You Know the Truth: Stay Connected to the Source

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Let’s pray once more. We can’t pray too much, can we?

God, we thank you again for this day. Thank you that we’ve been reminded that we can praise you in the presence of our enemies, in the presence of unbelief, in the presence of doubt, God, in the presence of uncertainty and confusion. We’ve been reminded that it is your presence that remains, and your presence is steadfast love.

You don’t restrain mercy. We want to remain in you and you in us, and that is where we will experience the abundant life you have intended for us from the very beginning. Lord, please bring clarity to that. Remind us of who we are, who you are, and the life you’ve invited us into. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Amen.

I’m feeling grateful for you all today. I don’t know why. I hear you guys now, but just thankful. Thankful to be with you each Sunday morning these several months, and thankful for what this church has meant to me, my life. You know, since I was—I think my family came when I was in seventh or eighth grade. Different building, different time. Some of you, the same people, less gray. Some of you were less gray then, and so was I, right?

But, man, it’s beautiful. This is the community, the community of faith, and I’m thankful for it.

We read—oh, by the way, look at that. I think I’ve been seeing pictures all over the place of the Rio Grande actually having water in it. That’s actually kind of true. That’s beautiful.

Jessica read the whole Scripture. Let me read this, where we’ll zoom in on:

“As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things, and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you—remain in him.”

In a world of competing truth claims, right, in a world of fake news and even faker people, faker preachers, faker politicians, all of them claiming to have the truth and having the truth that will set you free, right? I want to declare that the Spirit of the living God already lives in us, already lives among us, and is already bringing clarity in the midst of confusion and deception.

A few years ago, I got a little bit more serious about my health and started exercising. And of course, then my social media algorithm began to be curated, all right? And I got a bunch of food, nutrition, fitness influencers coming across my feed.

And what I started to realize is that there are vastly different opinions as to what it means to be healthy, what you should be eating, right? We’ve got the carnivore diet people, right? All meat, all the time. Vegetables will kill you. They have natural—their only defense mechanism is toxins, right? They don’t have anything else. So they will kill you if you eat vegetables, which I ascribe to that. No, I don’t eat a lot of it.

But then you read it, so that sounds great, right? And then, you know, meat is what will kill you. Carcinogens, right? You’ve got to go vegan. You’ve got to go this way. You can’t eat anything with, like, animal-based protein. That is what’s giving us cancer.

And then you have, right, what else do we got? The clean eating, right? No seed oils, no gluten. They spread wide. All of the problems have their source in bodily inflammation, right?

And so where do we go? Eat dairy, don’t eat dairy. Eat vegetables, don’t eat vegetables. Only eat meat, never eat meat. What do we do?

And you start to wonder, well, where are all these competing voices coming from? There is research done, kind of a peer-reviewed study evaluating nutrition influencers and the algorithms that influence us. We tend to see those who have more followers than those who have better research. If you notice that the more clicks someone gets, all of a sudden that gives you more credibility. The influencers that are tied to peer-reviewed research and, like, well-founded scientific methods, often we don’t see those feeds, right?

So what are we left with? We are left with those who are most extreme, trying this fad diet or that nutrition to cancer, to the death of the human race, to whatever. And that gets the most following. And then we have these competing voices. The more radical, the more they can scare you, the more extreme they can be, the more clicks they’ll get, the more you’ll see their videos.

Then there’s the financial incentives. Many nutrition influencers and influencers in general are tied—guess what? I’ll have a little click. Hey, click in my bio for these supplements that will help you fight all these horrible things. Or here’s my diet plan. Here’s my 30-day cleansing diet, or whatever it is.

So what do we do? I feel pulled or paralyzed, right, as I try to, like, be healthy. What does it mean to be healthy? All meat? All vegetables? What?

So what I end up doing is eating Doritos with melted cheese on top, okay? Because I’m like, hey, that’s what feels good. Do it.

There’s a paralyzing amount of information. Now, this would be bad enough if it was only in the health world, but it’s in every sphere of life, and the same dynamics are at play.

