coffee. So we're finally in 1st John chapter 4. Took a while to get here, but some really, I think, important material today, and really in the context of living in the United States in 2000, almost 26, maybe the most important thing that, you know, in terms of immediate applicability and just every day is this matter of discernment. John has alluded to the false teachers in the background before. And he's going out of his way to build a very rigid dichotomy between two worlds, in a sense, the truth that is grounded in the character of God and the work of Jesus, the redemptive work. And and then the world system and and I've we talked some about it a while back But what John does frequently in this book is he leaves something behind then comes back to it The material after this comes back to the issue of love, but he has these six verses nestled here On on this matter of discernment. We're in that we're in this larger section. It's really the big body of the epistle 228 to 418, but he covers a lot of ground and it may not seem like it all connects, but it's all sort of within the context of practical living as you walk in fellowship with God with the idea that you're going to stand before him at some point, give an account. And certainly we shouldn't really be surprised that discernment, uh, it's it's letter E where we're in like the fifth subunit of thought under this larger heading. And it's discerning between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Those are actual phrases he uses, spirit of truth and spirit of error. I think if the American church were to receive a progress report from God grading their ability and their past effort at doing this, and certainly in the last 100 years, they would, at best, generously get like a low D. And it's even worse today. So we'll think about some of those things, but I do want to deal with what John says is the answer. So that's important for us, too. We need to set context because we have a modern American church, and I don't speak of that in the sense that it's every church or every person. I don't mean that at all. But we have a widespread epidemic, if you will, of churches that have given up on the Word of God. They won't say it that way. They like to read parts of it, but they choose what they believe and they don't like any of it that doesn't match the current worldly culture. And so that's where churches are. And then, of course, outside of church, they are the world culture. Our world is saturated in secularism. with a hedonistic mindset, right? Everything is about what I can do to find personal pleasure. And numerous philosophies, they may seem all different. They typically are rooted in the same underlying assumptions. But we have all kinds of philosophies from materialistic naturalism to Marxism that are prevailing in our culture. Hate and indoctrination of the currency of the day. Now, this isn't the words you're hearing. You're hearing it described the way someone would describe it to deceive others. So they don't say we're selling peddling hate. They say we're loving. They don't say we're indoctrinating. They say we're teaching, but that's, you know, it's not what's happening. The currency of our culture is also labels. So it's not important about so much about what the substance is of what's being said is the label assigned to it. And so one of the popular labels is being tolerant, right? That kind of thing. But they're not tolerant either. So it's always, you know, Satan is always means 180 degrees the opposite of what he says, basically. And this hate indoctrination Is the currency of the day under the branding of tolerance and fact checkers and we've seen this play out is, you know, we've seen assassinations happen and we've seen not only. that maybe some people on the fringe might celebrate those assassinations. The fact is that it's widely celebrated. It's seen as righteous. It was the right thing to do. And I mean, that's who we are. We don't really want to admit it. And again, I'm not broad brushing everybody. but this is the kind of thing we're seeing in in our culture and To make it worse church history shows us the world's ideas can easily become entrenched among Christians If you've not done it, you know, you do good to study some church history. It's a big a Let me say there's a lot of experts on church history on social media. Reading one book or spending a few minutes on a Wikipedia page doesn't cut it. But everybody has to start somewhere. And I would say it's a worthy thing to begin studying some church history because you will see the number of times that ideas from outside the church were brought in to the church. It's very alarming. And that still happens today. That's the whole point of all this I'm saying. The world isn't acting in an unexpected way. The challenge for us is that churches are imbibing. They're drinking from the same well, and they're bringing in these ideas, and that's happened for a long time. We've talked, you know, at least some before. You can study the history of Augustine and some of the pagan ideas he brought into Christianity. In more recent history, you had pagan ideas that were brought in to create the charismatic movement. If that surprises you to hear things like that. I promise you there's lots of well-made, you know, well done history books with original sources that will trace that out for you. But it's just happened repeatedly and it's happening today. Today what we're bringing in the world's ideas about sexuality and so forth. So sometimes outsiders bring it in. Sometimes insiders show their true colors. as the Antichrist that John's going to talk about did in his day. And Christians, frankly, have been easy marks in recent years because they just don't know enough Bible to have discernment. Living in the last hour, and that's the time period we live and joins us to develop this matter of discernment. We're going to talk about how we do that, but we need it. And to do this, we're going to have to know the truth reality that God's presented. We're going to get that primarily by studying his word, but there