The apostle speaks to us about the necessity of testing the spirits, that is, distinguishing what is God's and what is satanic in life. Before these words the apostle stresses that what is characteristic of a Christian is faith, keeping the commandments, and a heart open before God. And he formulates the famous words sometimes called "the criterion of the apostle John." Every spirit, says the apostle, that confesses Christ come in the flesh is from God. If we look attentively at the history of the dogmatic development of Christianity in the era of the Ecumenical Councils, we will see that in the end all false teachings were rejected by the Church precisely according to this criterion. And conversely, correspondence to it helps distinguish Christian confessions from quasi-Christian sects.

But besides their dogmatic and historical significance, these words are also very important in the practical life of Christians. First of all, the apostle John speaks about distinguishing the spirits that speak in the human heart. What is right and what is wrong, what is worthy of a Christian and what is unworthy: to a significant degree, for distinguishing this in one's own life, one must use precisely the criterion of the apostle John.

For the apostle, love and knowledge of God are not only inseparable from one another; for him they are two sides of one and the same reality. No one has ever seen God, John says, but if we love one another, then God abides "in us," and the corresponding Greek expression can mean both "within each of us" and "among us." In this case God's love abides "in us," in both meanings of the expression, in all fullness. At first glance the thought that all knowledge of God is love may seem strange. There are other forms of it, after all, that do not deny love but also do not place it at the center of a person's relationship with God.

But if love is viewed not only as relations among people but also as a form of God's presence, the primary and foundational form for the Kingdom, much becomes clearer. Indeed, how can a person see God? The only real possibility, not counting speculative abstractions that usually have no relation to genuine knowledge of God, is awareness of that breath of life which God "breathed" into a person at creation.

Consciously placing it at the center of one's own life in all its manifestations. Only in this way can knowledge of God and communion with God become reality for a person. Then God's power and God's love become reality for him too: those forms of God's presence that were accessible to humanity even before Christ came into the world. Every other experience of communion with God proves derivative from the experience of becoming aware of this Presence.

But with Christ's coming the situation objectively changes: now every experience of the Presence, if it is genuine, is inseparable from the Kingdom entering the world. The breath of life given to everyone can today become a door into the Kingdom, if only one knocks. But only Christ can open the door, and when He opens it, the new foundation of a person's life becomes the energy of love on which the whole life of the Kingdom is founded. Only the life of the fallen world is founded on natural energy, yet God is hidden even behind natural energy.

But behind the energy of love God is not hidden; in it and through it He is revealed, and therefore it lies at the foundation of the Kingdom. But if, according to the Savior's words, the Kingdom is within us and among us, then love, if we are residents of the Kingdom, will also be within us and in our midst. And behind its concrete manifestations within us and among us stands the whole fullness of God's love revealed to the Kingdom. Everything else, every form of being, awareness, and knowledge of God, is derivative from God's love. Regardless of how much people understand this.

"Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God..." The heart... but why the heart? After all, the ability to make judgments would seem to belong to the mind, not the heart. There was a man who was not religious at all, a man of the modern age (he lived in the seventeenth century), Francois de La Rochefoucauld, a moralist who anticipated the appearance of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and he said this: the mind is always the dupe of the heart. He may have meant something other than what we are about to make him say. But here is another opinion, from a very different person who lived at about the same time, the words of Spinoza: passions are not overcome by reason, but only by stronger passions. We are not speaking of this by chance now, and it is not by chance that the Apostle speaks of the heart not condemning us, for we are standing at the doors of Great Lent. We will eat less and feed our brains worse in order to make the heart more sensitive and to let it tell us whether it condemns us. Very often, if not always, we repent of what our mind offers us for confession. And what are our sins? Almost all of them are passions, and so we try to overcome them with the mind. Of course, we try to make it look as though we conquer them by asceticism... But what asceticism can there be for a modern city dweller who has to go to work every day and think at work despite hypoglycemia, who has to run around with children and elderly parents? Asceticism in the true sense is impossible under such conditions; all of this is only self-restraint within our strength. So only the mind remains to help us with the passions. Yet here is the witness of two very different people that this may be completely useless. And now let us return again to the Apostle's words: "...if our heart does not condemn us..." Let us look at this wondrous organ, the heart. It is one of the most frequent words in the Bible. Here is what B. Vysheslavtsev, the philosopher of the heart, as some call him, writes: "It is necessary to recognize the heart as the primary organ of religious experience. In the simplicity and accessibility of this word 'heart,' this symbol constantly present in ordinary speech, lies its high religious value. A person 'without a heart' is a person without love and without religion; irreligion is, in the end, heartlessness." Let us dedicate Great Lent to receiving the Sacred Heart of Jesus into our own heart and to finding, in the boundless Sacred Heart of Jesus, a little place for our heart.