things that she had heard from talking with her youth pastor. This guy, he said this, and he said this. And I was like, I'd never heard this before. I'd never realized that there was a different take on this guy.
But he did. He would push the envelope on things. He would say things like, you know, I believe in the virgin birth. But do we really need that in our faith? Do you really need the virgin birth to be a Christian? He's like, I'm not saying that I don't believe the virgin birth.
But we actually, do we need that? He would press in on things like that. Whereas a young believer, I didn't really think anything of it. I was like, oh, he's just being edgy. But as a more mature believer, I'm now, I'm like, that's crazy.
Like, the Bible clearly teaches this. The church has believed this for 2,000 years. This is something that is fundamental to our faith. Absolutely, it matters. And he would do things like this. And basically, the next four years got to be a little bit of a case study for me.
Because I watched this guy continue to push boundaries, continue to say things that were a little bit edgy, a little bit more crazy, a little bit more crazy. Until finally, my senior year of college, he released this book called Love Wins. And if you've ever seen the bumper stickers that say Love Wins, this is where it comes from. It comes from this book that kind of took on his own ideology. He wrote this book, Love Wins, and it was like, oh, man, he's gone. Like, he is out the door.
He is leaving the faith. And he did. He left his pastorate. He moved to L.A. And like, got on Team Oprah and became like this guru for Oprah. And he's gone.
Like, he's just, he's gone. And at the time, as a young believer, as he was saying these things early on, I didn't have discerning ears to be able to hear, wait a second, to have red flags go up and say, I don't think this is actually biblical. I don't think this is actually good. And that happens all the time. And Rob Bell, he's out the door. He's gone.
But like, it's whack-a-mole. One goes down, 15 pop up. I mean, there are absolutely all kinds of false teachers all across American Christianity. And that has always been. False teaching has prevailed for the last 2,000 years in different parts of the world. And we see it here in 1 John 4 as he's addressing this head on, trying to help them, prepare them to be a people that actually discern what is good.
We're going to see the phrase, test the spirits in a moment, to discern what is actually good and true and worth orienting your life around between the difference of something that is going to lead you towards death and destruction. So we're going to sit in this passage and hopefully it encourages us and hopefully it equips us to be a more discerning people. To not just believe everything that we hear, but to actually grow in discernment as we grow in testing the spirits. So let me pray for us and then we will walk through this together. Lord, we love you. And we thank you that you give us the word to be able to grow us and instruct us.
God, I pray that you would help us listen. That you help us grow in being a wise, discerning people. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so.
I'm going to pick up where we ended two weeks ago in verse 24 of chapter 3. And then we'll go into verse 1. So he says, And by this we know that he abides in us by the spirit whom he has given us. So we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. That passage is to help give us assurance. The assurance comes from God.
The spirit in us helps us know that we are in Christ. That gives us assurance. That gives us confidence. That comes from him. And then he moves into chapter 4 to see where this confidence should lead us as we grow in this type of discernment. In verse 1 he says, Alright, so.
There's a case change in how he uses spirits. So he has capital S spirit. That is the Holy Spirit. And then he's got lowercase s spirits. So what is he getting at when he says lowercase s spirits?
A very just direct application of what he's saying there. As he's talking about don't trust everybody. Spirits there is just generally people. Right? So what he's drawing from is that each of us have a body and we have a spirit.
Right? We have a spirit. And that is either influenced by, empowered by the Holy Spirit. Or it's influenced and empowered by, we talk about this quite a bit in our church, kind of these three different influences in our life. Which is our flesh, our sinful nature. The world.
Which is the culture of the world around us. And the devil. The evil one. Satan. So you're either empowered by in your spiritual life the Holy Spirit or these three domains.
It's one or the other. And he's using spiritual language here to say don't trust what anyone says. Just don't, don't, don't just, just blindly trust. You have to test the spirits. And that's general good advice. Period.
Right? Just don't, don't be gullible. Don't believe everything you hear. All right? Because if you ever have a friend or a family member that, that shares something on Facebook that is obviously false. It's like, oh honey, no.
No. Don't, don't, don't do that. No. Like that, that is obviously not true. And it's just like, don't, don't be gullible. Don't fall for anything that you see, that you read.
Test everything that you hear. Test, discern whether it's from God or it's from the evil one. It's from the world. It's from your flesh. Test everything. John is commanding them.
Don't believe every spirit. Don't believe every spirit. Test. Because there are, are false prophets who have gone out into the world that are deceiving people. You need to know this. Test the spirits.
And, and, and we saw this in John early on. That there was some false teaching that was sweeping through the church. So much so that there were people that were in the church that looked like Christians that ended up leaving the church. That's why in 219 he says, they went out from us, but they were not of us. For they had been of us. They would have continued with us.
There are people that came through with false teaching that deceive people. And they end up leaving the faith all together. Discern. So he says, test the spirits. Discern. And then he gets specific on how they are to do it in verse 2.
He says, by this, by this you know the spirit of God. All right? So here's the test. 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, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
So the test is a doctrinal test. It's what are you confessing? Do these people who are around you, do they confess that Jesus came in the flesh or not? Do they believe he was a real, literal person or not? And as we saw early on in 1 John, what looks like the false teaching that had swept through the churches that John was writing to is some form of Gnosticism. And there's a lot of things that Gnosticism taught.
But some of the key teachings of Gnosticism is that Jesus did not come in the flesh. That he came in spirit only. That he didn't literally suffer on the cross or literally bleed or literally die or literally rise. That's why in the very first verse of the entire letter he says, That which was from the beginning, referencing Christ, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands. He's trying to help them see Jesus is real. Like he literally came.
So when you hear of people that are saying he didn't come in the flesh, red flags should go up. Immediately, you should wait a second. This is not true teaching. This is actually false teaching. So he gives this doctrinal test to see are they in the faith or not?
Are they claiming that Jesus came in the flesh or not? Because if they are claiming that he did not come in the flesh, well, what they're being influenced by is quite insidious. It's quite evil. He says, this is the spirit of the Antichrist. What you heard was coming and now is in the world already. So we talked about the Antichrist in chapter 2 as we were walking through this, that in the New Testament, there's, I mean, consistently this teaching throughout the New Testament, that there are false teachers.
Jesus comes on the scene and talks about in Matthew 7 that there are going to be wolves in sheep's clothing who are amongst you. They look like the children of God. They look like a sheep, but they're actually a ravenous wolf who will destroy you. Paul gives multiple warnings against false teachers. Peter in 2 Peter 2 gives a warning about destructive heresies that will sweep through the church. So that's taught consistently throughout the New Testament.