can be value in some non-Bible study that helps us, because we bring a Bible mindset to it, and it may help us further understand this reality. And it's imperative that we be learners, right? Paul says to renew your mind. So the idea is that we have to be prepared to be wrong about some things, and maybe even to admit that we took in something we thought was Bible, but it wasn't. It was just something from the world that other Christians, perhaps sincerely, took in and taught to us or whatever. So any initial comments from what I've said before I jump into the actual text? Okay. Well, we're looking at the first six verses of chapter four. We'll just split this in two. And I struggled with this passage for a number of years. And the reason was simple. I didn't know why he said to test the spirits instead of testing the ideas. or the teaching, but we'll, we'll talk about that. But it's just to say, I don't know that this is a well understood passage, but I hope, you know, to, to at least reveal my, you know, hope, you know, the way I see it. Uh, John says, beloved great. So he's talking to his, his readers that he takes to be Christians. Um, and he cares about them. Um, Susan, did you have, did you have something? I'm sorry. No, that's okay. My computer, my laptop gave up the ghost and I'm trying, I just got into my desktop. Okay. I just, I just saw the mute come off and I thought you might've had something. That's okay. Sorry. No, I, I have more computer problems. I know what to do. I need my own, uh, like IT department, but, but he grew up and moved out recently. Thanks. Beloved do not believe every spirit but test the spirits the question of course raised is is how do you do that? And why are we testing spirits? But the key is don't believe every every spirit test them whether they're of God, you know whether they're sourced in God Because and this is scary right many false prophets have gone out into the world, you know John's writing in the first century Christianity is is still a relatively new And there's many false prophets out in the world. Now, those false prophets, we need to not take that too narrowly. You know, people that are listened to in our world, often through social media, and they're called influencers, would fall into this category often. And they influence a whole lot of people, especially younger people. So don't don't take a narrow just these are people that go and teach Bible, but teach it wrong or something like that This is I think this is much broader Although he has in mind some specific people that were a part of that They were sort of pretending to be in the club for a while and then got mad at John and left. And he says, by this, you'll know the spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. I mean, for him, this is pretty simple and it's very binary. It's one or the other, no gray area. Now we need to think some more about this because there's a specific group of false prophets that he has in mind. But that said, he's pretty blunt and pretty simple. If they won't say this, They're not a God, okay? And he says, and this is the spirit, the ones that don't confess that Jesus Christ has come into flesh, he says it's the spirit, the word spirit's in italics here, by the way, it's implied, it's not, the Greek text leaves out the word, it has the word thee and leaves out the spirit, which is okay, you can do that, of the Antichrist, okay? This is the spirit of the Antichrist. What you have heard was coming and is now already in the world. Now, this is scary. He has mentioned these guys before. There's an antichrist to come that we know about in Bible verses that talk about someone in the future. Daniel talks about it. Revelation talks about it. Paul seems to call him, you know, he talks about his epistles. He's the son of perdition, things like that. But what John is saying is the spirit of that one to come is already active in the world of the first century. And if that's the case, it's active in the world today. This is a profound statement. Someone who's written on this fairly extensively is an old professor of mine named J.B. Hickson, and he's got a series of books that are sort of built on this idea, but looking at our current culture. They're worth the read. I'm not saying that I would be in alignment with him on every one of the issues he's raised, but the fact is, you know, we could make a mistake of seeing the devil behind every corner, but the more common mistake we see is that we don't see the devil hardly at all, or we don't see him at all. We underestimate the extent to which Satan is Working in the world deceiving the world and that's that's what John's trying to emphasize to these people This this Antichrist they know about that's going to come at some point in the future that the spirit of that Antichrist is already Work in the world today and that has implications mainly that you better listen to what you're hearing and exercise discernment So let's let's start unpacking this a little bit and we'll pause for some questions And then we'll at some point try to think about in very practical terms What do we do? Okay, what do we do with this? Spirit is a Greek noun like panuma, like we get, we usually don't hear the peace sound, but we talk about pneumatic. Spirit, this word can also have the sense of the wind. And so in modern day, we have like pneumatic tools that drive on air and that sort of thing, but here it's used to mean spirit. And it can have a wide range of meanings because, and I'll have some of this in the next slide, but right, we have a spirit within us. The other other New Testament epistles talk about the spirit we have within ourselves but there's also Supernatural spirits, so we need to we need to think a little about this the spirit thing. It can have a wide range of meanings But we're helped here because he makes a warning about the false prophets. He says test the spirits. Why? Because there's a lot of false prophets out there in the world and And that's giving us an indication of what this testing is about in the manner in which we test the spirits. So I'm just