Check it out

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in  the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. – 1 John 4.1-3


Did you know that the word ‘gullible’ is not in the dictionary?

Sorry, but I do have  a point here. I think all of us can be gullible at times. We can all believe things without checking things out first. You kind find all kinds of claims on places like Facebook. We read about the deaths of celebrities who haven’t died and all kinds of political claims about all kinds of politicians.

There is all kinds of wackiness out there and a lot of folks fall for it and they like and share without a second thought. When Christians post the false stuff without checking it out it gives the world cause to mock us for falling for anything. It is always to check things out before we pass them on or get convinced of them ourselves.

That is bad enough but there is an even more dangerous kind of gullibility. Because we want to think well of others who call themselves Christian we can easily hear a preacher or teacher say something and just accept it as fact.

The problem is that there are plenty of false teachers who go out into the world and preach and teach a false gospel that is not based on Jesus Christ alone. No matter how good a message sounds if it is not based on the deity and humanity of Christ it is a false gospel. It is our task to check out what we hear.

And it goes beyond just that. We know about the Bereans who ‘search the scriptures daily’ to check out if what they heard was true.

When we check things out online we use sites snopes.com or factcheck.com or something like that. Though pretty good even they make mistakes. When we check out teachers and preachers we have the word of God and it will never get it wrong.