Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus, the Good Shepherd. Amen.
You’re scrolling TikTok, or browsing YouTube. You stop on a video. You get a hot take on politics, or some tax advice, or a recommendation for a beauty product. Do you trust what you’re seeing?
We know we should say, “No, of course no. Not right away, at least. I’ll do some more research, I’ll see if I can confirm it.” The reality is, though, much of the time, we do immediately trust things that we see on our phones.
How about ChatGPT? Ask just about any question, it’ll give an answer. Do we trust what it produces? Again, we know what we should say. “No, of course not. I have to confirm its output.” And yet, more and more, I see ChatGPT answers shared as if they were unquestionably trustworthy. AI-generated pictures, too, pop up on social media, and people share them with not even a question of whether it’s real.
Not that we trust everything. Few people trust the government. Few people trust newspapers. No one trusts social media companies (which is so funny to me - we don’t trust the companies, but we trust the things we see as we use their products, as if you could separate those two things). Increasingly, people do not trust churches.
What should we trust? Who should we trust? How do we decide?
Easter - the resurrection of Jesus - gives us a place to start. We start with this fact. This rabbi named Jesus said he would die, and then come back to life. He did that. His words were trustworthy.
So we work our way backward, we look at the life he lived before the cross. We find that he was a great teacher, that he proclaimed an ethic for life higher than any other teacher in history, and that he himself lived out that ethic. No one ever raised the accusation that Jesus had stolen from them, had sexually assaulted them, had ever been anything other entirely above reproach in his conduct.
We also find that he was a man of generosity, and kindness. His preaching and teaching of an unparalleled moral code was paired with deep mercy toward those who failed to measure up. He didn’t recoil when a sinful woman, approaching him at a party one night, anointed his feet with perfume. When he rose from death, one of his first actions was to seek out Peter, who had denied even knowing Jesus three times during his trial. He was a forgiver. He was trustworthy.
Jesus inspired trust - another word for that, faith - in those who interacted with him. His words, his deeds, showed him to be trustworthy and gave people faith in him.
He is still alive. He is still trustworthy. We can believe the things he said. He said, “I am the good shepherd.” He said, “I have other sheep, not of this sheep pen, who will listen to my voice.” That’s you and me. People who live two thousand years after him, almost six thousand miles from where he spent his whole life on earth - he knows us. He is still alive, and he gathers us. How do we “listen to his voice” so that he can gather us? His words are recorded for us. We hear his teaching, we read about his deeds, and we come to know him.
But that happens through our contact with other humans. No one meets Jesus immediately, without an introduction. Some of you met him first through your parents, who read the Bible to you at bedtime. Some of you had a friend who shared Jesus with you. Some of you came to a church and heard about him for the first time there. And even if there wasn’t another person physically present with you, if your first encounter with Jesus was simply reading the Bible by yourself, that came about through another human being.
See, Jesus himself did not write the Bible. He is not the one who put pen to paper (or, I suppose, papyrus). Other people did. Today, for instance, what we’ve read from the Bible was written by two different men, one named Luke - wrote the book in the Bible we call Acts - and another named John.
John knew Jesus personally. John was a disciple of Jesus, in fact one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, in fact one of the “inner three,” Jesus’ closest followers, along with Simon Peter and John’s brother James. He wrote two of our readings today - the book we simply call John, and also a letter we call First John.
In that letter, John is trying to do something really tricky. On the one hand, over and over, he tells his audience that Jesus is our example for life. But at the very same moment, he is writing this letter as a strong argument against people who said that that’s all Jesus is.
Plenty of people, back then and still today, are happy to recognize that Jesus said some very nice things. They like his ethical teachings. But the same people will question whether he was a real person. Maybe he was just made up; he’s a wise character in a story, like Albus Dumbledore, or Atticus Finch, offering pithy statements about virtue from the printed page, but was never someone you could actually touch.
John wants you to know, “Yes, he was.” John ate with him, John drank with him, John walked with him. John touched Jesus’ hands and feet after his resurrection.
Can we trust John? Jesus thought so. In fact, he calls on us to trust John by allowing John’s words to appear in the Bible. Jesus, whose teachings demonstrates wisdom and whose resurrection demonstrates power, he wants you and me to trust what John has to say, not only about who Jesus is, but about what that means for our lives.