focusing on the first verse here on this slide for a minute to expand this out a little bit. John is interested in the source of what's being taught. So instead of saying, you know, take what they say and compare it to scripture, which in a sense is what he's getting after, but he doesn't say it exactly that way. He says you need to test the source of what you're hearing. And so he says, test every spirit. Every person has an immaterial aspect of the person we might call our spirit. And I listed a couple of verses here, but there's a lot of verses that talk about that. If you look at a lexicon definition, spirit is the source and seat of insight, feeling and will generally as a representative part of human inner life. So it's a part of who we are. We have a material body. We have an immaterial aspect that we call our spirit. But there are also evil spirit beings out there. And sometimes they're demons, and there may be some evil spirit beings that might be labeled a different way, especially as we start opening certain Old Testament passages. There is an unseen realm, and there are evil spiritual beings like Satan that are not They're not our friend. They're out to get us. So how do they do that? Well, they're going to do it with ideas and maybe other things, but ideas. So John's test here is whether the teaching is sourced in the spirit of God or some other spirit. And he's a bit vague about it, except that in the third verse, he says the spirit of the Antichrist is already at work. But I think the spirit of the Antichrist can can work through people and it can work through supernatural beings like what we might call demons. And so it could be either one, but the point is, is it sourced in the spirit of God? In other words, the Holy Spirit who has inspired the scripture we read, superintended the writing of the New Testament and the Old as well. Peter would write that those prophets of old were sort of carried along as the spirit led them to say and write the things that they said and wrote. In Ezekiel chapter 13 that we this group studied quite a while back But you had a whole chapter about false prophets and it's interesting how the prophet, you know echoing God's words, of course Described false prophets. They prophesy out of their own heart. In other words, it's sourced in their own spirit He even says they follow their own spirit, but they you know, they've seen nothing So this is this is what he's getting at about the source Paul would say in first Timothy 4 1 that You may hear false teaching that comes from seducing spirits and doctrines of devils So saying something very similar to what John's getting at so he tells us to test the source which kind of makes sense because if the ultimate source of the teaching is the spirit of the Antichrist, why would we want to have anything to do with it? And so now looking at verse two, he helps us to understand this a little better. Verse two is sort of his, in two and three, his test, if you will. He says, by this you know the spirit of God. In other words, by this you know that the teaching you're hearing coming or sourced in the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. Now, to confess is to, you know, in a simple words, to come into agreement or say the same thing as somebody, a homologeo, the lexical definition to concede that something, you know, to concede that something's factual or true. So, What they're confessing or conceding is true is that Jesus Christ, and we know that word Christ is the Greek for essentially a Messiah, has come in the flesh. This strikes at the heart of the deceivers in the background of this epistle. They are not confessing that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. In fact, they're denying it. And as we talked about at the very beginning of this book, as I introduced it, it seems that either outright Gnostics or those peddling ideas that would be more formalized into Gnosticism in the second century are alive and well when John writes and one of their core doctrines as You remember these Gnostics would work within the church setting they would have called themselves Christians But what they were teaching was that Jesus Did not come in the flesh. There was a physical human being named Jesus but a spiritual being, the true Jesus, simply went inside him for a while at the baptism and left before the crucifixion. So you have a background in mind of these false teachers that are around in the first century, and they do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Remember also, John opened his epistle emphasizing the incarnation, that he has come in the flesh. The first couple of verses, he talks about Jesus as the one that they heard and saw and observed and touched. And I said way back then, he started with the incarnation because that is what's under attack. The Messiahship of Jesus, he is the Christ. and the incarnation, God became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the basic confession. And he's telling you, if they don't confess this foundational truth, you better not listen to whatever else they have to say. So the litmus is whether the spirit that you're testing, you're testing the source, which obviously we're maybe listening to a human being say the words, But when we ask for the source, we're asking, is this God's truth from the Spirit of God that they're saying, or is it actually sourced in the Spirit of the Antichrist ultimately? It's an important question. So the litmus is Jesus' Messiahship plus incarnation. This reality was sourced in God. And this is important. Jesus is the Christ and the reality of the incarnation These things, these that were taught by the apostles, they're sourced in God and those that deny those foundational truths undermine Christianity and are false prophets because their denial is not sourced in the spirit of God. I want to ask this question and that last bullet is designed to get at it, but let's pause here and think about this. Why is it so important? That this this just very I mean he fits it in just a few words this confession That jesus is the christ the