But then there's this concept that shows up that there's actually like a false teacher of all false teachers, like the false prophet of all false prophets. And Paul in 1 Thessalonians calls him, he calls him the man of lawlessness, calls him the son of destruction. The book of Revelation talks about this figure as a figure who will rise up and kind of deceive the nations. And oftentimes that figure is called the Antichrist. That's what we most commonly know it as, the Antichrist. But as we saw in chapter 2, that Antichrist actually isn't the word that, that word doesn't show up in the book of Revelation, doesn't show up in 1 Thessalonians.
The word Antichrist only shows up in 1 and 2 John. This is the word that he uses only. And he's talking not about necessarily a person here, but actually a spirit of the Antichrist, a spirit of rebellion. Now, he's referencing that, yeah, there is someone who is coming, which you heard was coming, referencing this figure. But what's more concerning at the moment is the spirit of the Antichrist that is at work.
And I feel like that's something that we should absorb because there's a lot of people that get really excited about this kind of stuff. They get really excited about the book of Revelation, have like charts and stuff, and have seen all the movies and read all the books. Like, is the Antichrist coming? Is he here? Is he the president? Is he this actor?
Is he amongst us? And it's like, just breathe. All right? More pertinent question. All right?
How is the spirit of the Antichrist already at work in your life right now? How are you believing false teachings that are all over the American church right now? That's a more pressing and concerning question to ask because the spirit of the Antichrist is already at work. That's what he's trying to help him see. It's already at work now. And it's continued over the next 2,000 years to continue to be at work in the church.
So, he goes hard after any false gospel that claims that Jesus did not come in the flesh because the implication is huge. Like, if you don't believe that Jesus didn't come, if you don't believe that he came in the flesh, I mean, you've lost everything. You've lost the literal life that he lived to fulfill the law. You've lost the literal death that he bled for us, that he suffocated on the cross. You've lost his literal death, his bodily resurrection. Like, our faith hinges upon that hope.
Our faith is built upon that truth. And when you remove the offense of the cross that he died for sin, if you remove the fact that he was raised from the grave to free us from slavery to sin, if you remove the offense of that by removing his literal life, you've lost everything. And what happens with heresy is when you lose this essential truth that our faith is built upon, you replace it with something that is lesser. You replace it with a false gospel. He's trying to help them see the importance of that here. And the importance of that has not changed in 2,000 years.
It's continued to be important. Because there are false teachings that even are prevalent throughout the American church today and show up in many different forms. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks ago, probably the most prevalent false teaching in our time is the prosperity gospel. It's the idea that minimizes the offense of the cross, that minimizes the literal death of Jesus and focusing on that. And what it does is it actually focuses on faith equaling blessing in this life.
Faith as an exchange for being blessed and happy in this life, being prosperous in this life now. And Jesus in this teaching becomes a genie. And if you believe in him, if you trust in him, then you'll get the prosperity that you want in this life now. And it doesn't look at the literal life, death, and resurrection as our only hope. But it looks at things as our only hope.
And in a twisted spin, the things that Jesus died to save us from, which is the love of money, it actually replaces that as our hope. And what happens, I've seen this in our generation. So if you're under the age of 40, you're like, I wouldn't fall for that. Because when you think of prosperity preachers, kind of the stereotypical thing that comes to mind is the 80s and the 90s, when you had some guy in a nice Armani suit, on TV, on a channel like TBN, which is just kind of a garbage channel. They put people up there that don't even believe the Trinity. You got somebody on TV, it's got a 1-800 number at the bottom, and it's like, we wouldn't fall for that, that's so obvious.
He's peddling lies, he's peddling foolishness. And like any generation, at any time, there's always this arrogance of looking at those who went before you to say, I wouldn't fall for that. I wouldn't be like this. But no, we don't fall for that. We fall for a guy on Instagram who has $1,000 sneakers, who's just, you know, taking selfies of himself in the gym and talks about himself a lot and preaches the same message, repurposed and repackaged in different ways. That's exactly what we fall for.
And we fall for this, and we go after what they present as the good life. It's sick, and it shows up in so many different forms. There's another one that's a really close cousin of the prosperity gospel. It's really this man-centered gospel that's really come to life in the age of social media. But it does the same thing.
It takes the focus off of Jesus as our only hope. Like the literal crucified Christ as our only hope, and it replaces it with a mirror. And it says, you're your only hope. And that shows, I mean, there are so many people that have grabbed hold of social media who have done this, who have podcasts and blogs and books. You've got social media influencers that go and write books like, girl, wash your face, which I picked up that book and read the intro and the first chapter and went, oh my goodness. You're the hero of your story?
And that book's not unique. There's 50 of those books that get dropped every year in the Christian publishing industry. It's all over the place that you are your only hope. Like you should have red flags go up. For anyone that says they're Christian, that's on Instagram, that talks a lot about themselves, even if they do it in a self-deprecating way, right? Because that's kind of a popular thing to do now, is kind of make fun of yourself.
But if they talk about themselves, and they don't talk about Christ as our only hope, they push this, it's narcissism on steroids. And ultimately, what they peddle is these solutions that become man-centered. These strategies that are focusing on your works to get yourself to a place of happiness for your life. And it happens over and over and over again. I mean, these things pop up, and there are pastors and pastors who use the church of Jesus Christ as a platform for their own personal brand. There are worship ministries that craft this personal worship experience.
It's all about you and your feelings. I mean, it's just, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's all over the American church. And you have to have ears to hear, to listen, to be discerning, to see who is replacing the hope that we have in Christ for lesser things. That's the spirit of the Antichrist that is at work.
It has been at work, and it's going to continue to be at work. It is opposed to Jesus as our only hope, and it has infected churches for 2,000 years. So we have to have ears to hear, to receive the advice that he is giving, the commands he's giving to this church, and apply it to our days so that we might not fall for similar things. And then in verse 4, he pauses for a moment to give some encouragement. It says, 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.
And I love that, that moment of encouragement that he gives here. It's not just that, like he said a couple of weeks when we walked through it, it's not just that our conscience, that we have the spirit in us, that our conscience doesn't condemn us. He's like, Jesus isn't just greater than your self-indicting conscience, which we saw a couple of years ago. He is greater than the one who is at work in this world. And he's referencing Satan there. He is greater than Satan.
He's greater than the spirit of the Antichrist. And you roll with him. You will overcome him. You will prevail. He gives this moment of just encouragement that reminds us of how this ends. Then he jumps into verse 5 and he says, They, talking about false prophets, they are from the world.
Therefore, they speak from the world and the world listens to them. We are from God. 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. False prophets are from the world.
They speak in the language of the world. And language taps into identity. And that's true just in general. Like if you, you get around people that, like for instance, if you get around a couple of guys that are from the same branch of the military and they both realize it, like, Oh, you're army? Oh, I'm army too. The language changes immediately.
It just does. They start speaking in acronyms. And like, as a civilian, I'm like, I, it's hard to follow. Yeah, my, my CEO used to be an MP. He was in the DMZ back in 03. And it's like, what?