What does John say? In this little section of his letter, he says, “Don’t trust everyone.”
First, though, he says, “Dear friends.” Sometimes the Greek word there is translated, “beloved,” or, “dearly loved ones.” John is sometimes called “the apostle of love.” The books he contributed to the Bible use that word, love, more than any others. The stories we have about his later life tell us that until his dying day, he was teaching and preaching and praying for the people he knew, people he loved.
One of the things John prayed was that they would never be deceived.
John warns us about deceivers. Luke records the apostle Paul’s warning about deceivers. Jesus himself warned that may would come falsely claiming to represent him - that’s one meaning of the word antichrist, someone claiming to represent Jesus but instead pushing their own teachings on God’s people. How do we know who to trust now, two thousand years after the apostles have all died? Why Should I Trust a Pastor?
There are some practical answers I would give. First, how did this pastor get his job? Did he just decide one day he’d start a church? Is his only qualification that he’s engaging and interesting as a speaker, enough that people are willing to show up and listen to him for an hour or two?
The elders - pastors - shepherds - whom Paul brought to meet him in Miletus didn’t appoint themselves in those positions. They were chosen by their churches to lead their churches. That is how God intends for leaders to be brought up in the church. Other leaders, who have proven themselves trustworthy, should vouch for them.
Another practical question. Does this pastor have something outside of himself, outside of his own whims and thoughts, to which he can be held accountable? Against which his teaching can be examined? Is the Bible just a starting point for him, a springboard from which he can leap into invention and speculation? Or does the Bible hold his conscience captive? Are the Bible’s words the focus of his preaching and teaching?
Those are good practical tools for assessing a pastor. And in fact, both of them come from the Bible. First Timothy, chapters three to five, if you want to check.
But John, in this portion of his letter we call First John, gives us another test. Because those other tests can be hard to administer. If you don’t know the Bible well yourself, how can you know if someone is teaching what it says? If you don’t know how a particular church got its pastor, how can you know what to think of the process?
Here are John’s words. “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” John speaks here about, literally, spirits. Throughout history, at times, God has used spirits - angels - to deliver his messages. John’s congregation wondered, “What if some spirit would come to us with a message?” John says, “Test the message.” And he then applies this thought not just to spirits, but to people as well, when he goes on: “Because there are many false prophets.” Many people falsely claim to be representing God, and to be sharing God’s Word. Test them.
Here’s the test. “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.” Every spirit, or spiritual teacher, whose focus is on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus - that marks trustworthy teaching. That’s the meaning of “acknowledging that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” Focusing on Jesus, as our example, yes, but more importantly, as the atoning sacrifice who reconciled us to God by freely laying down his own life.
A pastor you can trust will not only acknowledge Jesus as the sacrifice for your sins, but as the sacrifice for his sins also. A pastor you can trust will be one who can admit, in Spirit-worked humility, that he himself is a sinner. He needs forgiveness. He needs the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life.
A pastor you can trust will not abuse that fact. A pastor you can trust will not glory in his sinfulness, will not use it as an excuse. A pastor you can trust will be humbled by his own sin. He will ask for forgiveness when he has sinned.
A pastor you can trust will love you. He will check in on you. He may rebuke you. He will not delight in that. In fact, it will probably be the hardest part of his job, the one he most dreads, the one which his own sinfulness urges him to put off, to not worry about, to let the situation handle itself.
A pastor you can trust will always bring you around to Jesus’ cross. He’ll bring you around to it when you need to be reminded that what you’re doing is sin. Jesus died for our sin; as we heard from Paul last week, we can’t live in any longer! Because we died to sin in baptism and we now live to God in Christ.
A pastor you can trust will bring you to Jesus cross’ when you’ve seen that what you’re doing is sin. When you don’t need your eyes opened to that fact, because you’ve seen the hurt and the pain that you’ve caused. He’ll bring you to the cross to remind you that Jesus has won forgiveness for you. You are at peace with God. You are God’s dearly loved child.
The Bible does not say, “Trust every pastor.” The Bible says, “Test your pastor. And trust pastors who bring you to Jesus.” Amen.