God’s Way of Knowing Truth & Error | 1 John 4:5-6

Lord's Day: July 13, 2025  Preacher: Carlos Montijo  Series: First John  Topic: Discernment  Scripture: 1 John 4:2–6; John 15:19; Titus 1:10–16; 1 Corinthians 14:36–40

⁵They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world hears them. ⁶We are from God. The one who knows God hears us; the one who is not from God does not hear us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. 1 John 4:5–6

• Main Idea: Those who belong to God and are from Him, who confess His Son and have the spirit of truth, have overcome those who are not from God, who do not belong to Him and reject Him, who are of the antichrist and of the world, and have the spirit of error

I.  They are of the world. We are not.

• There are worldly antichrists who are followers, and there are worldly antichrists who are active deceivers and influencers, whom the world loves to hear

II.  We cannot simply take people at their word

• The most dangerous antichrists are the ones with the best disguise, pious sounding language and appearances
  • Especially when they claim to believe the same things…
  • Especially when they claim that God talks to them…
• They have neglected—and in many cases rejected—the means and ways that God gives to us whereby we can know Him truly and reject Antichrist, to know truth and reject error

II.  What are His means and ways?

• God uses His Word, but He also calls men to teach us the Word so that we can understand it rightly, and grow in our discernment of good and evil, truth and error, to avoid pitfalls, extremes, imbalances, lies of Antichrist and deceptions of the devil
• The spirit of truth is the mindset that agrees with God’s word and with those whom He has called to teach it to us, like the apostles
• The spirit of error is the mindset that rejects God’s word and His teachers, and instead follows the world and its antichrist deceivers

Join us on Sundays for worship at 10:00am:

• ThornCrown Covenant Baptist Church
  4712 Montana Ave
  El Paso, Texas 79903

Contact us at:

• web: ThornCrownCovenant.Church
  call/text: (915) 843-8088
  email: [email protected]

Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.com