1 Listen, my friends. Don’t believe every message that somebody tells you. First, you have to find out if that message comes from God’s spirit. There are lots of people in the world that tell lies about God. They say that their messages come from God’s spirit, but really their messages come from bad spirits.

2 This is how you can know if a person has God’s spirit in them. If that person believes that Jesus Christ came and lived as a human being here on earth, and if they tell people that true story, then you can know that they belong to God, and they have God’s spirit in them. 3 But if they do not believe that Jesus Christ came to earth as a human being, they do not belong to God, and they do not have God’s spirit in them. Those people have a bad spirit working in them. That bad spirit is the enemy of Jesus Christ. You know we told you that Jesus’s enemy will come into the world. Well, that enemy is already here in the world, and he gets people to tell lies about Jesus.

4 My friends, you belong to God, and he is much stronger than that enemy that is in the world. God’s spirit is in you, so you do not believe those people that tell lies about Jesus. It’s like you won against those liars.

5 Those liars don’t belong to God, they belong to this world. So their messages come from this world, and the other people that belong to this world, they listen to them. 6 But us mob, we belong to God, and our message comes from God. So the people that properly know God, they listen to us. But the people that don’t know God, they don’t listen to us.

If somebody listens to us, you know that they have the true story from God’s spirit, and the messages they tell are true. But if somebody doesn’t listen to us, you know that they don’t have the true story. The messages they tell are lies, and those lies come from bad spirits.

7 My friends, we Christians all have to love each other. You know, love comes from God. He is the one that helps us love each other properly. So if we love other Christians properly, that shows that we know God, and we are his kids. 8 If anyone does not love other Christians, that shows that they don’t know God at all. God is the one that helps us love other people, and he properly loves people all the time.

9 This is how God showed us that he loves us. He sent his only son to the earth, to give us new life, so that we can live for ever with God.

10 Think about the way that God loved us. He sent his son to take away all the bad things that we did, so that now he can say we are not guilty. That’s real love. We didn’t ever love God that way.

11 Yes, my friends, God properly loves us, so we have to love each other too. 12 You know, nobody ever saw God. But if we love each other, that shows that God is joined up with us, and his love is truly in us.[a]

13 We can be sure that we are joined up with God, and he is joined up with us, because God put his spirit in us. 14 And we know that God sent his son to save us people here on earth. Yes, we saw Jesus, we saw him with our own eyes, and now we are telling everybody the true story about him. 15 If anybody believes that Jesus is God’s son, and if they tell people that true story, then God is joined up with that person, and they are joined up with God.

16 That’s right. We know that God loves us very much, so we trust him. God properly loves people all the time. If anybody loves God and loves other people, then they are joined up with God, and God is joined up with them.

17 We are joined up with God, and we have God’s love in us. We are like Jesus in this world. So later, on the day when God will judge everybody, we will not be frightened, because we know that God will not punish us. 18 Yes, we know that we have God’s love in us, so we don’t have to be frightened of God at all. Some people are frightened that God will punish them. Those people don’t properly understand God’s love. God’s amazing love means that we don’t have to be frightened.

19 We didn’t love God at first, but he loved us anyway. So now we love God, and we love other Christians.

20 Maybe somebody will say, “I love God.” But that person hates another Christian. Well, that person is lying. Think about it. It’s easier to love somebody if you can see them. But it’s harder to love somebody that you can’t see. Well, we can see other Christians, but we can’t see God. So if somebody doesn’t love other Christians, then we know for sure that they don’t love God.

21 But you know what God told us to do. He said that if we love him, we have to love other Christians too.

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