A Different Way Forward

Listen Online:

Transcript:

I’m going to ask you to turn with me tonight to the book of Jude, the only chapter of the book of Jude. We’re going to finish up the book of Jude tonight. On the bookshelf in my office, there is a little old book.

I don’t want to say it. I want to say, I want to be clear, it’s old for a book, not a person. It was printed in the 60s.

It’s old for a book in my office, but it’s a book that was circulated during the 1964 presidential campaign. Now, if you all know anything about me, you know that some of my interests are history and politics and the history of politics. And I have this book that was written, as memory serves, it’s not a very thick book, and it was written by one of the delegates to the 1964 Republican National Convention.

And in this book, she was arguing, and it was circulated around to the delegates, in this book, she was arguing the case that they needed to nominate Barry Goldwater for president. And her argument was, if they went with somebody like Nelson Rockefeller, some of these what are often called country club types, if they kept nominating the same type of guys that they nominated to run against Roosevelt all those times, if they kept nominating somebody who was just a pale shade of the other side. And it’s not relevant how anybody feels about Barry Goldwater.

Just stick with me and understand the point. She was making the case that in 1964, to run against Lyndon Johnson, they should not nominate somebody who was going to be Lyndon Johnson-lite. She made the case, this woman made the case, that they needed to nominate somebody who was drastically different from Lyndon Johnson.

And I think they succeeded, if you know anything about that race. They succeeded. He was different from Lyndon Johnson in every conceivable way.

They didn’t want somebody who agreed with what Lyndon Johnson wanted to do, but just said, well, let’s do it a little better or let’s do it to a lesser extent. And we still hear this in elections from both parties. Four years ago, the Republicans argued about, we need to make sure we’re not nominating somebody who’s Obama-lite.

And they argued about who had gone along with the policies of the Obama years. They’re doing it now. Oh, you agree with Trump on this.

We want to make sure we’re not nominating somebody who’s just a pale imitation of the other side. Now, I’m not pushing one political side or the other. I’m just making the point that sometimes people argue for you need to stand out instead of trying to be like the other side.

And again, however you may feel about Barry Goldwater, they mission accomplished. All right, very different from Lyndon Johnson. Now, the reason this story came to mind is because we recognize this when it happens right in front of us.

We see, oh, you know, you’ve got somebody to run against Obama. You want somebody totally different. You’re getting somebody to run against Trump or Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan, whoever.

You want somebody totally different from the other side. You want to offer a clear choice. Well, that’s what Jude talked about at the end of this book, that there needed to be a clear distinction.

Because if you’ve been with us on these Sunday nights, each week, the last three Sunday nights that we’ve talked about the book of Jude, Jude has laid out a case against the antinomians. Those antinomians, again, being people who believe that because of the grace of God, we have an excuse to just sin as much as we want and live however we want because he’s just going to forgive us anyway. So Jude has spent all of the book up until this point laying out his case that the antinomians are wrong, that they are dangerous, that they will cause no end of trouble in Christianity, that they will actually, because of their false gospel, they are leading people astray.

And ultimately, if you carry it out to its logical conclusion, they’re not teaching anything about repentance or the new birth, and so they are leading people into a false gospel that was going to condemn them to hell, all the while thinking that they were saved enough to just sin as much as they wanted. So he spent all this time laying out this case against the antinomians, and now we come back, and in the very end of this book, he explains to the Christians, you are supposed to be different. Don’t try to be like the world.

Don’t try to be an imitation of the world. Don’t try to be the sinful world only slightly more moral. You want something completely different. You want to go the total opposite way.

You want a different way forward. And so we’ll see in the verses we’re going to look at tonight, in verses 20 through 25, that Jude concluded this letter by encouraging his fellow Christians to live differently from the antinomians around them. He encouraged them not just to do better than the antinomians, but to be different.

And it’s that same call we hear right now with all the politics going on. We want something different. Jude said, for the Christians, we should want something different.

