Tweets From God (Part 5: Jude) Series

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: