Book of Common Prayer

Little anti-christs are abroad already

^18-19 Even now, dear children, we are getting near the end of things. You have heard, I expect, the prophecy about the coming of the anti-Christ. Believe me, there are anti-christs about already, which confirms my belief that we are near the end. These men went out from our company, it is true, but they never really belonged to it. If they had really belonged to us they would have stayed. In fact, their going proves beyond doubt that men like that were not “our men” at all.

Be on your guard against error

^20-23 God has given you all a certain amount of spiritual insight, and indeed I have not written this warning as if I were writing to men who don’t know what error is. I write because your eyes are clear enough to discern a lie when you come across it. And what, I ask you, is the crowning lie? Surely the denial that Jesus is God’s anointed one, his Christ. I say, therefore, that any man who refuses to acknowledge the Father and the Son is an anti-christ. The man who will not recognise the Son cannot possibly know the Father; yet the man who believes in the Son will find that he knows the Father as well.

^24-25 For yourselves I beg you to stick to the original teaching. If you do, you will be living in fellowship with both the Father and the Son. And that means sharing his own life for ever, as he has promised.

^26-28 It is true that I felt I had to write the above about men who would dearly love to lead you astray. Yet I know that the touch of his Spirit never leaves you, and you don’t really need a human teacher. You know that his Spirit teaches you about all things, always telling you the truth and never telling you a lie. So, as he has taught you, live continually in him. Yes, now, little children remember to live continually in him. So that if he were suddenly to reveal himself we should still know exactly where we stand, and should not have to shrink away from his presence.

What it means to be sons of God

²⁹ You all know that God is really good. You may be just as sure that the man who leads a really good life is a true child of God.

Several years later: John prepares the way of Christ

3 ^1-6 In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius (a year when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea Herod tetrarch of Galilee, Philip, his brother, tetrarch of the territory of Iturea and Trachonitis and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene while Annas and Caiaphas were the High Priests) the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, while he was in the desert. He went into the whole country round about the Jordan proclaiming baptism as a mark of a complete change of heart and of the forgiveness of sins, as the book of the prophet Isaiah says—‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill brought low; and the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’.

^7-9 So John used to say to the crowds who came out to be baptised by him, “Who warned you, you serpent’s brood, to escape from the wrath to come? See that you do something to show that your hearts are really changed! Don’t start thinking that you can say to yourselves, ‘We are Abraham’s children’, for I tell you that God could produce children of Abraham out of these stones! The axe already lies at the root of the tree, and the tree that fails to produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

¹⁰ Then the crowds would ask him, “Then what shall we do?”

¹¹ And his answer was, “The man who has two shirts must share with the man who has none, and the man who has food must do the same.”

¹² Some of the tax-collectors also came to him to be baptised and they asked him, “Master, what are we to do?”

¹³ “You must not demand more than you are entitled to,” he replied.

¹⁴ And the soldiers asked him, “And what are we to do?” “Don’t bully people, don’t bring false charges, and be content with your pay,” he replied.