And so after he’s described their wickedness up through verse 19, he switches. Everything kind of hinges right here on the spot between verses 19 and 20. Because up through verse 19, he’s explained the danger of the antinomians.

If you remember back to last week, he called them dangerous reefs. They were going to shipwreck people. He said they were shepherds that only look out for themselves.

I don’t need to go through all of these again, but he called them wild waves, wandering stars destined for eternal darkness. I mean, he had nothing good to say about them. So he lays out this case against them, and in verse 20, he says, But you, but you.

He’s drawing a clear line of contrast here between them. Because he says, But you, dear friends, as you build yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life. Have mercy on those who waver.

Save others by snatching them from the fire. Have mercy on others, but with fear, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh. Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling.

and to make you stand in the presence of His glory without blemish and with great joy. To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.

So it all hinges right there on verse 20, but you. With that word, but, He said there, here’s a change in our focus. And he says, you, that phrase, but you, means supposed to be different from everything that came before, everything that I’ve spent the last 19 verses discussing, which they didn’t have verses in the initial writing.

That didn’t come until a couple hundred years ago. But he was calling the Christians to be different. We’re supposed to be different, aren’t we?

The Bible says that we’re supposed to be in this world, but not of this world. The Bible says we’re supposed to be a peculiar people, And not just in the sense that people see us at Walmart and say they’re weird. But you can say, oh, people think I’m weird because I’m a Christian.

No, sometimes we’re just weird. Let’s not blame it on Jesus. But we’re supposed to be weird because of Jesus.

We’re supposed to stand out because of the difference that Jesus has made in us. And so he’s calling the Christians to be different. And it all goes back to this biblical balance in which both grace and the law have a role.

Now, I’ve told you this, I think, every week that we’ve talked about the book of Jude. There’s the balance and there’s the extremes. One extreme is legalism that says, follow these laws, do these things, so God will love you.

You have to be the most moral person to earn your way in. Well, that’s slightly true. Part of that is true.

To earn God’s favor, you have to be absolutely perfect. The problem is we can’t. We can’t do it.

So this legalism doesn’t work. It’s sending you down a road of trying to earn your salvation that is utterly impossible. On the other hand, there’s this antinomianism, or if we want to stick with alliteration, we’ve got legalism.

I’ve heard people call this liberalism or call it license. Antinomianism works. But the idea that because there’s grace, you can just sin as much as you want, and it’s okay because God’s going to forgive you anyway.

See, this side emphasizes the grace of God to the exclusion of any standard that God has set up. And this side emphasizes the law and the standard of God, really to the exclusion of grace. And the Bible teaches both.

The Bible absolutely teaches both. Now, by grace alone we’re saved. For by grace are you saved.

And through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast, according to Ephesians chapter 2. We’re saved by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, not by our works in the law. But that doesn’t mean that the law ceases to exist. When I say law, I also don’t mean every ceremonial law that was ever given to Israel.

Some of those were given for the specific purpose of keeping Israel separate for God’s purposes and bringing the Messiah into the world. I’m talking about the moral laws, the things that were re-emphasized in the New Testament. God’s grace is there because we cannot live up to the law perfectly.

God’s grace is there because we need forgiveness because we’ve all fallen short. But God’s standards are still God’s standards. And when you think about it, if it weren’t for God’s standards still being in place, we wouldn’t need grace.

God could just say, well, let’s forget about the whole thing. You’re all right. Do what you want to do and I’ll overlook it.

No, he didn’t overlook it. He showed us grace because Jesus earned it at the cross. Grace implies that you can’t earn it.

Grace implies that you’ve fallen short and you need me to give you kindness that you can’t earn and don’t deserve. And so the very fact that God has to show us grace reminds us that God’s standards are still in place. So we find this biblical balance in the middle that says we are not saved by adherence to the law.

The law shows us how far we’ve fallen short of God’s holiness. We’ve violated that, and so we need His grace. And it’s by that grace we’re saved.

