Tweets from God: Jude
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 6/12/2016
A few weeks ago I began a series I’m calling Tweets from God. What we’re doing is going through the five shortest books of the Bible. Each of these books is a single chapter and can be read in less than three minutes. Similar to a tweet on Twitter, these bite-size books of the Bible are short, to-the-point, messages from God to his followers.
The first of these brief books is Obadiah. If we summarized the book of Obadiah in one tweetable sentence, I think it would be this: God always sticks up for his children! Furthermore, the book of Philemon could be summed up: Faith in Jesus leads to true freedom! The second epistle of John can be summarized: Walking in truth, love and obedience leads to a happier holier life. Finally, Third John can be summed up: Holiness, hospitality and humility make a happy church family!
That brings us to the last one-chapter book of the Bible—the book of Jude. Nestled between Third John and Revelation, Jude is actually the longest of these little books with 416 words and it was written by Jesus’s younger brother, Jude (which is short for Judas). Judas was actually a fairly common name in the first century. But after Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, it’s no wonder Jesus’s little brother started going by Jude instead.
Jude hadn’t always believed in Jesus (Jn 7:5;Mk 3:21), but after He rose from the dead, things changed. The world changed (Acts 17:6). His brother changed. Jude changed. Now he shared this glorious salvation with people all over the world: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female—all united in Christ. He wanted desperately to write about it. But he couldn’t.
The church was facing a more pressing issue: people were creeping into the church unnoticed. He starts off saying, “Some ungodly people have wormed their way into your churches, saying that God’s marvelous grace allows us to live immoral lives” (vs. 4 NLT). These were not “seekers,” nonbelievers who were genuinely curious about Christianity. They claimed to be believers. But they denied the exclusive authority of Jesus, twisting His grace into a license to sin all they wanted.
They were infiltrators. They indulged in sexual immorality, greed, and grumbling. They mocked things they didn’t understand. They rejected the authority of the apostles, angels, and the Lord. They caused churches to split up into opposing factions.
The children of God needed to keep their eyes open for this kind of behavior in the churches. So instead of writing about the salvation they shared, Jude wrote a brief, hard-hitting letter to the churches of the world.
Many see Jude as a gloomy epistle because he doesn’t hold back about sin and God’s refusal to ignore it. He spends the majority of the letter writing about God’s judgement of sinners. For instance, he writes: “And don’t forget Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighboring towns, which were filled with immorality and every kind of sexual perversion. Those cities were destroyed by fire and serve as a warning of the eternal fire of God’s judgment” (vs. 7 NLT).
This little letter brims over with this type of imagery. Jude paints a bleak picture of wickedness and rebellion that will end in fiery judgement. And let’s face it—we live in wicked world. Sin permeates the culture, the country, and even the church. The question is—how do we deal with it? Put another way: How do we live a life of faith in a fallen world? Thankfully, Jude answers that question.
In fact, scattered throughout this miniature message, Jude offers three ways for us to respond to the depravity and debauchery that surrounds us.
First, Jude says, defend your faith.
• DEFEND YOUR FAITH
Jude begins by writing, “Dear friends, I had been eagerly planning to write to you about the salvation we all share. But now I find that I must write about something else, urging you to defend the faith that God has entrusted once for all time to his holy people” (vs. 3 NLT).
What does it mean for us to defend the faith? It means standing up and speaking out for Jesus, for God, for the Bible, and for our beliefs as Christians. The church collectively, and each Christian personally, has a responsibility to guard, protect and preserve God’s Word and the Gospel of Jesus.
In order to do that effectively we have to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it! Just like the Christians in Jude’s day, we live in culture and climate that seems almost diametrically opposed to Christianity. Our country is so morally mixed up that people don’t even know which bathroom to use anymore.
That’s why it’s more important than ever for Christians to be grounded in God’s Word and be able to defend their faith with reason and precision. We need to be able to answer skeptical questions, like:
• What does Christianity have to do with anything?
• How do you know that God exists?
• Is Jesus really the only way to heaven? Don’t all road lead to God?
• Can we really trust what the Bible says?