CEO, commanding officer, military police, demilitarized zone, Iraq. Got it. 2003. And they just keep going. It's just like, yeah, I got some R&R, little TLC, watching MTV. And it's just like, you're just making up stuff now.
But it is, you see their face light up and they start, they speak in a lingo that taps into an identity that I, that I'm not a part of. It taps into this identity of being in the military. Language taps into identity. And false prophets know the world. Like they know the language of the world. They know how to bring out worldliness in you by speaking in a way that appeals to the flesh, that appeals to the fallenness in us, so that we might be captivated and enslaved to the things of the world.
He's like, you gotta be mindful of this. You gotta be mindful of the language that they use. And he ultimately says, don't listen to them. Verse six, he says, we are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us. That we there, there's a progression built into we.
When he's talking about we, he's referencing, first the apostles who received the teaching of Jesus, who received the word from the word who became flesh, and then preached that message to the church of Jesus Christ. And then we came to encompass the whole church as a whole. But there's a progression that is built into that when he says, we, we includes the teachings of Jesus that they received from the beginning. So that you, whoever is not from God, does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. That receiving this from the apostles, receiving the teachings of Christ helps us discern what is true from what is error.
What is good from what is evil. He's arguing for discernment. That we need discernment and the foundation for discernment. The foundation. If you want to grow in foundational discernment, you need the word of God. You need the teachings of Christ that show up in his word.
Like you, if you want to grow in testing the spirits, John argues, you, you need the word of God. That is foundational discernment right there. You need the Bible to be able to discern what is error from what is true. because there are a lot of false teachings out there. Now, for the last 2,000 years, there are tons of them. But it would be foolish to try to focus on all of those first.
Right? Like if you, if you start at a brand new Job and you get your employment packet and you show up day one, you could make a list of all the ways you could get fired. Right? You could make a list and say, ah, don't open up an email from a spam because that might cause ransomware. We might lose all our company data. Don't run over my supervisor's foot with a forklift.
Don't insult the boss's wife. Like you could go down the list of all the ways that ends poorly for you. Or, more wisely, just focus on what you're supposed to do and do that well. Focus on the little things well and then as you grow in that, then you'll actually grow to be able to know the things that can take you out. So as a Christian, we focus on the word of God.
That's foundational discernment. You don't have to know every single false teaching from 1st century to 5th century to the Reformation to today. Just focus on the word of God. And when you know the word of God so well that when you hear something that's outside of the word of God, you get a red flag. Wait a second. I don't know about that.
You've got to grow in foundational discernment as you follow Christ. As you get serious about your faith, get rooted in the word. Read your Bibles. That is the best defense that is the best defense from falling to false teaching. And we talk about this all the time. We talk about gospel fluency in our church.
That you would be, as you're fluent in a language where you think in that language, where you process in that language, like you'd be fluent in the gospel, so fluent in it that you would know it so well that you would think in it, that you would process in it so that when false teaching creeps in, you go, no, no, no, no, not about that. I'm going to have to test that and see if that holds up against the word of God. That's why I'm in our Bible verse for the month is, our memory verse for the month is Isaiah 48, which is the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God will stand forever. And it's true.
The word of God stands forever and we need that long-standing foundation so that we can test the spirits. We need that foundation because here's the truth of the matter. Here's the reality. You are probably never, ever, ever going to hear anyone that stands in this pulpit and pushes false teaching. It's just, you will have to take the pulpit out of my cold, dead hands before anybody stands up here. Same with Chet.
And Chet's bigger than me and stronger than me. Okay? Like, no one's coming up here to teach false teaching, but the difference between us and the early church is they didn't have the internet. And we do. And it is so easy for you to pick up your phone, to surf through Instagram and find somebody who says nice things, who looks nice, who can quote a Bible verse. Y'all, just because someone can quote a Bible verse doesn't mean they're legit at all.
I mean, Satan quoted the Bible. Like, when he's tempting Jesus in Matthew 4, he quotes Psalm 91. I mean, I mean, he, I don't, the Bible, I don't know this for a fact, but it seems logical. Satan probably knows more scripture than any of us in this room. He knows the Bible. Just because someone quotes scripture doesn't mean they're good, doesn't mean they're legit.
You should test everything. You should test what we say as preachers. Like, test what I say against the Word of God. Definitely test what Chet says against the Word of God. Test everything through the Word of God and ask questions, y'all. Ask questions as you're listening to people talk.
Ask questions like, do they make much of Christ or do they make much of themselves? Because if they talk a lot about themselves, there should be a red flag that goes up. Do they shy away from subjects like the blood of Christ? They don't talk about the blood. They don't talk about His sacrifice on the cross. And it's like, man, there should be a red flag that goes up.
Some people are like, yeah, I just don't want to be so negative and focus on the negative things of the Bible. And it's like, oh, I don't think you should focus. I think you should just stop talking. Like, no. Shut it down. Unfollow.
Don't listen. Not at all. Do, are they afraid to talk about sin? That's another thing in this whole positive, oh, let's just be happy, positive things. Like, never talk about sin. It's like, man, if they don't talk about sin, Jesus talked a lot about sin, so much that He died for it.
I mean, do they talk, are they afraid to talk about sin? Do they believe the Bible is true? If you're listening or reading anything of anyone that questions the validity of the Scriptures, the truthfulness of the Scriptures, you should be running for the door. Red flags should go up. Is the solution that they give for your problems found in your work and what you can do are found in Christ? Because there's a lot of things you can find on the internet that says, here's the strategies for you to be the best version of you and figure this out.
You're going to be great, man. It's like, no, no, no, our hope is Christ. We build it off of that. I'll give you one more. Do they talk about happiness more than they talk about holiness? If they're so concerned with you being happy that they never talk about growing to be more like Christ, there should be red flags that go out.
We are not called to mindlessly accept what anyone says no matter how nice they say it, no matter how many verses they know. Discern everything through the word of God. Everything. And then go back to verse 4 and be encouraged where he says, little children, you are from God and I've overcome them. For he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. We need that.
In the midst of a tough call to discern and test the spirits, we need that type of encouragement. I'm going to give you two reasons. One is the lesser reason. We'll get to the bigger one in a moment. But I think the lesser one is more specific to our church family.
So here's the first reason. We need that encouragement. We are discerning. We're called to discern between those who have the spirit of God in them and those who have the spirit of the Antichrist. It's a pretty wide gap. Pretty black and white difference there. spirit.
Okay? Here's why that's important. That calling is not filled with fear. That is not a fearful calling because there are people that are fearful that the church, the American church is going to be taken over by heresy and these people make a living, have a hobby of just dunking on weaker theology because it's fun. And these things are, this is broadly called discernment ministry. And it's more, it's more of a problem for churches that love good theology.
