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Freedom From Fear

Freedom From Fear 2006

Randy Skeete

What All Women Should Know About God

Who Has Your Back?

Why is God Unemployed?

Poor Satan

How to Succeed Without Being a Genius

What does God Want for You?

Just Like Jesus

Fred Bischoff

Beloved, Let us Love

How to Resist Temptation

God, it Makes No Sense

An Essential Ingredient

Good Gifts Come From Above

How to Fire Proof Your Soul

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Some of this and Some of That

Hedrick Edwards

Reconciliation with God

Three Things to Know About God

A King in the Gutter is Still a King

Who is the Devil?

How to get Your Prayers Answered

The Fall of the Twin Towers

Jesus was no Angel

Crossing the Waters

Adding and Subtracting

The Truth Shall Make You Free

God is Able

The Summation

We have the opportunity the next little bit here to do a Bible study.

Wycliffe to have our PowerPoint going, so we'll be using that.

Fred Bischoff and I'd like to do a study with you in 1 John chapter 4.

I've entitled that study Beloved Let us love, taken from the passage itself.

So I'm going to be using the screen along with you.

I'm going to turn the podium a little bit here.

We'll be using as well the screen to make our key points.

Before we get into that, I would like to share with you some key points that I found very helpful, very useful, very practical in Bible study.

Number 1, since the scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, it is vital that we, before we study, ask for the Spirit to guide us and listen to him as he's talking to us.

So before we go any farther, let's do that.

Father, as we come to open your word, we ask for your spirit to guide.

The same spirit that spoke to John, that impressed him with the thoughts that he recorded, we ask for his presence to be made manifest here.

May our hearts be open to hear him speak and sensitive to his promptings.

Number 2, as we study scripture, we must see that Jesus is the center of it.

If we're studying a passage in Scripture and we cannot see Jesus, we have not understood that passage correctly.

Number 3, as we study, we must look for themes.

Themes are topics, subjects that tie passages together.

Very, very important in order to understand, because there are themes that run through all of scripture.

Even though scripture is written by multiple authors, it has the same themes running through it.

And unless we understand that, unless we look for those themes, we will not be able to see everything God has for us in Scripture.

Particularly when we find a word that we have not encountered before or a word that we don't know how it fits in the setting, what do the definitions of words mean?

This is a little bit related to number 3, but connections are more distinct connections between the verse we're studying and another verse.

Usually what connects are the themes, but sometimes they're actually the words themselves.

We need to discover the connections through scripture, and we need to explore them.

As you learn to do this, you will find that you actually have to stop at some point, because the connections are so numerous that as we say, you start chasing so many different trails, you lose track of where you started.

But yet, connections are vitally important, and we need to discover and explore them.

Number 6, very, very important, applications.

We need to see the application of scripture to our own lives, to the practical situations in which we live and interact with other people.

We need to see them and we need to live the application as well.

And a part of that living is to share them with others.

And number 7, let us not forget that part of Bible study is thankfulness.

We must express thanks to God for the blessing of his word, for the power that's in it, for what the Holy Spirit is teaching us as we go through these things.

I would highly recommend these as guidelines as you study scripture.

Let's try it now as we look at 1st John chapter 4.

1st John 4 verse 1, Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

This word try means test, examine, prove, scrutinize, check it out.

Because everything you hear, every spirit that you encounter in this world is not of God.

It says, according to 1 Corinthians 2.12, these spirits are not all of God.

The key phrase in defining the spirits is the spirit of God.

The contrast are the false prophets mentioned there in the verse.

False prophets clearly are those who claim to speak for God, but do not.

Verse number 2, Hereby know ye the spirit of God, every spirit that confesseth that Jesus has come in the flesh is of God.

Notice again the phrase that we saw in the first verse, of God, the essential qualifying phrase to identify the spirit, to identify the prophet, of God.

If it is of God, it will confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.

Well, we can look at some other passages.

We won't take time because of our limit this morning, but I would encourage you to look up these verses.

Again, connections with other passages in Scripture.

Romans 8 verses 3 and 4, 1 Timothy 3 verse 16, and 1 Peter 4 verses 1 and 2, texts that clearly talk about Jesus Christ coming in the flesh.

We probably all believe that Jesus Christ came to this earth.

What spirit, I would like to ask, what spirit was revealed by Jesus Christ coming in the flesh?

Philippians 2, verses 5-8 very clearly identifies for us what spirit that is.

That passage tells us that we are to have the mind of Christ and it tells us what the mind of Christ was.

Jesus Christ who was in the form of God, He was very God.

He did not grasp his position as God, but he humbled himself.

The passage says he emptied himself And he became a human being.

As we heard last night, the spirit of self denial, the spirit of being willing to go down.

That is the spirit that's identified by someone confessing that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.

That is the key spirit that is being identified.

Now we could explore, perhaps at another time, how far he came, how far down did he come, how far up was he when he was in heaven.

All very fruitful areas of study, But the core spirit is the spirit that's revealed of humbling yourself, going down, going down.

Verse number 3, and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

He is teaching, John here is teaching by repetition and by contrast.

And This is that spirit of Antichrist, where ye have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world.

Notice the contrast of what we saw before, the spirit of God, we have the spirit that is not of God.

So we're immediately looking to contrast it.

And it says very plainly that it is of Antichrist.

There's 3 other texts in the Bible that use the term Antichrist.

2 of them are in the same letter, 1 John 2, verses 18 and 22.

The third 1 is in John's second epistle, 2 John, verse 7.

The word antichrist very clearly is someone who is the opposite of Christ, someone who wants to take his place, someone who's showing the opposite spirit.

Matthew 24, verse 24 also warns us of this spirit where it says there are many false prophets gone out into the world.

Notice the first verse that we looked at spoke of these false prophets.

The false prophets clearly are of the Spirit, it is not of God, it is of Antichrist.

Verse number 4, ye are of God, notice again his theme here, of God, of God, not of God, let's not miss that, ye are of God little children, and have overcome them because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

And notice the little phrase, the endearing phrase, little children.

The very first use of that is in John 13 verse 33, the phrase that Christ used in talking with his disciples.

Series

Freedom From Fear 2006

Beloved, Let us Love

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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