This is how you can recognize God's Spirit. One spirit says, "I believe that Jesus is the Christ who came to earth and became a man." That Spirit is from God.
Another spirit refuses to say this about Jesus. That spirit is not from God. This is the spirit of the enemy of Christ. You have heard that the enemy of Christ is coming, and now he is already in the world.
My dear children, you belong to God, so you have already defeated these false prophets. That's because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
But we are from God. So the people who know God listen to us. But the people who are not from God don't listen to us. That is how we know the Spirit that is true and the spirit that is false.
No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us. If we love each other, God's love has reached its goal—it is made perfect in us.
If God's love is made perfect in us, we can be without fear on the day when God judges the world. We will be without fear, because in this world we are like Jesus.
Where God's love is, there is no fear, because God's perfect love takes away fear. It is his punishment that makes a person fear. So his love is not made perfect in the one who has fear.
If we say we love God but hate any of our brothers or sisters in his family, we are liars. If we don't love someone we have seen, how can we love God? We have never even seen him.