We talk about theology a lot and one of the dangers of being a church that talks about theology a lot is you can get, go down the rabbit hole of some of their whole YouTube channels and blogs and Instagram pages, feeds, whatever they're called, that are devoted to this right here, to discernment ministry. And discernment ministries drive me insane. They are so annoying because it's like they read this passage and don't read verse 4. They're like paralyzed by fear. It's like they don't read the rest of the Bible. And here's the problem with these discernment ministries that are always pointing out, always going after, always going after weaker theology.
Here is the, here's the problem with this. They don't differentiate between those who are false teachers, who don't have the Holy Spirit and those who are genuine brothers and sisters in Christ who just got it wrong on a few things. Who just agree to disagree on a few things. Like there are secondary, tertiary, and lesser issues in theology that are not, not worth just going after with other people. It's not worth hammering them for. And for discernment ministries, everything's a nail.
If it's not, everything's a nail and they're a hammer and they go after everything. And the problem with this is it's foolish arrogance. And Jesus in Matthew 5 says, whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council. Whoever says you fool will be liable to the hell of fire. And woe to the person that insults other Christians. Woe to the person that belittles other Christians.
I'm not against being impolite. I will call out the Joel Osteens of the world because they are false teachers and they deserve to be called out. But woe to the person that goes after other Christians who you don't agree with. And that is a problem that can creep up in churches like ours that love good theology. Don't go down that rabbit hole. Seek wise Christians, not those who make a living off of these type of things.
Alright, that's the lesser one. This is not as big a deal. Here's the bigger reason. We need this reminder of verse 4 because we need to remember how this ends. Like, remember how this ultimately shakes out. Because what can happen is you can start to look at, like you can look at the Christian publishing industry and look at all the books that get pushed out and go, oh my goodness.
You can see all the popular preachers and go, oh my goodness. You can start to freak out. And you forget how this thing ends. Like, if you've ever watched something that you've seen ever and ever again, like an epic, like Harry Potter, like Lord of the Rings or whatever, you've seen it over and over and over and over again and you watch it and you're like, there's a moment where there's a tension where it's like, oh, is he going to win? Like, is he going to win the battle? And you're like, no, I've seen this ten times.
I've read this book over and over again. I know he wins. You have to step out of yourself. And that's what, you've got to step out of yourself and remember, 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. And that is good news because you roll with God. You are with him and the spirit of the Antichrist is always going to be at work in this world.
It is always going to be at work and you're going to see it, you're going to pop up with every new following in American Christianity. It's going to keep happening. But the power of the risen, literal Christ is greater and he will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it and the kingdom of light will pierce through the darkness. Little children, we are from God and have overcome it and will continue to overcome. We need that truth and until then, we do what we're supposed to do. We read our Bibles, we preach the gospel, we contend with lies because we ultimately overcome and Jesus wins.
So let's be a church that tests the spirits, that discerns everything, that boldly and winsomely proclaims truth in the midst of opposition and let's do that with a confidence that comes from him, not from a spirit of fear, but from a spirit of absolute victory that we have in Christ.
Discernment Radar Wk. 1
Colossians 2:1-7
Transcript
Okay, so we're in chapter 2. Here's the thing. Our culture is confused when it comes to a lot of stuff. Like, we're all over the place. I think some of it has to do with we have the internet now, and so we have all this access to information. I saw a thing that said, if you met somebody from 100 years ago, the most difficult thing to explain to them would be that you have a device in your pocket that gives you access to all the information in the world, and you use it to watch videos of cats and to get into arguments with strangers.
So, like, that's what we have access to. We got a phone book was sent to our house the other day, and my wife was like, do you want this? And I was like, no, I know where the internet is. Like, I can get there, so I don't need a phone book. But the truth is, we've got a lot of information, and not a really good way to sort it.
We have a lot of information. We have access to studies. We have access to what scientists are learning. We have access to what great minds in the world think, but we don't have a really good way to filter it. And so I even got to just thinking about simple things. I remember when I was growing up, milk was, like, super good for you.
And then for a while it was like, well, we're not so sure it's good for you. Like, it doesn't help your bones as much as we thought, and it might be the reason you're fat. Like, there was just like, so now you can have skim milk, which is basically white water. It's just lying to you. It's not actually milk. And so, like, there was, and then it came back, and it was like, no, milk's good.
And they had the big advertising. And so I was just, so I just got on Google and started typing in why blank is, and then Google fills it in for you. So I did milk first. Why milk is, and immediately my options are bad for you, because Google fills in related searches. So why milk is bad for you, why milk is good for you, why milk isn't good for you, which is the same as the one above it.
It's just trickier. Why milk is white and why milk is bad for cats. Those are the things you can search when it comes to milk. So I could get on Google, and I could stand up here and give you reasons why milk is bad or why milk is good just as easily. So I started thinking, okay, if milk has this, what else do we have that's pretty baseline stuff that Google's going to help me either fight for or fight against.
The next one is water. Why water is important. Why water is good for you. Why water is so important. Why water is bad for you. Why water is important for life.
At least bad for you is further down the line than on milk. But there's probably some sort of a study that proves that water is bad for you that scientists did. Just for the record, water is not bad for you, unless we're in one of the boil water things that Columbia does constantly, because we can't apparently not need to boil our water on a regular basis. So water, I did eating. So eating, pretty baseline thing.
Why eating is important. Why eating is good. Why eating is important for weight loss. I need to check that one later. Why eating is bad for you. Here to tell you, there's two things you need to stay away from.
It's water and eating. The internet says they're bad for you. I did sleeping, because I thought if people had a problem with eating, why sleeping is good, important to your health, healthy, so important, why sleeping is awesome. The internet agrees. Nobody's making an argument against sleeping. Sleeping is great.
It just got better. As you went, ends in awesome. Nobody's like why sleeping is bad for you. The internet would get rid of them. That person would be wrong. So we have people willing to argue that you shouldn't eat, but nobody's against sleeping.
Then I started doing some things that are really important to me. Bacon. Why bacon is bad for you. Why bacon is healthy. Why bacon is amazing. Why bacon is called bacon.
Why bacon is the best food ever. Which really doesn't even need to be on the internet. If you've had bacon, you know why it's the best food ever. And then I checked another one that really means a lot to me. It's fried chicken. Why fried chicken is bad.
Bad for you. Unhealthy, good for you. But right there in the middle, why fried chicken is racist. And I'll tell you, that made me feel so good about fried chicken. Because you know how people would be like, meat is murder and stuff. This fried chicken is racist.
I'm glad we killed it. People would be like, you shouldn't eat so many chickens. What about a chicken? I'd be like, you want this racist chicken to live? This chicken hated Filipinos. And I'm glad that it died.
It deserved it. Now pass me the hot sauce. So just so you know, fried chicken deserves to die. It's racist. All of us should eat fried chicken and get rid of racism. Because those racist fried chickens.