messiah And that he came in the flesh Why is that a cornerstone? That you use to test Everything else you might hear from them You might have some ideas why why john positions this in a place of such importance Does it have something to do with Adam? With the fall of mankind? Because Jesus is the new Adam, or the second Adam? Does it have something to do with that? Well, I certainly think that going back to Genesis is a good approach from the standpoint that this lie sort of has its roots back there, right? In the fall and in Genesis 3, because, you know, Satan was a deceiver at that time. And he tried to displace God. If you take from the fruit, you'll be his gods. And sort of the idea, he's introducing a humanism at that time, a secularism at that time. or maybe like, maybe Jesus Christ specifically, the man, Jesus Christ is important because if you leave him out, you could have anybody as the Messiah, right? Like anybody could claim it and they could apply certain truths to anybody. So it has to be this particular man, Jesus Christ. Yeah, now I think you're getting on to an important idea there, right? Because this Jesus Christ, remember this incarnation isn't just that Jesus became a man. There's a little more to it, right? He became the God-man. He perfectly communicated the person of God Right. As no, no one else could because he was God in the flesh. And so denying the incarnation, you know, is a denial of, of, of him being the God man, uh, Cheryl. I was just going to say that when you go to John's gospel that he starts out with and basically makes it very clear that the word was at creation and the word was God and nothing was made except through him. So to my way of thinking, this is foundational. This is the beginning. This is the basis of every single thing that comes out of the gospel. And if you don't believe this, then it kind of negates just about every core principle of salvation. So it's foundational. Start there. I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think that's the issue. I want to suggest, and this is exactly what Cheryl was saying, I'm going to say it a little differently just to think about it in a visual way. You know, you've heard the saying about, you know, if you grab the horns, you get the whole bull kind of thing. You've heard the illustration of the iceberg, most of it submerged under the water. You see a little bit of it coming out the top of the water. And the point is, you do get the whole thing. Our world is accepting all kinds of ideas. They typically are conclusions that have a lot of stuff behind them, the bull, if you will, the rest of the iceberg. And when you accept the conclusion, on the hot button, so-called social or political issues of the day, you accept by implication, the reasoning that gets you there. And if you're asked to defend this conclusion you've accepted, even if you had never thought about the reasoning, you'll start falling back on that. You'll find the world's reasoning to get to there and you'll have to use it to defend it. It's this idea. And by the same token, to deny this foundational truth, is at least by implication to deny those things that come out of it. Carol? Unless you believe that God is only man and not God, that would make him with sin, because every man sins. And only God is without sin, so. Yeah. Right, and if Jesus Christ was that way, if he was, as the Gnostics taught, just a man, that the true spiritual Jesus, or whatever you want to call him, that the Gnostics taught was just a spirit that inhabited Jesus for a while and left. So, you're left with a crucifixion of a mere human. And no real bodily resurrection, by the way, right? And if just another sinful human being died on the cross at Calvary, then he saved nobody. Dan? Yeah, it seems like in these three verses here that John seems to be putting special emphasis on the humanity of Christ. And the deity of him is sort of assumed here, but it seems like, unless I'm off base here, it seems like today it's almost the opposite, right? It seems like people today don't so much have a problem with him being a man as they do about him being like the God man. Yeah. Well, that's right. And the reason is because Gnosticism is alive and well. And I went to a bookstore, this has been just a couple of years ago, but it was a Barnes and Noble. And I was in their little religious section, which is a horrid place to select books from. There's virtually, other than the fact they sell some Bibles, there's virtually nothing redeeming there. But lo and behold, there were books about Gnosticism, and I don't mean historical monographs about Gnosticism from the second century. Those kind of books are actually somewhat hard to find. They're out there, but they're scholarly books, they're expensive, and they're hard to find. This is books advocating, teaching people how to be modern day Gnostics. It's not that what they're teaching exactly mirrors the first and second century stuff, but it's the root ideas. Again, you accept the horns, you get the whole bull kind of thing. And those root ideas are prevalent in our culture today. our culture views the the body the human body as Is it largely is sort of a tool from which to derive pleasure? It's not necessarily the real me. The real me is my feelings and My feelings might tell me that my body is not the body. I was supposed to have them, you know great the you know, the the evolutionary mechanism made an error and or something like that, but there's this separation. And I will say a lot of Christians have bought into this. They view the real person because the spirit is sort of the seat of our Intellect and so forth. Well, that's the real person but that's not true God created us human beings as as a Physical and spiritual being at the same time. It's not one or the other The real us isn't the body and the real us isn't the spirit. It's this united human being that God has made that has a material and immaterial aspect and they're in there in union and and Our future is not to be an angel As is so many, you know, Hollywood shows have promoted I guess people