Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a PhD in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So, chapter 4 verse 1.

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.

So now he's sort of looping around.

Remember, he talked about the Antichrist.

He said, you've heard it Antichrist will come. Already Antichrist, plural, have come. We're looping back

around. Sort of circling back around to that idea. Right. So he's saying, test the spirits, right?

He's not here literally talking about, like, you know, your average Christian who he's talking to had like demons and angels appearing to them all the time and they had to figure out which was which, right?

It's not quite that literal.

Right.

But the kind of spirits he's talking about are not unrelated to that either in that he's talking about spiritual realities that sort of motivate

and move people right so one of these false teacher come teachers comes has this teaching is

drawing off a following after himself right there's sort of a spirit of that right and that And that spirit can be good and from God, right?

This could be a movement of the Holy Spirit, or this could be something else.

Right, this could be something else.

And so he's saying, don't just follow whoever shows up and seems to have something exciting going on.

Right? Because this is another mistake we make, is that we assume, oh, well, this is growing, this is popular, this is,

you know, people are into this, therefore it must be good. There must be something good there.

Not necessarily, right? There's a lot of spirits out there.

There's a lot of false teachers out there now as then.

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