The REALITY of our Spirituality

"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."
~1 John 4:2-3a

There is a heresy that the Apostle John wanted to address in the early church and right now. It is a very important one, one that everyone of us as Christians has encountered and are probably living it. The heresy that "Jesus did not come in the flesh". On the surface, the meaning of the heresy seems just that straightforward.

But consider with me carefully the meaning of that idea. If Jesus has not come in the flesh, Jesus would then be not flesh and blood like us. Jesus would then be something that does not come in the form of our humanity. In other words, there is nothing real about Jesus for us in our humanity. The reality of Jesus being righteous is separate from us as flesh and blood. The false teachers in the heresy disconnected Jesus the pre-existent eternal one from the flesh. They didn't like the idea that Jesus is being in the flesh.

"This view of the person of Christ not being united to physical, bodily, flesh evidently had a practical, moral effect on the way these false teachers viewed the Christian life. Just as they disconnected the person of Christ from ordinary physical life, so they disconnected being a Christian from ordinary physical life."
~John Piper

In another words, for them, as how the false teachers would like to teach, it is possible to separate 'being spiritual' and 'doing spiritual'.

My brothers and sisters, be careful, be very careful, be vigilant! For "this is the spirit of the anti-Christ, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world." (1 John 4:3b)

Let us not 'be' spiritual and not 'do' spiritual, for it is the spirit of the anti-Christ!

Being spiritual ultimately has to 'flesh' out in the reality of our humanity!

"And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says "I know him" but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked."
~1 John 3:9-10 (ESV)