Clicks over credibility. Financial, monetary gain is driving the narrative. Polarization, extreme headlines in politics, but most importantly, in our faith, right? We have social media influencers, news media, talking heads, celebrity preachers, books and podcasts, and all kinds of media saying diametrically opposed things about who is God. How are we supposed to live? What’s this faith all about?

And we feel paralyzed. We feel confused. We don’t know who to believe, who to trust. Are you with me? Does it feel that way?

I want to declare, you know, in a world such as this, the Spirit of Truth, God, is already in us, among us. He’s already bringing clarity in the midst of confusion and deception. We have the Author of Life, the Spirit of Truth, the Light of the World, leading us into truth.

And our passage today declares that we can know the truth. The truth has already set us free. The truth is already living in us, leading us into the abundant life with God and with one another.

So we’re in 1 John, and remember that John is writing this community, a community of small house churches in ancient Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. And they are grieving and they are confused because some have begun to teach truths that were not truth. They claimed truth, and they left the community, and they tried to take as many people with them as possible.

So they’ve had this division, and those who remain are left hurting and confused and deceived and questioning, “Do we have the truth?”

And John says, “Yes. I write to you that you might know you have eternal life,” right?

And so here today, he shines a light on: How do we discern truth, and how do we tell a false teacher?

And so here’s some signs of false teaching. First sign: You want to beware of those talking heads, those influencers, those authors, those podcasters, those teachers that disconnect themselves from the community, that silo themselves, all right?

Verse 18 and 19:

“Dear children, this is the last hour. And as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour: they went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their going shows that none of them belonged to us.”

So when we’re discerning who we give weight to in our life, we need to look at: Are they connected to a concrete community? Are they living life in the church, in a faith community?

Often false teachers will separate themselves from the church and from people that actually know them, and they will start their own ministry. They will build their own platform, and they’re removed from the context of community and relationships and accountability.

There are so many—we live in a world that is at once blessed and cursed. Like, at no other time in history do we have access to so many awesome teachers, so many wonderful communicators, and so much junk at the same time.

And so we have celebrity pastors, celebrity teachers, all telling us the equivalent of the carnivore or the veggie diet, right? But this is a matter of faith. And we get pulled in, and all we see is a detached, beautiful presentation on YouTube with the perfect lighting, removed from the context of concrete relationship and community.

Please beware. Doesn’t mean they don’t have anything good to teach us, but we need to know that they are rooted in a community that holds them accountable and that knows the fruit of their life.

I don’t know the fruit of anyone’s life I’m on YouTube, right? I know the fruit of your life because we live in community, and you can know mine.

And so let’s give weight to the people that we know. Does this person have integrity? Are they living a life, a righteous life, a life supported by loving fruit?

So that’s the first.

Second, they will also often deny the core teachings about Jesus. And this is often not, like, super blatant, so we have to have eyes to see. But we call the core teachings about our faith orthodoxy, right? Correct doxy, correct teaching.

And this list is not super big, all right? Sometimes we want to make it really exhaustive, but there are pretty foundational truths that the church in all places and for all time has agreed, yes, this is the stream of Christianity that we do.

In order to say, “Hey, I’m a follower of Jesus in the Christian tradition,” then I’m going to be in the orthodox stream.

And we’re going to—I’ll show you a slide. You’ve seen it before. I’m going to bring back some Mike Potter here, but we’ll talk about that in a minute, all right?

So let’s just look at some of these verses. 1 John 2:22:

“Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the promised one. Such a person is the Antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.”

“No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”

And then we have chapter 4, verse 1:

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

This is how you recognize the Spirit of God. Here we go:

“Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”

Just a brief note on Antichrist. Antichrist is only mentioned in the letters of 1 John. It’s not even mentioned in Revelation. It’s pretty interesting. We’re always looking for, like, a one-world ruler, a diabolical figure. But John simply says Antichrist means against Jesus, and it is those who do not believe that Jesus came in the flesh. They deny that he’s the Messiah, and they actively recruit people out of that belief.

So that applies to a lot of people and to some really horrible figures throughout history, right? But it’s Antichrist. It’s anti-teaching. It’s anti-orthodox about who Jesus is, the character, the nature of God, right?

