²By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God …

We take John’s warning seriously; what we believe about God and Jesus Christ matters—and it matters a great deal. The contemporary movement to tamper down the many disagreements among Christians and emphasize our unity can eclipse the importance of knowing and defending biblical truth. Many would consider themselves enlightened, to hold themselves above doctrinal dogma, intoning with an air of superiority that doctrine divides, but love unites. To be sure, Christendom at large has been heavily marked by doctrinal divisions, conflicts, excommunications, and even wars (literally)! Thus, focusing on unity would seem to be the enlightened thing to do. But doctrinal fidelity can be too easily diluted when we look for the lowest common denominator around which to rally our unity.

The apostle John has a different emphasis. He is the one who was the “beloved disciple” and who, of all the NT writers, emphasized the importance of love, not only in his letters but also in his memoir of what Jesus taught. Yet love does not erase the differences between right teaching and false teaching. We must never minimize truth, because to do so will water down love to a superficial or sentimental feeling.

In particular, the teaching about the person and deity of Jesus Christ is non-negotiable—period. If, as John will soon point out, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), then to live a life of God’s kind of love, we must know and hold on firmly to the truth about who God is and who His beloved Son is.

Knowing God does not come from book learning or philosophy. Many atheistic professors can regale the Christian understanding of God yet don’t have a personal, saving faith in Christ. Fundamental to genuine Christian faith, as the apostles (John, in particular) taught, is spiritual knowledge, something we know, not just in mind but in the spirit. This does not make sense to the unsaved, but to the born-again believer, it is completely understandable. We can each say, “I know Him.”

This spiritual knowledge of Christ leads to unabashedly, unashamedly, undeniably, unambiguously, and publicly acknowledging Jesus Christ as God incarnate; not just a spiritual being, not just a man, but God in the flesh, sent from God. The validity of a person’s claim to teach by the Spirit of God is determined by a clear conviction of the centrality of Jesus Christ as God in the flesh, in both his teaching and in his life.

Lord, I resolve to listen only to those teachers who center on Jesus Christ.