| 4:1 | DON'T trust every spirit, dear friends of mine, but test them to discover whether they come from God or not. For the world is full of false prophets. |
| 4:2 | You can test whether they come from God in this simple way every spirit that acknowledges the fact that Jesus Christ actually became man, comes from God, |
| 4:3 | but the spirit which denies this fact does not come from God. The latter comes from the antiChrist, which you were warned world come and which is already in the world. |
| 4:4 | You, my children, who belong to God, have already defeated them, because the one who lives in you is stronger than the antiChrist in the world. |
| 4:5 | The agents of the antiChrist are children of the world, they speak the world's language and the world pays attention to what they say. |
| 4:6 | We are God's children and the man who knows God hears our message; what we say means nothing to the man who is not himself a child of God. This gives us a ready means of distinguishing the spirit of truth from the spirit of falsehood. |
| 4:7 | To you whom I love I say, let us go on loving one another, for love comes from God. Every man who truly loves is God's son and knows him. |
| 4:8 | But the man who does not love cannot know him at all, for God is love. |
| 4:9 | To us, the greatest demonstration of God's love for us has been his sending his only Son into the world to give us life through him. |
| 4:10 | We see real love, not in the fact that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to make personal atonement for our sins. |
| 4:11 | If God loved us as much as that, surely we, in our turn, should love each other! |
| 4:12 | It is true that no human being has ever had a direct vision of God. Yet if we love each other God does actually live within us, and his love grows in us towards perfection. |
| 4:13 | And the guarantee of our living in him and his living in us is the share of his own Spirit which he gives us. |
| 4:14 | We ourselves are eyewitnesses able and willing to testify to the fact that the Father did send the Son to save the world. |
| 4:15 | Everyone who acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God finds that God lives in him, and he lives in God. |
| 4:16 | So have we come to know and trust the love God has for us. God is love, and the man whose life is lived in love does, in fact, live in God, and God does, in fact, live in him. |
| 4:17 | So our love for him grows more and more, filling us with complete confidence for the day when he shall judge all menfor we realize that our life in this world is actually his life lived in us. |
| 4:18 | Love contains no fearindeed fullydeveloped love expels every particle of fear, for fear always contains some of the torture of feeling guilty. The man who lives in fear has not yet had his love perfected. |
| 4:19 | Yes, we love because he first loved us. |
| 4:20 | If a man says, "I love God" and hates his brother, he is a liar. For if he does not love the brother before his eyes how can he love the one beyond his sight? |
| 4:21 | And in any case it is his explicit command that the one who loves God must love his brother too. |
1 Yohanes 4 - Philips NT in Modern English