So beware. There are a lot of beautiful, wonderful, well-articulated teachings on spirituality, and they sound beautiful. But we need to say, is this anchored in a God revealed in Jesus, that he is incarnate? He is in the flesh. He bled, he died, he rose from the dead bodily, right? He’s coming again.

These are the core dynamics that we need to look for. If someone isn’t claiming those things, if they’re not claiming that Jesus came in the flesh, that he rose from the dead in the flesh, and he’s returning in the flesh, that he is the Messiah, the promised one of the Old Testament Scriptures, then we need to have a red flag go up, right, and not give weight to those teachings, no matter how beautiful they sound.

A little bit more about that in a minute.

Sign three: False teachers will not have the fruit of love in their life.

This is one we need to pay more attention to in the church. A church that highly prioritizes the cerebral, the logical arguments that are airtight logic—we need to also be a people of the heart and look at how they love.

Chapter 4, verse 20:

“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

There are teachers, pastors, politicians who have tons of knowledge. They sound brilliant. They win debates. They have logically airtight arguments. They can proof-text everything, and yet they have not love.

And that, my friends, Paul says, they are a clanging gong or banging cymbal. Their faith is worthless.

You look at their lives. You look at how they treat people. You look at how they talk about those who disagree with them. You look at how they stir division and divisiveness and name-calling and othering, and you say, “No, you don’t have weight in my life.”

We need to measure people by the fruit of their life, by love, the evidence of a Jesus-looking love. And we’ve talked about that over the last several weeks.

When seeking and discerning a true teacher, we have to measure their lives and their teaching, the fruit of their teaching, by love. Does it produce patience, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness?

The fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of love.

Now let’s go back to the stream of orthodoxy.

These three ways we determine a false teacher: Are they separated from the community? Are they orthodox in their beliefs? And are they orthopraxy? Do they practice love? Does their life spill out?

Mike Potter, the former pastor, had this doctored up to look even more awesome, right? But this is the stream of orthodoxy.

And we need to remember that many more topics could fit into the stream, right? How you parent, all right? What kind of food you eat, all kinds of stuff. But this stream, there’s room for debate. There is room for beautiful engagement, conversations, searching of Scripture, these mysteries that we will spend our whole life and even maybe eternity discussing and talking and exploring, right?

And so we ought not to divide around certain aspects of the faith and certain topics.

But there are riverbanks. There are points and boundaries at which you crawl out. You are no longer in the stream. Doesn’t mean we don’t like you. Doesn’t mean we can’t learn from someone who’s outside the stream, right? But we have to say, “Hey, what you are saying is no longer Christian,” what is traditionally, historically, throughout time and place considered Christian.

How do we know this? And we don’t—we don’t need to get, like, people have drafted very long documents and have defined orthodoxy, tried to kind of bring some of these debates into those banks or the guardrails. But really, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the first few creeds of the early church, those provide a very small list of things that we say, “This is orthodox, and we need to live within this.”

So we can talk more about that. There’s a lot of room for debate. But someone who climbs up out of the river, we say, “Hey, I can’t give you weight. I can’t give you teaching weight. I need to say, hey, let’s time out here. We’re no longer talking about the same God. We’re no longer talking about the same faith. We’ve climbed out of the river.”

So to sum up, when discerning what voices to allow sway in our lives, let’s look at orthodoxy and orthopraxy, all right? This is correct belief and correct practice. We look at both.

Do they hold correct belief about the basics of who Jesus is, that he came in the flesh, that he rose from the dead in the flesh, that he is the Messiah, the promised one of God, that he will come again to judge the living and the dead?

And do they evidence a life of love?

If they lack the fruit of love, we need to be suspicious. We need to be on guard.

So that’s how you determine a false teacher. But that’s not where John spends all of his energy, right? The Spirit of Truth already lives in us and among us, bringing clarity in the midst of confusion and deception.

And John highlights this. He’s elevating the good news in the midst of the bad news of false teachers and this confusion that we experience.

And he says, “You have the truth already.”

He even goes extreme. He says, “You have no need for a teacher.” Now, he’s teaching them, right? But he’s saying, “You have no need for a teacher. You have the Teacher with you. The Spirit of God is with you. You have direct access to the source of truth, to the one who spoke the world into existence. He lives in you. He’s with you. He’s among you.”