like the idea of having you know wings on their back and in our future is is not being a You know disembodied spirit just floating around the the ether up there Our future is a kingdom that will last forever That Christ will rule in He will be physically present and he and us will both Be humans in the sense in which God originally made the human race body and spirit and in that same way that's that's important in its If you start digging down to the root behind a lot of the ideas we're hearing in our culture today, they would not accept that. The body is seen differently, and it's not the real me. And once you accept that your body, your physical body, is not the real you, then you understand why it makes perfect sense that you would do things to alter the body, to match the real you. Hope I'm making some sense there. There's an excellent work, an excellent scholarly piece by Nancy Piercy, a book. I advocate reading all of her stuff, but her book, Love Thy Body, talks Extensively and from a very scholarly point of view citing studies, etc. About what I just said So so this this reality here is sourced in God and those that deny these foundational truths and it's getting I think Cheryl said it well, it's foundational and Everything sort of hangs on this you you can disagree about the timing of the rapture and things like that and in in fact, there's a lot of things we can disagree about and John is getting down to the root and I will hear a lot of times people say well We need agreement on the fundamentals. I agree with that But if we go to Scripture John saying we need agreement on this We need agreement on this because if we don't You know if if if the most foundational part of Christianity Jesus is the Messiah who came in the flesh if you deny that foundation I mean, what else is there? Now, I'm not saying it's not possible that that person would believe some other things in scripture and say them correctly, but once you know this, you know that the source behind this person's thinking, it's not the spirit of God. So- It's gonna be a dead, empty religion. Yeah, and you know what's happened? There's never been a shortage of false teachers and nor has their game plan ever really changed. But we're in a time now when I would say that false teachers have been handed a platform through social media that amplifies them and it allows people who are not qualified and people who have lots of wrong ideas To to to garner millions of quote followers that believe what they say. And, and I don't know that we think of it that way, but like we have to discern about it. Some of those people are we call them journalists, it's a it's a bizarre term since. You can look up the definition of journalism, it has nothing to do with what these people do, but they're on television channels and so forth, telling us what to think. And I don't think people pause very often to ask themselves, is this journalist I'm listening to, is he or she a false prophet? Are their truths sourced in the spirit of God or not? And I think we need to be asking those questions. So taking this a little further, John had some specific deceivers in mind that I think had some Gnostic ideas, even if full-blown Gnosticism wasn't around yet. And I think it's pretty evident from even this verse two here that that's what he had in mind. But their rejection of this truth was at the, and I've got a typo here, it should have said the core of their false teaching, and it would show their true colors. I mean, this would out John's targeted group of people right away. But here's the question. I've been told this a number of times, that you can still learn from others that are wrong about stuff and have all these problems. You can learn from them by eating the meat and spitting out the bones. And I want to say that we need to be careful with this. I think sometimes you can learn from people that you may disagree on some things that you think are important. Let me give you an easy example, and again, you may disagree with my take on this, but this is just how I viewed it. I do read a lot, and I don't hold myself out as an apologist, but I read lots of apologetics books. I don't know how many I've read, but I bet it's got to be upwards of 100 or more. And to my knowledge, every one of those was written by someone from a reform background. The fact is, and I'm not saying there's none out there, but as much as I've read on apologetics, I have had trouble finding by people that weren't of sort of a Reformed background. I guess I'm not sure where I put C.S. Lewis, because I have read his books. You know, he had some mixed-up theology. He had a lot of good things to say, and I like his books, but I'm just telling you the fact that I would disagree with some of that Reformed stuff, I was okay reading their apologetics books, whose primary focus typically was not Reformed theology, but it would pop up here and there. And I might say that I eat the meats without the bones in that sense, but none of those people We're rejecting that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. You understand? We would disagree about total depravity and some of that stuff. And I'm not saying that's not important. I wrote a whole book about it because I thought it was important. But it doesn't keep me from reading what they have to say. Some of the church historians that I've enjoyed reading on church history, Reformed theology, some of the people I've read that have written some very good stuff or more of a charismatic background. We're getting at something a little different here. And so I think there is a sense in which you can eat the meat and spit out the bones, but you've got to know when you can't do that. You know, when the cake is poisoned, you can't eat around it. And so when you have people that are denying foundational core elements of Christianity without which you just, you really don't have Christianity. Then you've got a real problem and there's a lot of people saying, no, no, it's okay. The reason they're saying it's okay to read this stuff, which is in direct contradiction to what John's telling