• If so, what does it say about homosexuality, gender identity, and other social and moral issues?
Unless we know what we believe and why we believe it, we can’t offer any meaningful answers to these or other similar questions that might challenge our faith.
Jude told of some “ungodly people” who had “wormed” their way into the church and were twisting God’s Word to justify their own life-style and wrong behaviors. He says they used “God’s wonderful grace” (his undeserved love, forgiveness and mercy) as an excuse to sin sexually. They’d say, “God loves me. He doesn’t mind who I have sex with.” They may have added, “God gave me these sexual desires, so how can he be upset when I act on them?”
Is that what the Bible teaches? Is that consistent with the Christian faith? Of course not! The truth is sex outside of marriage—whether its homosexuality, fornication, adultery, or even pornography—is an offense to God. Even today some Christians minimize the sinfulness of sin, believing that how they live has little to do with their faith. But what a person truly believes shows up in how they act. So what do you believe?
The churches that Jude wrote to needed believers who would stand up and speak God’s truth about sex, sin and God’s grace. Likewise, the church today needs you to defend the faith—to stand up and speak out for the Gospel, for God’s Word and for Biblical values and morals. Of course, dealing with depravity in the world involves more than just defending the faith. Jude also urges Christians to develop their faith.
• DEVELOP YOUR FAITH
He offers three different ways of developing your faith. Jude writes, “But you, dear friends, must build each other up in your most holy faith, pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, and await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will bring you eternal life. In this way, you will keep yourselves safe in God’s love” (vs. 20-21 NLT).
Jude tells us to develop or “build up” our faith. As I said, he gives us three ways of doing that. The first is through partnership. He says, “build each other up in your faith.” In other words, we’re not in this alone. We need to encourage each other, stir one another up, be a positive influence on each other. The Christian life isn’t lived in isolation. It’s a team effort. Encouragement makes it easier to love as Jesus loved (John 13:34-35).
Encouragement gives hope (Romans 15:4). Encouragement helps us through times of discipline and testing (Hebrews 12:5). Encouragement nurtures patience and kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and Galatians 5:22-26). Encouragement makes it easier to sacrifice our own desires for the advancement of God’s kingdom. In short, encouraging each other makes it easier to live a life of faith in a fallen world.
Furthermore, Jude says we can develop our faith through prayer: “pray in the power of the Holy Spirit,” Jude says. Prayer nurtures our faith like nothing else. It’s our lifeline to God. All too often, though, we treat prayer as some sort of emergency measure. We only talk to God about life when we have a problem and even then we allow the problem to fester and grow a little first. Prayer isn’t a magic formula to get things from God; it’s about getting God himself. There is a God-shaped hole in our lives and when we pray, God fills that inner vacuum with his Holy Spirit. When we keep asking, searching, and knocking we don’t just find the things of God or the favor of God; we discover God himself. So through prayer, our faith is built up.
Finally, Jude says we can develop our faith through patience. He says to “await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will bring you eternal life.” We don’t like waiting, though, do we?
Madeline Rockwell once wrote a story for Reader’s Digest: My grandmother was a ball of fire, while my grandpa was slow and deliberate. One night they were awakened by a commotion in the chicken house. Grandma sprang out of bed, ran to the chicken coop and found the cause of the racket, a large black snake. Having nothing to kill it with, she clamped down on its head with her bare foot. There she stood, until Grandpa arrive, a good fifteen minutes later—fully dressed and even his pocket watch in place. “Well,” he said cheerfully to my disheveled and enraged grandma, “If I’d known you had him, I wouldn’t have hurried so much.”
I think God is sometimes like that. We’re always in such a hurry in our culture. We want overnight success; instant gratification. We want microwaves, not slow cookers. Patience is not one of our strong suits and God rarely shows up as fast as we want him to. He shows up in his own time, when he’s ready. But his time is always the right time. And God is worth waiting for. The Bible says, “Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:14 NASB). One of the best ways to develop our faith is simply learning to wait on God.
If we would follow Jude’s advice—encouraging our fellow Christians, praying in the Spirit, and learning to wait on God—we’d develop a stronger, hardier faith. And it would be much easier to live our faith. Finally, we can live a life of faith in a fallen world by distributing our faith.