Verse 20:

“But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie comes from the truth.”

As for you—see that what you have heard from the—oh, sorry, verse 24:

“As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and the Father. And this is what he promised us: eternal life.”

Verse 27:

“As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things, and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you—remain in him.”

Do you ever feel lost and dizzy and pulled in many different directions by many different ideologies and perspectives and theologies? Do you feel paralyzed?

John reminds us: Don’t forget, you are connected to the very source of truth. Like, God lives in you.

I think we miss the radical, mind-boggling reality of this. The living God, who is love and light, is with us and in us and for us and in conversation with us. This isn’t a silent God. This isn’t an inaccessible God. This is a God who is in relationship.

Jesus said, “It’s better for me to leave because I’ll be present in my Spirit. I’ll be present. The Holy Spirit will be with you, and he will remind you of all the things that I taught and said.”

Do we lean on the reality of the real presence of God and the voice of God in our life?

John says, “Remain right where you are, because where you are is where God is. You have him.”

I want to remind you of John 15. He says:

“I am the vine, the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.”

I want to go to:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.”

In this, I see the flip side of the coin.

How do we discern false teachers? Are they in community? Are they holding to orthodox belief? And are they living lives of love?

How do you remain in the love of God? How do you hear the voice of God? How do you stay with God and hear the truth?

It’s the flip side.

You remain in God’s love. So if one way to know, see, and recognize false teachers is that their life doesn’t evidence the fruit of love, how do you remain with God? How do you stay with God? How do you stay connected to the vine?

You live. You remain in love. You live a life of love.

You love your neighbor. You love your brother and your sister. You love your children. You love your enemies. You love, love, love, love. You choose love.

How do we stay connected to Jesus, and how do we stay near, and our ears stay clear and our eyes stay clear to hear and see truth?

We got to be living in love. As we live in love, we remain connected to the vine and we have clarity.

And then we need to remain in community.

One mark of a deceitful teacher is that they disconnect from community. They’re absent a life of concrete relationships.

One way we stay in the truth is we stay in community. We live in concrete community with one another. We worship together. We live together. We have fellowship together. We have conversation together.

“Where two or three are gathered together, I am there in their midst.”

Hebrews says, “Do not forsake the assembly. Do not forsake the assembly.”

Staying connected, remaining in Jesus, isn’t an individual activity. You are all here individually, right? But following Jesus is personal, not individual.

So you’re having a personal connection and relationship with Jesus. As we sing songs, you personally experience it, but you are here corporately. You’re in community. It’s not an individual sport. It’s not a one-on-one kind of me-and-Jesus kind of thing.

God says, “You are the body of Christ. My body is made up of many parts.”

So remain connected in the vine. Remember, you are the branches. That’s a plural. We don’t have the plural. It’s y’all. Y’all, right? This is why Texas is great. It’s, “Y’all are the branches, and I am the vine.” Y’all, right? Not you and you and you. Y’all.

And so to stay connected to Jesus is to stay connected in love, and then it’s to stay connected in a community in which you can practice love, right? And you can be confronted lovingly: “Hey, that wasn’t loving.”

Or you can go to someone and say, “Hey, I’m struggling to love my neighbor, love my enemy, love my spouse. Can we walk this road together and discern the voice of Jesus?”

Another way of remaining in community, I want to say, is not just local community, but we need, when we talk about false teachers and false teaching and orthodoxy, let’s read widely and think widely across our own culture, right?

There’s, you know, people outside the English-speaking world and even the Western world and even the American world also have thoughts and beliefs and perspectives on God. It’s amazing. It’s weird.

And so if we start to read outside of our little bubble, we get outside of an echo chamber and we have better perception. We remain in community.

Hebrews 11 says there’s a cloud of witnesses observing us. The community of faith goes before us, like the ancient, the early church fathers and mothers and grandparents, and those who have gone before us and written books, and those who will go beyond us, and those that are, like, alive now but don’t live in our culture.

So we need to read widely across time and space, time and culture.