I guess if you bake it, it's not racist. They only take the racist ones and fry them, I guess. I don't know how that works. But here's the thing. We have access to an inordinate amount of information. We have access to studies and all of this kind of stuff.
And people would back these things up with facts and reasons why. And you'll hear all the time, well, studies have shown or doctors say. And we've got all of this coming in. And we don't have a really good way to sort it out. We have a constant flow of information. But we don't have a good way of filtering what's good and what's bad and what's healthy and what's right.
And I'm not even just talking about, those are just fun examples. I'm not talking about when it just comes to food. But in more important life issues, we are constantly bombarded with ways to think, ways to feel. And we just don't have a good framework in America for how we handle that. How we process what's good and healthy, right, wrong, or otherwise. And so we're in the sixth week of Colossians.
And Paul is writing this book to the Colossian church. And a lot of times Paul would write a letter to a church and he'd have a specific thing that he was mad about. Like that he was angry about or that he was fighting against. In 1 and 2 Corinthians, he's answering specific questions. There are even times where you can tell he's like quoting them in response. Like you said this, let me respond to that.
In the book of Galatians, he's arguing against people that said you needed to be good Jewish people in order to be good Christians. And so Paul doesn't beat around the bush. He starts off with like, hey, my name's Paul. What the heck is wrong with y'all? And like he says some really mean things in the book of Galatians. That's why it's one of my favorite books.
He just goes after them when it comes to adding religion to Jesus. And so in the book of Colossians, he doesn't really do that. He talks about, you can see that he's talking about different concepts. And so it seems as if more he's combating just culture around them and culture inside the church that was slowly pulling them away from Jesus. And so it wasn't a big thing. It wasn't this one specific area, but it was just this constant onslaught.
And so it actually is helpful for us because we're in the same situation. I saw a statistic that said, because studies have shown, that the average American is going to see 2,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day. 2,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day. So thousands of times a day, we're going to be told, you need this to be happy. You need this to be complete. You need this to have fun.
You need seven razors to shave your face and not just four. Loser. Like we're going to be told over and over again that we need something else to make us happy, to make us complete, to fulfill us. I saw a statistic that said the average American watches 34 hours of television a week. Now in some places, that's a full-time job.
Definitely a part-time job. 34 hours a week. That's average. So some people in this room probably watch a little more, some people a little less. But here's the thing.
Each of us for hours a week are having worldview pumped into our brain. How we should think about romance. How we should think about finances. How we should look at success. How we should know what masculinity and femininity is. Like what makes a man a man and what's to be honored in females.
Like we're having that pumped into our brains. And how do we sort out what's helpful, what's right, what's good, and what's not. So that's what Paul is going to point them to. And so what we're working to do for the next two times that we get together is to build a discernment radar. We just want to have something. Discernment just means to make a good decision, to judge rightly.
And so Paul's giving them, he's equipping them in chapter two to discern well, to judge rightly. And so radar just means something that, you know, the little, when you're watching a movie and the little thing's spinning around and they're like watching for an enemy aircraft or something and it's just the little green thing. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, radar, yeah. And then it goes, boop, boop. You know, they can see it or whatever.
That's what we're talking about. So we're talking about we all have some sort of a system to gauge what's coming in and whether it's healthy, good, or right. And so some people in this room, we all have one. You all have some way that you gauge what's coming in. Some of us, super intense, like we're way over here. We believe like stuff our grandmother said and maybe some things Billy Graham said.
And if you're the president of the United States, but it depends on which team you're on. We'll listen to you a little bit. Like that's it. Like we have like a very tight amount of who we'll listen to. And then some people more in the middle. Well, we have some gauge for how we what we believe and what we won't believe.
And then some people just pretty much we don't have a system at all. If it just sounds good. It's like, cool, that's true. And so here's the thing. We've gotten to where we're so used to having information pumped in that we've stopped sorting it. We've stopped thinking through what's good and right.
And the truth is, it's the same way that water can run over a rock and and bore out a channel. And it's happened slowly and it happens over time. But eventually, a river running over rock will dig its own hole. And for some of us, that's what culture is doing to us. We have constant cultural onslaught of information and ways that we should believe. And we don't notice it.
But it's happening slowly and slowly and slowly to where we're drifting and how we think and what we believe. And so that's what we're going to be looking at in Colossians. We'll be in chapter two. And so I'm going to go ahead and start reading. Verse one. For I want you to know.
This is Paul writing to the church. For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea. And for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the fullness of assurance and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. And so he says, I want you to know how much I struggle for you, how much I'm fighting for this, that you may be encouraged being knit together in love.
So he says that y'all would be together. Being knit together in love to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom, in Jesus, are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible argument. So he says, I want you to be knit together so that you can grow in Christ. And I'm telling you this so people won't delude you, trick you with things that sound smart. That's what he's talking about.
So here's the thing. Paul's going to say that what our discernment radar is, and that's all we're talking about tonight is what it is. The next time we get together, we'll talk specifically about how it functions and how we kind of catch things. But what he's talking about tonight is what it is. And he says this. It's submission to Jesus in the context of community.
So we hold things up to Jesus in the context of community, that we were knit together so that we can grow in the fullness of understanding of Christ. You can go ahead and skip to the Colossians slide. Don't show the one with the other. Yeah, there you go. We'll get to the other one later. There you go.
Yeah. That we would be together and we would submit things to Christ. So here's what happens. We constantly have a lot of viewpoints pumped into our brains. And so I think sometimes as Christians, we like run into the bookstore and we run over to the Christian living section and we feel like we're at home base or something like safe. That sign says Christian.
Or we flip it through the channels and we cut it to like, oh, TV preacher, we're good. He's going to talk about good Bible things. That's not actually always the case. We have to submit everything to Jesus. We have to submit everything to Christ. It's about him.
And so what's the criteria for how we do this? Like what's the criteria for even with Christian things? Like they have cool hair. Is that like what we're shooting for? They have a TV show. So obviously, I know what they're talking about.
That they pastor something. I wish that was true. I wish that if someone was pastoring a church, that meant that they were pointing people to Jesus. But that's not always true. What is it? They seem trustworthy.
Like they wrote a book. They have a doctor in front of their name or a PhD after it. See, a lot of times we have information being sold to us, given to us, we're reading books about, and it actually isn't pointing us to Jesus. And so what Paul says is it's got to be in submission to Christ. It's got to point us to Jesus. It's got to be about him.
So you heard about blood moons? Anybody? Not in a long, some people have heard about blood moons. People, a guy wrote a book about blood moons, because there's going to be blood moons this year, which a blood moon is a way that Jewish people describe a certain type of lunar eclipse, I think, or solar eclipse, but I think it's a lunar eclipse. And so they're freaking out because there are blood moons, which is a type of lunar eclipse, landing on major Jewish holidays. There's a big book written about it.