us, John's telling us to flush it down the toilet, don't listen to it. But the reason they're saying it is because we live in a pluralistic culture and our churches too frequently and our pulpits too frequently are pluralistic and they don't wanna say that anybody's wrong. I mean, we have to, I'm kind of in a, in a unique, you know, cause I'm down in the, in the, you know, the Bible belt, I guess in Texas and you know, in my County, there's a number of, of churches that we don't all believe the same thing, but, but we're Bible believing churches. Okay. There's a lot of places where that's hard to find and, and, and yet they have these churches and, They outright deny the truth of scripture. They deny it's inspired. They'll pick a few things they like, you know, probably should be good if we didn't steal stuff, be good if we didn't, you know, commit adultery, but they, you know, they, they, they, they keep what they want. And, and we have to recognize that, that There's a widespread, you know, teachings and stuff, and we may need to read it for a scholarly purpose so we can go out there and warn people about it, but we need to be very careful. Cheryl? I wanted to make a comment. It's related to this, but probably not exactly on point. We chase rabbits all the time. This has to do with worship music. I was worship leader for my church for many years. I have always been a very big proponent of worship. I love music and I love worshiping. And I am really very dismayed by the number of things I see online where, because a certain denomination has maybe, they're Bible believing, they're basic Bible believing, and they believe the things that they're supposed to believe. But again, If they have, let's say they have one of their worship leaders who gets a little sidetracked, gets into trouble. All of a sudden the music is demonized and you can't listen to that. You can't listen to the music for this denomination. You can't listen. And I listen to the music and I see this, I see the Holy Spirit in it. I see biblical truth in it. And it just really, really makes me angry because it's, You know, you can look at a song and say, well, you know, that's really lightweight and there's really no nothing really biblical about it. That's fine. I can go with that. But when I hear a song, for instance, I would I would talk about some of the things that came out of Hillsong. Some of their songs are absolutely foundational. They're beautiful, and they're fantastic worship. But then because the church got into trouble, so now everything is demonized. And so anyway, that's just my rant. As I said, I love worship music and I really, I listen to the melody and I listen to what the words tell me. And if I see, I see biblical truth in them, then I don't care what that person may have done at some point in his life. I care that the spirit can still speak through these people. That's it. That's all. Yeah. No, that's, that's a good, that's an important point. I'm glad you raised it. I've thought a lot about that and I'll tell you why. We, and you see it in music a lot. Frankly, you know, my old pastor used to tell me the hardest thing to do is to hire a music pastor. There are a lot of people out there with unsound theology that are very talented in music. And it's what leads to some of this that we've seen. But let me give a more recent, fairly recent example to illustrate. And I think you're right about sort of your reaction to what you're seeing. There was an apologist for you know, one of the leading apologists from the standpoint of people knowing who he was and and And so forth named Ravi Zacharias I've read a number of his books. I probably didn't start reading him until close to when he passed away It came out after he passed away some some things about sexual sin that he was involved in and My take on it is that, we'll call it the church with a capital C, if that's a real thing, pass judgment and basically cancel them. Following the lead of the world's culture, cancel them. And so you don't hear Rabbi being talked about, generally speaking, in a positive way, or his books. And so what you're left with is a man who perhaps destroyed his legacy. And yet I've read a number of his books. They're not only sound, they're some of the best out there at apologetics. He had a gift for speaking to people in large audiences that were mixed audiences with people that are antagonistic to the gospel. And he did so with a graciousness, but also delivering the truth in a powerful and intelligent way. And he's been canceled. Okay. And when he was canceled, his books were canceled. And that's what we've seen with like that. I agree. Like the Hill song has some great songs. Some of the people tied up with that have bad theology have done bad things. That doesn't, that doesn't mean I have to cancel the song. Um, when, when Ravi Zacharias sort of fell from grace, if, if, and I'm using that not in a biblical way, uh, he came under the Christian cancel culture, which really shouldn't exist in the way that it does. And people won't read his books, and they would still benefit from his books. In my own life, the mentor that was the most influential for me, who passed in 2015, had the same thing happen. I found among Christians, after an issue of sexual sin became public that I was shocked by, but nevertheless, it was true, and he had done the things he was accused of doing, and he lost everything ministry wise and I'm not saying that's not correct because He disqualified himself to be a pastor for church. I understand that But his ministry was canceled people. I know that knew him for years don't want to talk about him and They wouldn't give a plug for a book he wrote. I mean, it's kind of weird. And so I would be careful about those things. And it's a little bit of a rabbit maybe from where we're at. Be careful about canceling people and be careful about being the best at never forgiving. Because because that's kind of what's happened and I know there could be a different view of that But Ravi Zacharias is sexual sin that came out Doesn't mean that some of the things he said