Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God,
because many false prophets have gone out into the world  1John 4:1

How good are you at sniffing out internet hoaxes, providing you are on the internet?
I think I am pretty good and generally can tell fairly quickly if something is a hoax, a joke or just plain misguided.
If you get email you have received the breathless plea from James Dobson that someone is trying to take "Touched by an Angel" off the air. Or that Bill Gates wants to send you five dollars just because he cares. It's curious that since the Gates' real charitable work is becoming more well known, that hoax has more or less died out. Or you have seen the purported last photo from the world trade center with an airliner heading right toward the camera. The one I like is the thirty foot great white shark leaping out of the water to grab a helicopter. Some are just jokes, some are pranks, but all the above are totally fake.

I did get one a few weeks ago that I was about to put in the "hoax" category, but hadn't heard of it so decided to check it out first. My friend Dennis Vietorisz, from Vancouver sent me an email that said we have been the victims of a hoax by the Walt Disney corp. The cheek of him to suggest such a thing!  The story went like this: During the filming of  the Disney movie, White Wilderness  there is a sequence of Norwegian lemmings plunging off a cliff into the sea below. And we were told this is a regular phenomenon. When populations reach a certain point, masses of lemmings follow one another in a mass suicide into the sea. In fact, this has been so well accepted as fact that the word "lemming" is short hand for someone who blindly follows.
Well it turns out that my friend Dennis is right. There is no such regular lemming suicidal plunge. Disney led us astray. The sequence was almost entirely faked.
Now I am not even sure about Bambi, let alone Dopey and Sneezy. I figure Doc is a regular guy though.

Maybe we should call this Disney hoax, "Lemminggate".
So lemmings do not jump off cliffs.
Ostriches do not stuff their head in the sand when they are threatened either, but we still use the analogy of putting your head in the sand.

Call me old fashioned, but I like to know what is real and what is not. The less obvious and the greater the stakes, the more
important knowing becomes.

Don't believe everything you hear.

In his letter to the churches, John warns them of spiritual hoaxes. He says don't believe everything you hear because there are false teachers going out into the world. It's amazing how many people fall for false teaching.
There are always a fresh supply of gullible or desperate people who will follow, "lemming-like" some charismatic leader even to their dooms. There are plenty of  current examples of people who will surrender all their possessions to some guru, agree to becoming the fourteenth wife to some cult leader or even throwing their lives away for a person they trust in.

In 1980, Harvest House published a book by Larry Parker entitled We Let Our Son Die. The book tells the tragic story of how Larry and his wife?after being influenced by one of America's numerous "word of faith" (or "word-faith") teachers?withheld insulin from their diabetic son, Wesley. Predictably, Wesley went into a diabetic coma. The Parkers, warned about the impropriety of making a ?negative confession,? continued to ?positively confess? Wesley's healing until the time of his death.

Even after Wesley's death, the Parkers?undaunted in their "faith"?conducted a resurrection service instead of a funeral. For more than one year following their son's death, they refused to abandon the "revelation knowledge" they had received through the "word-faith" movement. Eventually, they were tried and convicted of manslaughter and child abuse.¹