And it's a Christian book about how we as Christians should be thinking about, worried about blood moons and what they mean for us. Okay, first of all, it's not a super big deal that blood moons land on Jewish holidays, because Jewish holidays follow a lunar calendar. So if there's ever going to be a blood moon, it's going to be on a Jewish holiday, just for the record. So that's how that works. Secondly, the Bible mentions a few things about prophetic, the moon will turn to blood, but it does not camp out there, and it's not a major thing, and it's not super described. And so for us to run off into some sideline small issue that doesn't point us to Jesus is actually not appropriate.
Because Paul says, the understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So if we have any Christian teacher standing up and pointing us to some hidden treasure, some hidden mystery, and it's not in Jesus, they're actually pointing us in the wrong direction. And so I've actually gotten into conversations with people before, Christians who are telling me, oh, but these blood moons. Somebody said, but Jewish scholars say, and I let them just talk for a while, and then I said, yeah, Jewish scholars miss Jesus when they're studying the Old Testament.
And the Old Testament's about Jesus, so I'm glad they found this blood moon stuff, but I'm not sure they're hitting on much when it comes to how we're supposed to grow and know and what we understand to be true. Harold Camping, anybody know who this cat is? He had a radio program. He did Bible math. Numerology, I think is what they call it. It's where you take random Numbers in the Bible, and then you do math, which sounds horrible.
And then he figured out when Jesus was coming back, when the world was going to end, I think is how he did it. And so there was a bunch of, like, billboards. This was a big thing up in Lynchburg, where I was at the time, but, like, it was a thing. And he said the world was going to end at 6 p.m. Which time zone, bro? Like, how's that going to work?
Is it Eastern Standard Time? And some people asked him, because he said that, and people asked him, and he was like, at 6 p.m., wherever you are. Which means that the world's going to end until it hits a time zone and wait. No, no, no, wait for it. Wait for it. There we go.
It doesn't make any sense. And what he's saying is he's found secrets, he's found mysteries, he's found knowledge, he's found understanding, and it's not in Jesus, it's in something else. And so what Paul's going to say is that if anybody comes with mystery, secret, knowledge, wisdom, and they're pointing you to something other than Jesus, it's not right. Now, those examples are a little bit easier, although they are big mainstream Christian things. But how do we do this in a very simple day-to-day basis?
How do we know if the information that our aunt or our best friend just told us over coffee points us to Jesus or doesn't? How do we have a functioning radar for when people are talking to us that we grow in our knowledge of the gospel, that we grow in following Jesus or something else? So I'll give you a few examples. You're a dude, and you're wanting to get married. You have a desire to meet a lady and to get married. And so you're talking to someone about this, and it's like your aunt, and she's super nice and has really cool blue hair, and so she's talking to you about how to meet a lady.
She's Christian, you know, in church, and her advice to you is make yourself a good gift, that God gives good gifts, and so you need to make yourself a good gift. So you need to get your finances in order. You need to have a job. You need to, you know, if you're a little bit overweight, like you need to get healthy. Like her advice is make yourself a good gift, and then God will give you as a good gift to someone else. And that's the advice.
Okay. That's actually not bad advice, but does that point us to Jesus? Is that what the gospel says? That we work on ourselves, that we make ourselves good, and then he owes us? Is that the gospel? That you do good religious things, and then God owes you something?
No. It's that we're completely messed up, that we don't deserve anything, and that in his grace he grants us things. That in his grace he gives us things. So yes, good advice. Take a shower. Yes, use shampoo.
Get a job. Sure. Quit eating things that end in Edo. Absolutely. But God doesn't owe you anything on the back end of that.
You don't earn a spouse from God that way. That's not how that works, and that actually doesn't point you to Jesus. It points you to legalism. It points you to moralism. It points you to hard work, and then he owes you something. And so nice advice, but wisdom, knowledge, mystery wasn't found in it because it didn't point you to Jesus.
Okay. You're a, um, you're female, and you've gone from guy to guy. She's gone from guy to guy, and she's constantly just needs a man to be in relationship with, to have a relationship with, to know that she's okay. She has to have a man, and so this has been a problem. It's kind of derailed some things in her life, and so she's sitting with a counselor, and the counselor tells her, here's what you need. You need to get a job.
You need to be successful. You need to be able to stand on your own two feet, and then you won't need a man. You'll be your own person. That's the counsel that's been given. Okay. Is that good advice?
Does that point us to Jesus, or does that point us to something else? Where, where are we trying to grow? Do we, as we take in advice, as people say these things to us, we have to submit it and see, how does this fit with the gospel? How does this fit with what we know about Jesus? Okay. The truth is, she does need a man, and his name is Jesus.
She's not complete by herself. She doesn't need to be self-sufficient. Getting a job is fine, if she needs to be able to operate on her own, but the goal isn't to be a successful, self-made woman, to be empowered. She actually needs to find rest, and hope, and life, and be a complete person because of Jesus. And then, yeah. Have a man, don't have a man.
Be successful in a job. Don't be successful in a job. But the goal isn't to find something outside of herself on earth to make herself complete, but to find Jesus, to rest in him, to find fulfillment and satisfaction in him, so that what she's looking for in a man, she finds in Jesus. So, yeah. Get a job. Don't have to have a man.
Sure. But realize that hope and life is found in Jesus. All right. Here's one. I've seen this a good bit. Hanging out with some people, Christian people.
Somebody's, like, super depressed. Just, maybe not even depressed isn't the word, but, like, just feels, unworthy feels, like there's no, there's no way God loves me. They have this guilt. And so what I've seen people do is they'll sit around them and start telling them why they're special, why they're good, why they're loved. Here's all the great things about you. And so it could be a spouse, sit down and say, here's why you're wonderful.
Here's why you're good. Here's why you should feel good about yourself. Or it could be a group of guys in, like, a community group, and one of them is just like, man, I just feel, every time I mess up, I mess up so much, and I just don't feel like God could love me. And everybody says, no, you're doing great. You're trying really hard, and you did that nice thing for that kid two months ago. Remember?
Remember that? You pumped up his basketball. Like, God wrote that down, and he loves you. And, like, they do this, like, you should feel good about yourself. And the truth is, that's encouraging. That's nice to say to someone.
But if my standing before God is based off of how I feel about myself and how good I feel like I'm being at the moment, you're not pointing me to Jesus. You're pointing me to me. And as soon as I stop feeling good about myself, I bottom out again because my rest and my hope is in something other than Jesus. And so what they ought to say is, hey, man, be encouraged for these things. This is where Jesus is at work in you. And know this.
You don't have to feel good about yourself. Jesus loves you regardless. And you don't have to have it together. Jesus died for you because you don't and because you never will. And then we get to point to Jesus and we get to grow in the gospel and we get to find riches of knowledge and wisdom and mystery because we submit everything to Jesus. And so we have to have a functioning radar for how we do that so that when someone says something to us, we can gauge, is this gospel?