It’s because Jesus was righteous, because Jesus paid for our sins, because we were given His righteousness in exchange. but then there’s still this matter of God’s moral standards and as Christians it then becomes our calling to as the Holy Spirit empowers us to live according to those moral standards not to earn our salvation but because we love God and want to please him and if we sort of short shirk the moral standards and say no I can just do whatever I want that is indicative of a life that has not been changed by the power of God. That is indicative of somebody who never has known him.

And so there’s this biblical balance. We find all throughout the New Testament, grace and the law, they both have a role in the life of the believer. Grace is what brings us to salvation, but God’s standards are still God’s standards.

And if we love him, we will desire to aim for those standards. Will we always hit them? No.

I don’t believe we can be morally perfect on this side of eternity, but it becomes our goal to aim for those standards because we love God and want to honor Him. And so Jude called on his fellow Christians to maintain that balance. Here, as he’s saying, be different.

He’s telling them to maintain that biblical balance. Now, in verses 20 and 21, we see that they were called to maintain that balance in their own lives. Verse 20 says, build yourselves up in your most holy faith.

The faith that they had, the faith that they had in Jesus Christ, the faith that they were endeavoring to live out, he said, you know what, build yourself up in that. Strengthen yourself. Now, we don’t need to take from that the idea that our spiritual growth is our own doing.

I can’t make myself grow spiritually. That’s God’s work. I can’t even make myself grow physically.

Jesus said, who of you, by worrying about it, can add a cubit to your stature? The most common interpretation I’ve heard of that is, how are you going to make yourself any taller by worrying about it? I can’t even do that, let alone spiritual growth.

I can’t make it happen. That’s God’s work. So it’s not saying go out and grow yourself spiritually like it’s your responsibility.

Instead, it’s calling us to walk in a way that’s conducive to spiritual growth. God does the work of spiritual growth in us. But I don’t believe that God blesses us with that spiritual growth when we’re walking in disobedience to Him as a general principle.

I don’t believe that God blesses us with that spiritual growth. He’s calling us here to walk in a way that’s consistent with what we’re asking God to do. You know, to say, oh, I want to grow spiritually, and then do everything possible in my life that I can to inhibit that spiritual growth, to get further and further away from God.

To do that makes about as much sense as me sitting down with a tub of ice cream every night and saying, but I want to get skinny. And by the way, I have been there. And it didn’t work.

All right? Now, this is what the Bible says. Build yourselves up in your most holy faith.

Again, I think the scriptures point to the fact that it’s God who does the work of our spiritual growth, but he expects us not to actively work against him in that. Now, could God grow us anyway? Yeah, God can do whatever he wants.

But I think God set it up where he expects us not to work against him in that. So if you want to grow spiritually, do the things that point themselves in that direction. Act like you’re expecting God to grow you spiritually.

Sort of like the story we’ve all heard, I think I’ve told from the pulpit, I’ve heard some of you tell about everybody going to the prayer meeting and praying for rain and only one man brought an umbrella. That man was on board with what God was going to do. Can God send rain whether or not you’re on board?

Yeah, we know that. Can God send spiritual growth whether or not you’re on board? Yeah, he can.

But everything I know about Scripture tells me God typically expects us to be on board before he’s going to grant that request. So Jude here says, build yourselves up in your most holy faith. That just basically means act in a way that you’re looking for spiritual growth. Pursue that and watch what God can do.

Now, how do we do that? Verse 20 also tells us the answer of how we build ourselves up in the most holy faith. One of the ways we do that is by praying in the Holy Spirit.

He says that, build yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit. Now, that requires us to be sensitive to the leading and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, be listening to Him, following what He teaches us, particularly what He illuminates to us from the Word of God, And then pray for those things that we know God wants for us. Now, if you’ve heard any sermons, if you’ve heard any responsible sermons, I should qualify, on prayer at all, you know that God is not obligated to grant every request you make.

