By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 John 4:2-3)
I preached 1 John 3:24 – 4:6 on Sunday morning, where John exhorts the Children of God to exercise discernment between the Spirit of Christ and the spirit of antichrist in the messages that are brought to their ears. The preeminent test which we must apply to these messages, John tells them, is what these messages say about the person and work of Christ. This means that Christology is not just a relic from the past to be studied by pastors and bible teachers. Instead, if they are to be lead by the Spirit rather than into error, all the people of God at all times and in all places need to nourish themselves on the precious doctrines of Christ upon which the church has stood for the last 2,ooo years.
Later that Father’s Day afternoon, my family and I watched a portion of the recent John Adams miniseries on DVD, which lead us into a discussion about the faith of his son and our sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Little did I know that these two themes from Sunday would intersect in this article I found at the Christian History Timeline:
Until George W. Bush’s election, he was the only president’s son to have become president himself. Before holding America’s highest office, Adams was a lawyer, senator, diplomat, and Secretary of State.
That such a man could be elected is a reflection of America’s religious roots. John Quincy Adams sprang directly from those roots and had a firm faith. If Christianity is proven by character, Adams was surely a Christian. This stubborn man whose motto was “Watch and Pray,” spoke openly of his trust in God: but not for that did he win his nickname “Old Eloquence.” Rather, it was for championing principle and attacking the institution of slavery.
He was an unyielding patriarch, tough as the granite of his native New England. Every day he read two to five chapters of the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek and drew strength from them. He prayed daily. Not content merely to read, he acted on what he read. So often did he put principle before party he became highly unpopular with his followers.
John Quincy did not let their disapproval alter his course. “The Sermon on the Mount commends me to lay up for myself treasures, not on earth, but in Heaven. My hopes of a future life are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ…” he had written his father. After his single term as President, he returned to Congress.
Christ was central to John’s theology. When Unitarianism emerged, denying the divinity of Christ, Adams flirted with it, but the Bible soon convinced him the doctrine was false. Either Jesus is God incarnate and our path to salvation or we have none. With characteristic rectitude John wrote as much to his parents.
“I find in the New Testament, Jesus Christ accosted in His own presence by one of his disciples as God, without disclaiming the appellation…I see him named in the great prophecy of Isaiah concerning him to be the mighty God.”
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