Does this help me grow closer to Jesus? Are you pointing me to Jesus or is this something else? Are you pointing me to me? Are you pointing me to something outside of me? Do I need a job or a man? Like, what are you pointing me to?
And just for the record, don't point me to a man. I'm not going to take the bait. We have to have something, some way that we functionally walk that out. And so Paul says this. He says he's praying that their hearts would be knit together in love, their hearts be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the fullness of assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this, that no one may delude you with plausible argument.
He says, I want you to be together and I want you to know that everything's found in Jesus. And I'm telling you that so that you won't be led astray by plausible arguments. He doesn't say dumb things. He says stuff that sounds smart. Plausible argument. Yeah, actually sounds pretty good.
That's what leads us astray. Not when someone tells us something blatantly stupid. But when someone says something that sounds pretty good. So he says, I want you to be together. And so that's our discernment radar. Submission to Jesus in the context of community.
That we actually have people around us that we're knit together in love. So that we can reach the fullness, the full assurance of the gospel and that we won't be led astray. So really practically, we're going to land on a few things that we just need to know. Here's what we do. Here's how this happens. Oh, sorry.
I already went to my last page and then I hid it for myself. Anyway, here's practically how this happens. Somebody tells you something, you hear something, you read something, you don't just accept it, you think. Does this line up with the gospel? Does this line up with Jesus? And then when you've thought about it, you take it to a team, you've got a team, and you say, hey, other believers who know me, this is what I think this is saying.
Is this smart? This is what my aunt told me. Didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, although I did take a shower. Like, is this, is this, does this line up with the gospel? And then your teammate gets to say, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?
Like, this doesn't really line up. And this passage says this, and we get a team. We get to do this in community. So practically, just a few things this means for us. It has to be Bible, not just books. We have to have Bible, not just books.
What I mean by that is this, we have to know what this says about Jesus. We can't just read what other people say this says about Jesus. So in college, I used to work out a good bit. I worked out a good bit in high school, playing football, and different times I was trying to put on weight. And I would take supplements like protein powder and creatine and, you know, Explode, some different supplements. And so there's stores at the mall that sell just straight up supplements.
And so, they are to help you put on weight or bulk or whatever. They tell you they do all kinds of things. Some of them, I think, are more helpful than others. But they're supplements to you exercising, to you lifting weights, working out. They're supplements. If somebody asked me, hey man, what kind of workout program are you on?
I was like, I eat creatine three times a day. Yeah, but what kind of workout program? I just told you the creatine plan. It's like, you know, you've got to lift weights and run. There's got to be, that supplements what you're doing. The truth is, books, commentaries, devotionals, they supplement us spending time with Jesus.
Now, here's the thing. One of the pushbacks a lot of times for reading the Bible is a couple of things. One is, I don't know where to start. Start in the book of John. Or if you're walking with us, start in the book of Colossians. Study it along with us.
Read it ahead of us and be studying in it. I don't know where to start. I don't know what Bible version to use. There's a bunch of them. We can have conversations about that. And some people will be like, well, the Bible's confusing.
Yes, sometimes it is. But here's the thing. The disciples who hung out with Jesus all the time were constantly confused by him. Because he'd be like, here's the gospel. It's like a tree. You plant that tree in your garden.
And he would talk and then he'd walk off and they'd be like, I don't know who he's talking about. What kind of tree did he say it was? Like, constantly confused. He would look at them and say just straight up, I'm going to die. They're going to deliver me over into the hands of men. They're going to kill me and three days later, I'm going to come back.
And then it would say that he left and it would be like, none of them knew what he meant, but they didn't ask him. So you know they were having conversations. No, no, John, you ask him. I ain't asking him. I asked him last time. See the look he gave me?
So, here's the thing. Study this. Catch 60% of it. And grow and grow and grow in your understanding of the Bible. You should rather be confused by Jesus than to understand completely the nonsense that someone else tells you. You should rather that happen.
We need to be Bible people. It has to be Bible, then books, then movies. All right. They made the TV show The Bible miniseries. Okay. Then, the show did well.
Then they wrote a book about the show. So they took the Bible and they made a show about it. And then the show did well, so they took the Bible show and wrote a book about it. Which is great, because now we have all our favorite Bible stories in book form, which we already had. And here's the thing. Some of us are, we grow, we learn by watching Bible shows and by reading the Bible stories, Bible show, miniseries, book thing, which it says, based off of the Bible miniseries.
And I wanted to say, that was based off of the Bible. We've got to read the Bible first. We've got to grow in that. And that way, when somebody tells us something, we have a framework for, uh, not, because I read this. And here's the thing. We say the Bible's confusing.
We get to do this in community. So we read the Bible and then we go talk to other people. I was reading this. I think this is what it's saying. Is that what it's saying? Is that what he means here?
The other thing is this, and you need to realize this as a Christian. For those of us in this room who've placed our faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit of God actually dwells in us, which we talked about. Paul says this is a profound mystery, that Christ is in us. The Holy Spirit authored Scripture. So he knows what it means and can teach us.
So there are times, this happens probably about once a week. I'll be reading Scripture and I'll read something and I'll just be like, I don't fully know what that, what you're trying to say, like what I'm supposed to take from that, what that's supposed to mean. It just seems like it's a story or just, and so I'll pray, God, if you want me to understand this, tell me. He wrote it. It'd be like if you had the author of the book with you and you could say, what was this whole thing about? Chapter three was weird.
Like you get to do that and so I just ask, tell me. And then I'll read it again and if I still don't get it, I just assume he didn't want me to know and I move on. I don't let it stress me out. I understand enough of the Bible to stress me out. Like I understand enough of it to know where I ought to be doing and how I ought to be walking and the things that I don't get, I just assume he'll teach me later. We get to do that.
So we get to be Bible first so that we get to know Jesus, so that we know if things submit to him. It has to be community, not just crowd. So Bible, not just books, community, not just the crowd. What I mean by that is don't take, oh yeah, I talked to other Christians because I read a review online. You actually have to, if we're going to process what's coming in and what we're being taught and what we're trying to believe and how we're trying to function, we actually have to have people around us. He says be knit together.
It should almost be awkward if we're doing things on our own because we're so used to being in community. It has to be people that are actually around you, that actually know how you walk in life because the truth is this. The people in my community group know that approval isn't a big thing for me. I don't super struggle with approval. It's more success. I don't care if you like me, I just want you to think I'm awesome.
That's a thing for me. And so I talk to my community group about this. And so when I have a life decision coming in, something I've got to think through, I get to bring them in on it and they already know me so they can actually give me helpful advice. They can see where I'm chasing after wrong things. They can say, well this isn't really something that you're pursuing for wrong reasons because we know you, we've been around you. And you want actual community because you need people to say hard things to you sometimes.