You know, we can’t claim some of the promises in Scripture as blanket promises, that God, if I want a brand new Mercedes and I pray for it, then you have to give me that. That’s not how it works. We’re told that if we pray according to His will, He hears those things and He grants those requests.

So one of the things Jude is saying here to do as Christians, he’s saying pray in the Holy Spirit. Pray as the Holy Spirit prompts you, as the Holy Spirit leads you. Pray for those things that you know to be the will of God, which incidentally, by the way, folks, is your spiritual growth.

The Bible says this is the will of God, even your sanctification. There are a few things that the Bible spells out for everybody. This is God’s will for your life.

Sometimes people come and say, well, how do I know God’s will for my life? Well, if you’re wanting to know what job you should take or who you should marry, you’re going to have to spend some time with Him about that. But there are some things I can tell you in the Bible are His will for all of us, for all believers.

He wants us to give thanks. He wants us to be more like Jesus. He wants us to be sanctified.

Start praying for those things that tend toward your spiritual growth. Pray in the Holy Spirit. be sensitive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and pray for the things that are going to build you up in the holy faith another way we do this is by being on guard being in obedience he says in verse 21 keep yourselves in the love of God this does not mean that you are currently in a spot that is in the love of God and now it’s your job to keep yourself there because otherwise God might push you out, and so you’ve got to work to keep yourself there, because he loves you today, but he might not love you tomorrow.

That’s not at all what it’s talking about. This word keep in scripture oftentimes means to guard ourselves. Guard yourselves in the love of God.

This idea of the love of God means not the love that God shows us, but I believe it means the love that we show God, and the scriptures are clear, especially in John’s letters, how we show God we love him is through obedience. Didn’t Jesus say, if you love me, keep my commandments? He told Peter, if you love me, feed my sheep.

If you love me, do what I told you to do. I feel like a broken record because I have this conversation with my children all the time. Guard yourselves, keep yourselves in the love of God.

I understand that to mean that we are guarding ourselves against disobedience. It has nothing to do with earning God’s love. It has everything to do with guarding ourselves to be in a place where we are demonstrating the love that we have for God because He’s already demonstrated His love toward us.

And as believers, there’s nothing we can do to lose that love. It’s who God is. So the only thing we need to guard is that we don’t step out of a place in our lives where we can show Him the love that He deserves in return.

Keep yourselves in the love of God. And we can also do this by anticipating his imminent return. He talks about, in verse 21, waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life.

And I’ve talked to you before in some of the books we’ve studied on prophecy, Joel and Obadiah and books like that, that when you live with the expectation in the front of your mind all the time that he could return at any moment, that his return is imminent. That’s what it means, imminent. It means it could happen any moment.

When you think that way, that changes your perspective. Now, there are some people who say, well, I just know we’re living in the end times. That’s entirely possible.

I’m not saying they’re wrong. At least not that we’re living in the end times part. The I know is the part I have an issue with.

It could be today. Jesus could return today. He could return before I finish this message tonight.

He could also return 200 years from now. he could return 500 years from now it’s up to him but if we live with that understanding that it could be any moment it begins to change our perspective if I were to tell you that I knew for sure and by the way I’m not going to I’m not a date setter I’m not a date suggester but if I were to tell you I knew for sure God had sent me a message he’d sent me a text message and he’s coming back tonight I’d say at such and such time, but again, my watch is not correct. But he’s coming back at such and such time tonight.

We have six hours. We have eight hours left, and we know that for sure. How would your night tonight be different from how it was going to be otherwise?

I tell you what, when I leave here tonight, I plan on going home and helping Charlie get the kids ready for bed, and then she and I will sit down and eat something for dinner and maybe turn on the TV and see if there’s anything worth watching, talk a little bit. She’ll fall asleep on the couch. I’ll do a little work, and then we’ll eventually go off to bed and start tomorrow all over.

