1 John 4

¹Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to determine whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

²By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh is from God,

³and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and is now already in the world.

⁴You are from God, little children, and have overcome them, because he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

⁵They are from the world; because of this they speak from the world, and the world listens to them.

⁶We are from God; the one who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

⁷Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God.

⁸The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love.

⁹By this the love of God was revealed in us: that God sent his one-of-a-kind Son into the world so that we might live through him.

¹⁰In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

¹¹Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

¹²No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

¹³By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.

¹⁵Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God.

¹⁶And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has among us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

¹⁷By this love has been perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because just as that one is, so also are we in this world.

¹⁸There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and the one who fears has not been perfected in love.

¹⁹We love, because he himself first loved us.

²⁰If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

²¹And this commandment we have from him: that the one who loves God should also love his brother.