• DISTRIBUTE YOUR FAITH
Jude goes on to say, “And you must show mercy to those whose faith is wavering. Rescue others by snatching them from the flames of judgment. Show mercy to still others, but do so with great caution, hating the sins that contaminate their lives.” (vs. 22-23 NLT).
Jude calls us to “show mercy” to two distinct groups—believers whose faith is wavering and “others” (presumably unbelievers) who are endanger of final judgment.
In either case, I think the message is this: you can’t live a life of faith, by keeping your faith to yourself. You have to lovingly distribute it—sharing your faith others who need it.
Back in July of 2002, in an incident that the news-media called "The Miracle at Quecreek," nine miners were trapped 240 feet under-ground for three days in a water-filled mine shaft without food nor light nor drinking water. After they were rescued, they were interviewed about what happened down there. One of the miners said that they "decided early on they were either going to live or die as a group." The fifty-five degree water threatened to kill them slowly by hypothermia, so according to one news report "When one would get cold, the other eight would huddle around that person and warm them, and when another person got cold, the favor was returned." Miner, Harry Mayhugh, told reporters after being released from Somerset Hospital, "Everybody had strong moments, but at any given time maybe one guy got down, and then the rest pulled together... And then that guy would get back up, and maybe someone else would feel a little weaker, but it was a team effort... That’s the only way it could have been."
Those miners faced incredibly hostile conditions together—and the world marveled when they all came out alive together.
Jude urges us to do the same thing for our fellow Christians whose faith is wavering. When someone is struggling spiritual and maybe even beginning to lose faith in God, it’s our job to huddle around that person—restoring their faith by sharing ours.
The same goes for seekers and skeptics. One of the most important reasons for us to know what we believe and why we believe it is so that we can share our faith with our friends, relatives, associates and neighbors who don’t know Jesus. It’s not easy to share your faith though, is it? Maybe you’re just not an extroverted person. Neither am I. Maybe you don’t know what you’re supposed to say or how to broach the subject. And, of course, there is always the fear of rejection. What if they’re offended? What if it turns into an argument? What if I ruin an otherwise perfectly good friendship?
Those are all legitimate fears and concerns, but they are all outweighed by the reality that someone’s soul—someone’s whole eternity—may depend on you sucking it up and sharing your faith with them.
In both cases—whether we’re dealing with believers or unbelievers—Jude reminds us that we are to love the sinner, but hate the sin that contaminates their lives. There’s a delicate balance here. If we’re not careful we risk driving people away from Christ because our harsh criticism of the sin in their lives. On the other hand, we could just as easily be so overly accepting that we not only embrace the person, but we embrace the sin as well. Accepting someone and loving someone, doesn’t mean we accept or endorse everything they do.
I think it takes diplomacy and delicacy, but sometimes the most loving thing we can do is point out the sin in someone’s life. Not out of malice. Not in a critical, condemning way. But with gentleness and respect, knowing full well that we have faults of our own.
Conclusion
Living a life of faith isn’t easy, especially in a world tainted by sin. Jude reminds us that God takes sin seriously. He doesn’t ignore it or excuse it. He doesn’t turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. God hates the sins that contaminate our lives. So it’s important for us to examine ourselves, to seek God’s forgiveness and grace and begin living a life of faith.
The best way to do that, Jude says, is to:
• Defend your faith – by knowing what you believe and why you believe it
• Develop your faith – through partnerships, prayer and patience
• Distribute your faith – by sharing it with as many people as possible
If we chiseled Jude down to a single tweetable sentence, I think it would be: “Sin corrupts and condemns, but faith restores and renews.” So let’s determine to live by faith.
Invitation
Perhaps you’ve been struggling with sin yourself. Let’s not make the mistake of using God’s grace to justify our sinful behavior. Instead, we can openly confess our sin and seek God’s wonderful grace. Through his wonderful grace we can start living a life of faith. If you need help defending, developing or distributing your faith, please talk with me while we stand and sing.