1. S. Lewis, I believe, said that for every contemporary author he read, he would read two ancient texts because we are people, a product of our time, aren’t we? And we get an echo chamber. And it’s helpful to see outside of our space and time, and to see that allows us to see our blind spots.

All right. I want to show you this.

I am the little skinny kid, the tall skinny kid. I was about 12 or 13. As many of you know, I grew up in a family business. This is my family. It’s grown since then, but I was part of a family business.

And this morning, I just woke up thinking about this: what it means to remain with God.

Sometimes I think we think it means, like, sitting very still on our couch and just, like, soaking in the presence of God, which is a beautiful practice. We need that.

But the Scripture says remaining in God is to live a life of love, obedience to God, and to be in conversation with him, to be where God is.

And so I was thinking about the family business. I grew up in the family business, and one of the best things about being in this family business is I got to spend time with my dad.

I was with my dad all the time, and believe me, I didn’t want to be all the time because we were making—we had dips and soup blends, and we were on the assembly line. They paid us a quarter cent a bag and then had to borrow money from us because they couldn’t afford to keep the business going.

And so we were—we called it the sweatshop, the spice mines, you know, and we would work all the time. And we would travel to shows and do shows over the weekend, these trade shows where I’m a ten-year-old kid, eleven-year-old kid, trying to get people to buy samples.

I went to the fair yesterday with my daughter, and I cannot go into the Expo New Mexico exhibit because it brings back, like, this. Everyone’s trying to get me to sample their stuff, and I’m like, I remember being a twelve-year-old kid and needing, like, my next meal was dependent on them tasting the dip.

And I was just like, “Don’t walk away, man. I need you. I need it. We need to sell packages of dip, please.”

And so if I don’t, I feel so bad. I can’t walk past the booth because I’m like, “You need—I need to buy your jewelry,” you know?

So all that to say, though, I got to spend so much time with my dad because I was part—he had a business, and it was a family business.

And to be with my father, I had to be about my father’s business. And we ate lunch together, and we did road trips together, we made samples together, and I learned from him as I watched him.

And one of the beautiful benefits was just being with my father.

And I think about, what does it mean to be with Jesus?

To be with God is to be about his business, right? And his business is love.

His way of life is love, and he’s at work in the world cultivating, nurturing love and bringing about restoration and renewal and hope and life. And we are invited into the family business.

If we want to be where God is, we need to be where he is, about the Father’s business.

And as we do, we’re not just tools in a machine. We’re not just employees in a business. We are invited to be friends in intimate relationship with our Father, and we get to share life and be formed and transformed as we’re about the Father’s business.

So the Spirit of Truth already lives in us and among us, and he’s bringing clarity.

You have the voice of truth in your life.

You just need to tune into it.

So I’m learning to go to Jesus first. So often, when some kind of theological question comes up or something I’m struggling with, I don’t know what to believe, or it’s causing me to doubt, I automatically, like, go to Google or automatically go to a commentary or automatically call a friend.

And those are all good things to do.

But at its core, the first place I need to go is on my knees to Jesus and say, “God, would you speak to me? God, would you give me clarity? God, as I go to these commentaries, as I phone a friend, right, give me discernment. Please guide me. Lead me.”

Because God is with me. He’s a still, small voice in the midst of all the other voices.

So can I turn them down a little bit?

And some, I got some voices I got to turn down way down, right, to the off switch.

But let me hear the voice of Jesus.

So I just ask you: How are you? Or are you remaining in community? Are you remaining in love? And are you tuning in to that voice that is already with you and in you as a follower of Jesus?

Now, some people might be here that aren’t followers of Jesus. And I just want to invite you to come into the presence of Jesus, who will speak truth into your lives, be clarity into your life, and be a guide and a shepherd in the midst of all of this confusion and deception.

As we come to the table and celebrate communion and come to Jesus in a very real way, I thought it would be good to confess our faith, to acknowledge the banks of the wide stream of orthodoxy.

This is the Apostles’ Creed, which the church has held since nearly the beginning, has been formulated and held by the church across time and culture to be those core doctrines.

So can we stand together and confess our faith in Jesus?

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven. He is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Amen.