That’s sort of my standing Sunday night plan. But if I knew I had six hours left on this earth, that plan would probably be very different, wouldn’t it? My priorities, unless I’m a crazy person, my priorities would flip upside down.

well the fact is we don’t know any day that we’re on earth we we ought to have one eye on what we’re doing and one eye on the sky because he could come back any day and I think sometimes we as christians because it’s been two thousand years we start to think well you know he says he’s coming back but we don’t think about it we it’s it’s not really something we focus on it’s not important I had an atheist professor one time say, your Messiah promised that he’d come back soon 2,000 years ago, and he still hadn’t come back. And I told him, well, he said he’d come back soon. It’s even truer today than it was then, isn’t it?

I thought it was clever. He didn’t think it was funny. No, but we get that mindset.

Ah, it’s been 2,000 years. Yeah, he’ll come back someday, but we never think about it could be today. It could be today.

Shouldn’t we be giving thought to it every day and living our lives as though it could be today? I’m not talking about going and selling everything you own and just hanging out on a mountainside singing Kumbaya. I’m just talking about go out and do the things that he’s called you to do in everyday life.

Talk to the people that he leads you to talk to. Share him with the people that he’s put in your path. Love on the people that he’s put around you.

Don’t put it off until tomorrow. Jude told them, that they need to wait expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life. Always be expecting His mercy.

One of these days, He is going to come back for all of us. And if He tarries long enough, there will still be a day when He’ll come back for each of us, that each of us will be received to Him. We may or may not know when that day is going to be.

But if we wait on Him, if we anticipate His return, if we start living each day with one eye on the sky, We’re not going to have time for the shenanigans of the antinomian crowd. We’re not going to have time to pursue whatever sin we feel like because we’re going to be too busy serving Him. So He called them to maintain this balance in their own lives.

That’s how they did it. He encouraged them to pray, to be praying for the things that were going to grow them spiritually, to keep themselves in a place where they were obedient, to keep themselves in a place where they were focused on His return. Just basically do the things Jesus told you to do.

Not because that’s how you get salvation, but because you love him and because you want to represent him to the world. But he also said that they were supposed to do that. They were supposed to maintain that balance in their treatment of others.

And we see this in verses 22 and 23. He said, have mercy on those who waver, save others by snatching them from the fire, and have mercy on others but with fear, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh. So there are three different groups of others that he talks about in this passage and the way that they were supposed to treat them.

In verse 22, he talks about those who waver. Those are believers who are a little weaker in the faith. I talked about that some this morning, that sometimes even believers have questions and doubts, right?

Sometimes even believers have moments where they don’t feel saved. And in their day, certainly there were people who were going to waver. It was a lot harder for them to be Christians.

We think we’re persecuted because Starbucks put out the wrong cup. they were being fed to lions and so there were certainly people who wavered you’re faced with torture when you’re faced with death when you’re faced with your family being ripped apart I would think just about anybody would have a moment of crisis and certainly I’ve run across some of those in church who would say there’s no room for such a thing you know god wants committed people absolutely God wants committed people. That doesn’t mean we shoot our wounded.

He says to deal graciously with those believers who aren’t as spiritually strong. He says here, have mercy on those who waver. There’s another verse in scripture that says, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.

Because as soon as we think we’re too strong to be hit with that temptation, or we think we’re too strong to be hit with that question or that doubt, there it comes. I heard an interview a couple years ago, parts of it have stuck with me, an interview from one of our Navy SEALs. He was telling this man on the radio about them training to be tortured and not give up information.

He said it was always the guys who said, I won’t crack, that you had to worry about because they weren’t taking it seriously. It’s the ones who said, I’m worried I might give something up, who were in touch with reality. It’s the same way in Christianity.

It’s not the people who have questions and have messy lives, I mean, complicated lives that I’m concerned about. But we need to get to a place where it’s okay for people to ask honest questions. It’s okay for people to be open and honest about the struggles of their life and problems and hurts and things.