You need people that care enough about you to say real stuff and that know enough about you to be able to do that accurately. So it's got to be community. It's got to be actual people around. Here's the difference between me watching somebody I don't know about to do something stupid and me watching someone I do know about to do something stupid. Someone I don't know. That fool's about to hurt himself.
And then you just watch. You just, I think this is going to be really bad. So I'm watching this. Like this is what I'm doing at the party now. I'm going to watch this guy hurt himself. And then if I know them, I'd be like, hey fool, you about to hurt yourself.
And then you still get to watch. And that honestly is some of the difference between community and just people that are around. You need people around you enough to call you out, to talk to you, to say real things with you and to know you well enough to be able to do that accurately. You need people around you. The thing about blind spots is that you can't see them. And so if you're processing things and there's a giant blind spot in your life and you just don't realize it, you may make some poor decisions or you may not line things up well.
But if you've got people around you, just say, hey, you don't realize this about yourself, but I see this pattern and actually be helpful. And it makes life way easier and way better. That's what Paul says he struggles for. He says, this I'm struggling for, that you'd be knit together in love. I want you to be community. I want you to actually care about each other.
Okay. We've got to study the Bible. We've got to know the Bible. It's got to be Bible, then other things. And then we can actually decide whether those other things are helpful. And it's got to be community, not just a crowd of people, not just people around that we every once in a while sit down and say, hey, here's the situation.
I'm going to give you the gist of it. Is this smart? Because all you did was give them the stuff you're seeing. So of course they'll agree with you most often. But if you've got people around you who say, actually, yeah, but don't you know this is how you're pursuing this and this is what's going on with you?
It's actually more helpful. So it's got to be community, actually people around. We get to have faith. So don't freak out. We get to have faith. I've gotten to go out of the country a couple of times.
Not a lot, and I hope to do it some more, but it's always funny to me when you're leaving the country and coming back into the country because there's customs. And customs is like when you come in or out of the country as a foreign person or coming back into the country and they have to check your passport and they ask you questions and stuff. And it takes a super long time to walk through. But like I've been in four and you walk up and they're like, are you checking anything into the country that you should not bring with you? Like do you have anything that is illegal? They just ask you.
And you're like, nope. No ma'am, I am not. And then she looks at you and she's like, checks out. And like they don't check at all. Like they don't look at your bags. They just ask you.
And you're like, okay. Like I could have smuggled all kinds of things in here. And so some of us, that's been our radar. Is this bad for me? No. Seems legit.
Like that's how, that's our customs process. This person said it with their mouth so it's got to be true. Read it on the internet. Like that commercial with that guy. It's like everything on the internet is true and he shows up and she's like, he's French. And he's like, oh yeah, bonjour.
Like that. Like that's our, that's our process. We just believe it because we read it or because someone said it. And then, all right, so, but don't, don't freak out. We get to have faith and so sometimes you're somewhere and they've got like the drug dogs. So it's like an armed officer.
Got one on the side. Maybe he's holding one. He's got a, an intense looking dog. Like a scary, pointy ear. No nonsense. Like you don't see that dog and think, I need to pat his head.
Like, you know, that dog's got a job to do. He means business. He's got this look that like scares children and stuff like that. Like he's, he's in the zone and, and they're looking for drugs and it's a serious thing. What I am not saying, when we build a discernment radar, I am not telling you to go live in the woods and be afraid of everything or to start a website where you just look for stuff to argue with. That's not, that's not what we're talking about.
Fruit beagles. That's what we want. When you're coming back into the country, they have fruit beagles, which is a beagle, still an officer, walking around with a dog that is smelling for fruit because it's actually not good for us to go to another country and bring fruit back to the U.S. because it can have bugs that we're not ready for. And it can actually, like, you could bring an apple back and it could decimate crops here. And so, that's what we want. We want something that, we're not always having to be super intense, we're not always having to start pick fights with people, but we have some process for how we bring things in, how we know to check whether or not something's good.
We have the ability to submit it to Jesus in the context of community. I always like it when the fruit beagle comes by because I know he's being helpful. You do look at him and think, I can pet this dog if I wanted to. Like, he's still got a job to do but he's not crazy and I'm never worried because why would I have fruit? Now, if they bring a bacon beagle by, I might be in trouble but it's like, I never have fruit. We're okay.
Me and you, we're okay beagle. And so, we just, we want to have some process. So, you just need to be willing to know that we have to have a process and we get to have faith. Here's the thing, we're not going to always get this right. We're going to believe some stupid things. We're going to not believe some good things.
And we get to walk that out in the context of community and we get to constantly push towards finding hope and depth and wisdom and knowledge in Jesus. And here's how he lands this. This is what he says. We'll start in verse 5. For though I'm absent in body, yet I'm with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. Therefore, so therefore meaning all this stuff we just talked about, that you would be knit together, you'd have a community, you'd submit everything to Jesus.
Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. We get to rest. We get to have joy. We get to be in community and we get to talk about real stuff and we get to have joy. We get to abound in thanksgiving. We get to, therefore, as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith.
Here's the thing. All of us received Christ Jesus in the same way. We were messed up. We had fallen short. We were not going to fix our lives or get it together. And Jesus came and lived perfectly on our behalf and died for our mistakes, died for our rebellion, died for our errors, died for our inability to fix the situation.
And then he rose again three days later so that he could fix the problem for us. So that he could take care of our errors, so he could take care of our sin, our rebellion, our brokenness, and we place our faith in him. Not our good works, not our intelligence, our faith. That he was good on our behalf and that he gives us life. That he paid for our sins. He paid our penalty and he gives us life.
That's how we receive Christ. That's how we're rooted in him. That's how we're built up. Not in our ability to work really hard. Not in our ability to have a really good discernment radar and not do stupid things. That we get to follow him.
Yeah, we get to have that. We get to follow him in faith. That he's good and that he'll teach us and that he'll train us and that ultimately it's up to him, not up to us. And then we get to do this in community and we get to abound in thanksgiving. We get to have joy in relationship with each other as we try to follow Jesus and we try to point each other to Jesus. That's us.
That's what we get to do. That's our discernment radar. Submission to Jesus in the context of community. Band's going to come back up and we're going to sing. We're going to abound in thanksgiving. We're going to make much of Jesus.
And then we get together next time, not next week, but next time. We're going to talk about specifically things that we need to be on guard for. Specifically why we have a discernment radar. What it is we need to be looking for. What it is we need to be in defense of. But ultimately we get to rest in Jesus and our faith is in him not in anything else.
I'm going to pray and then we're going to sing. God, we thank you for your grace. We thank you that we get to be built up in our faith in you. That in you is found knowledge and wisdom and life. So we praise you and we thank you.
We ask, Lord, that we would submit things to you. That we would be willing to test what comes in. Know what's good and keep it. Know what's bad and get rid of it. We ask for you to lead us in this. Give us community.
Help us to grow closer to you. In Jesus' name. Amen.