1 John 4:1-6

Be still: As I enter prayer now, I pause to be still; to breathe slowly, to re-centre my scattered senses upon the presence of God. (Lectio 365)

Read: 1 John 4:1-6

‘Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God’ (v2)

Encounter: We live in the Information Age. Of course, humans have always needed information – but now we are simply swamped. Too much news, too many advertisements, too many YouTube videos. And then there’s disinformation which deliberately sets out to mislead us. Disinformation can sound attractive and even convincing because it is supported with statistics – but remember, 62.33% of all statistics are made up (🤣).

John didn’t have the Internet, but that didn’t mean there was no disinformation, and in today’s reading we see him warning against a particularly dangerous kind. ‘False prophets’ were gathering many followers. Seeming to proclaim truth about Jesus, they were denying the central core of John’s (and our) faith – that Jesus Christ, of whom John said ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’ was, and is, both fully divine and fully human. For these ‘prophets’ it was out of the question that Jesus, the Messiah, should really have come ‘in the flesh’. He was surely, they thought, a spiritual being. He couldn’t have compromised that pure spiritual identity by having anything to do with ‘flesh’, the grubby, physical, human stuff, needing to eat and drink, to use the toilet, to sleep or even - unbelievably - to die.

This disinformation is still around in some places today. It denies the truth that it is the very human nature of Jesus that leads him, through his crucifixion and resurrection, to become ‘the firstborn from the dead’, reassuring us of our own life after death. 

Apply: Take a little time to reflect on Jesus, fully human, firstborn from the dead, who promises us eternal life. As the One of whom John says ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1), he has the power to make it happen!

Devote: Lord, please open my eyes again to the miracle of the One who ‘being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage … he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6-8)