And for us as a church, as a Christian community, to come around them and show them mercy rather than beat them up because again metaphorically only one time have I seen somebody take a swing at somebody else in church and it wasn’t here but all too often the response is we beat them up spiritually now jude said there are going to be some people who aren’t spiritually as strong as you and maybe they’re even going to be enticed by what the antinomians are saying because it sounds good part of it sounds like you’re emphasizing the grace of god it sounds great and some of them might start to waver. He said, deal with them mercifully. Now, dealing with them mercifully doesn’t mean we just excuse whatever they want to do and affirm whatever they want to believe.

Sometimes the most gracious thing you can do to somebody is tell them the truth, but we do it in a loving way. He said, deal mercifully. Have mercy on these people who waver.

There’s another group. Those are believers who weren’t quite as spiritually strong. There’s another group of people who were non-believers, who were unwittingly perishing, and he said that we need to deal graciously with those people and point them to salvation.

There are people in our world who are just living their lives, doing their own thing, and don’t realize how lost they are, don’t realize the peril that they’re in. And it’s our job to deal graciously with them. Sometimes we get so mad at unsaved people for acting like unsaved people.

I think I talked about that a little bit last week. Instead of getting mad at them for acting like what they are, we could point them to salvation in Jesus. That might be a better option.

He said, deal graciously with these people. Save others by snatching them from the fire. He said, you go to where those people are, where they’re smoldering, where they’re so close over the fires of hell, they’re already singed and you can smell it on their clothes and you snatch them out of the clutches.

Go out there and snatch them out of the fire. We need to be gracious toward those who are perishing. especially those who don’t even realize it.

Not everybody who’s an unbeliever, not everybody who’s hell-bound, is on the same par as one of these false teachers that he wrote so strongly against. And the last thing we ought to ever do is get some sense of moral superiority because of where they’re headed and where not. He said, as he’s talking about dealing graciously and having mercy, in the very next breath, he says, and save others, snatching them from the fire. Go and rescue them.

he says. Some of these people are going to go to hell thinking they’re experiencing the grace of God because we can just sin however much we want and he’s going to forgive us because there’s grace. Meanwhile, they have never trusted Christ actually as their savior.

They’ve never been to a place where they were repentant over their sins. They have never experienced the new birth. They’ve never experienced new spiritual life given to them by God, but somebody came along and told them if they just say this or if they just repeat that, that they’re all right.

And so they live like they’re as lost as they are and they don’t even know it. And he said, go and snatch them out of the fire. We could complain about them.

We could roll our eyes at them. We can be mad at them or we can be gracious and go and snatch them. But then he told them to deal graciously even with those hardened sinners and antinomians, not just the ones who are ignorant, but the ones who know full well what they’re doing, and they reject God and they reject his mercy anyway.

He said, be gracious even with them, but be cautious about how the corruption spreads. He says in verse 23, have mercy on others, but with fear. That’s where I point out that caution.

He says, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh. He said, have mercy on those people too. They need to know the love of Christ. They need to know the truth of the gospel, but at the same time, you need to be aware of yourself and where you stand with God before you go into that.

He uses the word fear here. You need to be cautious. You need to be aware.

He talks about this garment defiled by the flesh, sin corrupts. And I hear all the time people say, well, Jesus, Jesus would have done this. Jesus would have done that when we had the last big debacle about marriage and the definition of marriage.

I heard people saying, Jesus would have baked the cake. I preached a message on that. Jesus would have baked the cake because he hung out with sinners.

Jesus spent time with sinners, but Jesus never, ever, ever, ever joined them in what they were doing that went against God’s standards, and he never affirmed them that. As a matter of fact, Jesus hung out with sinners, but he lovingly rebuked them. He lovingly called them to repent.

I don’t think you can get any more loving than Jesus telling the woman caught in adultery, neither do I condemn thee, after he had basically shamed and run off her accusers, telling her, I don’t condemn you either. But then he told her, go and sin 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Powered by atecplugins.com