OET-RV 1YHN Chapter 4

4 Dear friends, don’t trust every spirit, but test them to determine whether or not it’s from God, because many false prophets go around the world. 2 You all can find out whether or not a spirit is from God: If the spirit confesses that Yeshua the messiah has come as a person, then it’s from God 3 but if the spirit won’t confess Yeshua, then it’s not from God but rather it’s the spirit of the false messiah, whom you’ve heard is coming, and is now already in the world.

4 You new believers are in God and you have defeated the false prophets, because the one in you is more powerful than the one in the world. 5 They belong to the world hence they are speaking from the world, and the world is listening to them. 6 However we belong to God, and anyone who knows God listens to us, but anyone who doesn’t belong to God can’t accept what we’re saying. That’s how we can distinguish the spirit of truth from deceptive spirits.

7 Dear friends, we need to be loving each other, because love is from God and everyone who truly loves has been reborn into God and knows God. 8 Those who don’t love, don’t love God because God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed to us when he sent his only son to be born into the world so that we can live through him. 10 So this is real love, not us loving God, but God loving us and sending his son to be the sacrifice to clear us of the sentence from our sins.

11 Dear friends, if God loves us like that, we ought to be loving each other. 12 [ref]No one has ever seen God, but when we are loving each other then God is living in us, and his love is being perfected in us.

13 We can know that we are living in him and him in us because he has given to us from his spirit. 14 And we have seen and are testifying that the father sent the son—the saviour of the world. 15 Anyone who confesses that Yeshua is God’s son, God lives in that person and they live in God. 16 We have known and experienced the love that God has in us.

God is love, and anyone who lives in love, lives in God, and God lives in them. 17 This is how love will be perfected in us so that we can live with confidence about the coming judgement day: we live like Yeshua in this world. 18 There’s no fear in love, but rather perfect love drives away fear, because our fear is that of being punished but the one fearing has not been perfected in love.

19 We love others because he loved us first. 20 Anyone who says that they are loving God but hates a fellow believer, that person is liar because if someone can’t love a fellow believer that they’ve seen, they can’t love God who they’ve never seen. 21 So we have this command from Yeshua that anyone who loves God must also love their fellow believers.