in his books couldn't continue to help people or that they're you know That they're it doesn't make him bad. It doesn't you know, it taints his legacy. I guess I would say it doesn't necessarily taint his entire ministry the fruit of that ministry and I think people don't know what to do with it. I think Christian people don't know what to do with it. They really, besides feeling betrayed, but the bottom line is they don't know how to kind of ferret through it and come out on the other side of it. They fall back on doing it the way the world does. And we do that a lot as an American church, right? I mean, we hire pastors the way the world does. We put together a committee like we're looking for a CEO, and no one on the committee is qualified to preach a biblical sermon. But somehow this process is going to shake out. We hire the first Saul that comes along, and then later scratch our heads wondering what happened. It really is a Bible thing. And I think people have to come back to that. But anyway. I think it's fear of man. It's like if you stand up and say, take the Christian view, you're afraid of people saying you're a supporter of the immorality, or it's a reform thing because you're a hypocrite. You have this weird belief that somehow you're not a sinner, and all Christians would never do something like that. It's bad doctrine either side. There probably is some of that going on, right, where people reason, well, Ravi Zacharias couldn't have really been a Christian, right? None of the Hillsong people could, you know, nobody involved in that could really be a Christian. You get that a lot. And we need, we just, we know better. But we do need to be mindful that like what we're getting at here is false doctrine, not people that are Christians who have done some unchristian things and then we cancel them. We really need to worry ourselves about canceling because I'll just make this as a general statement. I study a lot of history and I try to get more people to study history. I think people that are in the pulpit should study history eagerly. And because it allows you to bring a biblical perspective as you look through the lens of history and see how human beings behave and what they do. But one of the things you learn about is that people cannot be flattened and dehumanized they're multifaceted and even people that might be heroes in one sense will have these flaws in another. And when we become people who only grade others by their flaws and we ignore everything else, we refuse to take the person as a whole. I think we make a lot of bad mistakes and people that don't know history we've seen in recent times sort of start canceling people of the past. We've canceled Christopher Columbus, canceled Robert E. Lee, canceled lots of people, and attempt to cancel Thomas Jefferson, right? And I understand why, and I understand the negative parts that people wanted to focus on, but there's a lot more there. But we do sort of see that in our church culture, I think. Judd? It's me. Yeah, I think this is a great study because I also, there's people that I absolutely, you know, Judd and I were the only white people in an all African American church around here. And it was like such a learning experience. We had friends of ours, He was in the army, Blaine, for you guys that know him. He's a pastor now, and he would say that the culture was, he lived in Africa, and he would say the culture in the church we were going to was more different than in the deepest, darkest Africa. Well, anyways, the girls that sung in there, they were like, to me, like Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, and I miss the music like crazy. And I wish that I could get the worship music somehow. I can't seem to find it online or anything. but there were different pastors that they would play along with the guy that was teaching every week, and one of them was Voodie Bachman. And I absolutely, even though I have a real, there's so many people that are Calvinists and not free grace, but he was so fantastic on teaching about race. And his, Things about race were so great. I've even played some of them in our Bible study. He was just fantastic. But it is where it's saying about the poisonous. But can't we learn from false prophets by eating the meat and spitting out the bones? I think that when people, and Voodie, I think, is a Calvinist. Go ahead, what did you just say? Oh, he definitely is. He's deceased now, but he died this year. Yeah, I know he's deceased. It broke my heart when he died, but it's very hard for me when you're dealing with people that I feel like their view of the gospel is very not, not inculcated. They don't have it down. They're not, they're like saying different things. People call me, text me, and we have discussions about it, that it is difficult. Like John MacArthur, I think it's that he has the gospel so wrong. It's very hard to, I don't feel that way about myself because I feel like I'm rock solid when it comes to the gospel. But I think that it could be a very bad thing for people. I know people that they're not sure of their salvation because of people like them. What do you think? Well, see, so with Vody, like just for example, I met him years ago because he actually taught at the little Bible college that I'm an adjunct professor at. He guest taught or something. But I got to hear him talk in person. I didn't know who he was. I don't know if he was a big deal yet. He was an extremely gifted orator. No doubt about it. I read one of his apologetics books recently. There were some others. I didn't think it was a great book, but his Reformed Theology comes up repeatedly. But it is an example where, now I'm reading it from, I hope, a little more mature perspective, where I can read it, I'm not gonna be thrown off by some of the Reformed stuff, and I could get something valuable from the book. But what we can say for sure is Vody would not have, I mean, Vody would have confessed that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. That doesn't mean that everything else he taught was true, but on this foundational issue, he's