UST 1YHN Chapter 4

4 Dear friends, there are many people who have a false message and they are going around teaching it to others. So do not trust every teacher. Instead, think carefully about what each teacher says and decide whether it came from God’s Spirit or from a different spirit. 2 I will tell you how to know if someone is teaching truth that comes from the Spirit of God or if he is not. Those who affirm that Jesus the Messiah came from God and became a human like us are teaching a message that is from God. 3 But those who do not affirm that Jesus became a real human being are not teaching a message from God. They are teachers who oppose the Messiah. You have heard that people like that will be coming among us. Even now they are already here.

4 As for you who are as dear to me as though you were my own children, you belong to God, and you have rejected what those people teach. You have done this because God, who enables you to do what he wants, is more powerful than the devil, who motivates everyone who does not honor God. 5 As for those people who are teaching what is false, they think and live in ways that do not honor God. That is why what they say also does not honor God, and that is why other people who do not honor God believe what they say. 6 As for us, God has sent us. Whoever lives in relationship with God believes and obeys what we teach. Whoever does not live in relationship with God does not believe or obey what we teach. That difference enables us to distinguish between people who teach true messages from God’s Spirit and people who teach false messages from the devil.

7 Dear friends, we must love each other. This is what God wants for us, and it is because he loves us that we can love others. Those who love their fellow believers have become God’s spiritual children and are living in relationship with him. 8 God’s character is to love people. So whoever does not love others is not living in relationship with God. 9 I will tell you how God has shown us that he loves us. He sent his only Son to this earth so that his Son would enable us to live eternally because of what he did for us. 10 I will tell you what loving someone really means. Our efforts to love God do not define what it means to love someone. No, God himself did that by loving us so much that he sent his Son to offer himself as a sacrifice in our place. When Jesus did that, God could forgive the sins of people who trust in Jesus, instead of punishing them. 11 Dear friends, since God loves us like that, we certainly ought to love each other!

12 No one has ever seen God. Nevertheless, when we love each other, we can see that God lives within us and that he is the one who enables us to love others, just as he intended for us to do. 13 This is how we can be sure that we are sharing life with God and that God is sharing life with us: He has given us his own Spirit. 14 We apostles have seen God’s Son Jesus on earth, and we solemnly tell others that the Father sent him to save the people in the world from suffering eternally for their sins. 15 So God continues to share life with those who say the truth about Jesus. They say, “He is the Son of God.” And so they continue to share life with God. 16 We have experienced how God loves us and we believe that he loves us. Because God’s nature is to love people, those who continue to love others share life with God, and God shares life with them. 17 When we continue to share life with God, then God has achieved his purpose in loving us. As a result, when the time comes for God to judge us, we will be confident that he will not condemn us. This is because we are loving others as we live in this world just as Jesus does. 18 We will not be afraid of God if we truly love him, because those who love God completely cannot be afraid of him. We would be afraid only if we thought that he would punish us. So those who are afraid of God have not completely understood how much he loves them, and they are not loving God completely. 19 We love God and others because God loved us first. 20 People are lying if they say that they love God but they also hate a fellow believer. After all, we can see our fellow believers. But we have not seen God. So those who do not love one of their fellow believers certainly cannot be loving God, because it is much easier to love someone whom you can see than someone whom you cannot see. 21 Keep in mind that this is what God has commanded us: If we love him, we must also love our fellow believers.

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