First Letter of John 4

¹ It is not every spirit, my dear people, that you can trust; test them, to see if they come from God, there are many false prophets, now, in the world.

² You can tell the spirits that come from God by this: every spirit which acknowledges that Jesus the Christ has come in the flesh is from God;

³ but any spirit which will not say this of Jesus is not from God, but is the spirit of Antichrist, whose coming you were warned about. Well, now he is here, in the world.

⁴ Children, you have already overcome these false prophets, because you are from God and you have in you one who is greater than anyone in this world;

⁵ as for them, they are of the world, and so they speak the language of the world and the world listens to them.

⁶ But we are children of God, and those who know God listen to us; those who are not of God refuse to listen to us. This is how we can tell the spirit of truth from the spirit of falsehood.

⁷ My dear people, let us love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.

⁸ Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.

⁹ God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through him;

¹⁰ this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.

¹¹ My dear people, since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another.

¹² No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us.

¹³ We can know that we are living in him and he is living in us because he lets us share his Spirit.

¹⁴ We ourselves saw and we testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world.

¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him, and he in God.

¹⁶ We ourselves have known and put our faith in God’s love towards ourselves. God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.

¹⁷ Love will come to its perfection in us when we can face the day of Judgement without fear; because even in this world we have become as he is.

¹⁸ In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love.

¹⁹ We are to love, then, because he loved us first.

²⁰ Anyone who says, ‘I love God’, and hates his brother, is a liar, since a man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen.

²¹ So this is the commandment that he has given us, that anyone who loves God must also love his brother.