not rejecting that. I understand the Reformed theology. I would not be comfortable, me personally, probably being in a church that's taught Reformed theology from the pulpit because I always get asked to teach eventually and it would be inappropriate for me to teach in a church where I'm going to say the exact opposite of what the pastor says. But that said, that's a different thing than Will I read a church history book or an apologetics book written by someone that has a reformed background? And the answer is yes. Now, sometimes that reformed theology comes up a lot, like in Bodhi's book. Oftentimes, it just peaks its head in a few places. A lot of people wouldn't notice it. I'm probably hypersensitive to it. But in that sense, I feel comfortable eating the meat and spitting out the bones. You know, so that's for what it's worth. Now, being under their teaching in a more of a pastor role, no, I wouldn't. And I'd say the same about MacArthur, by the way. I probably have read, you know, 75% of his books. He's such a poor exegete on the gospel, I like sufficient English terms to get at it. He was sincere, for sure. But just, he seemed to have theology driven by a knee-jerk reaction to the worldliness of modern Christians, and I get it. That said, he has a number of books that don't really get into that much that are, they're good books. And now again, hopefully from the perspective of having a little bit of maturity, I could read those things, and if a little bit of stuff, nonsense pops up, I could deal with it. Now, when you talk about people that aren't mature in the faith, then I get a little more concerned that I wouldn't want to hand them those books maybe and get them confused. Judd? I think, is it Judd or Winnie, one of you? Oh, no, no, let me, I didn't lower my hand. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, that's really, and his stuff on race, you know, we never, we never, that just never was an issue for me. Like Judd said, when we were gonna go there, we could be the only white people there. I said, so what? I couldn't have cared less. But when I tell you, I have now a new appreciation when people hate people because of the color of their skin. It was a new, the tragic flaw, and it was very painful. It was very, very painful. And it was a real learning experience. So yeah. It's interesting that Christianity hasn't managed to deal with the racism issue effectively. that we have anti-Semitism, but also, I mean, it's just simply a lie to suggest that only white Americans from European descent can do racism. It's all over the world, it has been for a long time, but within the church, it's there, and it's frightening. I should think, though, they would have struggled with Votie Bauckham's teachings because He does have some, some... solid, I think, views on differentiating race issues from what's happening in our culture today, where they're being used as an analogy to teach the issues that are being taught on gender and sexuality. And he's got a whole book. The title's like, It's Not the Same Thing kind of thing. So some good stuff there. Well, let's see here. Let me finish up just this slide, I think. So the idea seems to be here, if their rejection of Jesus Christ is, you know, not sourced in the spirit of God, then where is it sourced, right? And he tells us, it's the spirit of Antichrist. And we'll come back to this next time to finish up the unit, but we really need to be concerned about this spirit of Antichrist. It indicates not only maybe an adversary of Christ, but the idea of counterfeiting They come in here with a whole different slate of beliefs about the Christ that aren't rooted in scripture. It's not just necessarily denying, but it can be this idea of a fake version. And that's a lot of what we have. And this spirit, the Antichrist, was in the world in John's time, and it still is, and we need to take discernment seriously. And I'll end here with this last slide. He provided us this litmus test that I think is still effective today. The world at large and many fringe groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and so forth, LDS, they try to stand in the shadow of biblical Christianity, but they reject the work of Jesus Christ as the Messiah or they reject the incarnation or both. So it's not to say that there might not be something else they speak the truth about, but those who pass John's litmus test, I said it the wrong way, I wanted to make this point that just because someone does say the right thing, they believe Jesus is the Christ, they believe the incarnation, that also doesn't mean that everything else that they say is true. John's really getting at whether at their core, the people we're listening to reject the foundational apostolic truths of Christianity. And we need to recognize Spirit Antichrist is deliberate, orchestrated deception, and Satan's very good at it. We don't need to be, so to say, conspiracy theorists, but we need to realize there are conspiracies out there that Satan is doing, like the conspiracy to indoctrinate several generations through the universities. I mean, that's just fact. And so we need to have this discernment about it. And where we'll start next time in thinking about this, we need to be asking questions like, what is the source? What is the antecedent philosophical justification for the truth claim? So I said before, you take the horns, you get the bull. And when Christians accept Modern truth claims, particularly in these areas that are the kind of the hot social issues of the day, they accept, whether they thought about it or not, the philosophical underpinnings of those ideas. And third, have I actually investigated the facts. Lots of people Just they read something that sort of meshes with what they like to believe, and they accept it as true without any real digging into it. So anyway, I'll stop there. And next time, we'll jump back into this and finish off this unit, but also spend some more time, I think, chasing some rabbits about what kinds of deception are we actually seeing in our culture today that have been widely accepted.