This one is more of a “meditation” (the fancy word for “light, short sermon”). I delivered it at our church on Harvest Holiday (in Russian, “prazdnik zhatvy”). Usually the Americans call it “Harvest Festival”, but “holiday” is actually closer to the meaning of the Russian, not to mention the fact that the conservative Ukrainian Baptists would hardly take a shine to some of the historical nuances of “festival”.... This is not a state holiday in Ukraine but a Baptist church tradition. (There is no Ukrainian “Thanksgiving Day” yet, though the way western influence has flooded in, I do not doubt that there will be, eventually. Even if only for an excuse to eat turkey.) Each church chooses a Sunday somewhere between late August and early October on which they will celebrate the harvest, with a big, beautiful display of the fruits of the earth, along with a huge loaf of bread and an equally huge Bible, in front of the pulpit. Traditionally, especially in the villages, the service is followed by a great big lunch, though in the city churches this is not quite as common. I have vivid memories of the cauldron being hauled out into the yard, after the service out in a village church, and loaded up with all the fixings for borsch, stirred over the fire. Great fun! Finally, on a more “technical” level, I admit ahead of time that my language here, regarding eternity and, in particular, my use of the past tense of the verb “to be”, is quite casual and inexact (it was a holiday, after all...). I say, for instance, that there “was a time” when God “was” simply life, i.e., before Creation. Of course, God is life now, not just “then” – and more to the point, before Creation there wasn't “a time” to speak of, anyway. But I chose for the purpose of this sermon simply to speak on a you-know-what-I-mean level. Therefore, I will trust that you know what I mean.
(Read Genesis 1:11, 12, then Genesis 1: 29-31)
God gave man the fruits of the earth for food. Now there’s two of the many things which didn’t exist before Creation: man, and food! We don’t think of that very often: not only was man non-existent before the Creation but so, obviously, was food! God didn’t need food, after all. Life existed perfectly in God with no need of support or sustenance. God is life, the source of His own life. But when God created living beings in a material creation, then there was need for food. Physical creatures needed physical support and sustenance. God is the source of His own life, but man is not the source of his own life. Man needed food.
But wait! Be careful! We will make a mistake if we think food is the source of our life. Life doesn’t come from the food we eat. Life uses the food we eat, but the life is already there in us. “Where?”, somebody asks. Ah, that’s a very good question. Where is “life”? The answer is, we don’t know! We see the outward effects of life, just as we see the leaves of the trees flutter in the wind, but we don’t see life itself, just as we don’t see the air that moves the leaves. And life is even more intangible than air, because we know that air is a mix of physical gasses, even if we can’t see them. We can feel air, we can put air into a bottle, we can examine it in a laboratory. Even air is matter. But life can’t be poured into a bottle or examined under a microscope. Yes, you can examine a living thing, like a spider or a person, but you can’t put life under a microscope. You can’t take life out of an animal, run your experiments on it, and then when you’re done with it put it back into the animal and say, “Thank you very much; you can run along and play now.” You can’t say what color life is, or what it smells like or what shape it is. You can’t go to the drugstore and say, “Give me a vial of life, please!” (though there are some companies that would like you to think so!). We can find stars and planets in the most distant corners of the universe, but we can’t find the life that exists inside each one of us.
As for food, it helps life, but it isn't life, not even the source of life. When Scripture says that God gave Adam life, it doesn’t say God gave him a spoonful of honey or a big glass of milk. No. God breathed life into Adam out of His very self; the essence of what makes God God, His life, became the essence of the creature made in God’s image. The source of our life is God. So, really, we can say that the source of our life is... Life! Because God is life. Just like the source of love is Love, because God is love.
Food is a wonderful and delightful gift from God, and He has given us many, many varieties of it. Most of us have favorite kinds of food. Some of us love carrots, some of us can’t stand carrots. But there is something we all have in common: we need food; we even “love” food. You know how people commonly talk: “I love pizza”, “I love ice cream”. We don’t all “love” the same foods, but each of “loves” some foods.
Now here’s an amazing paradox: on the one hand, our bodies cannot live without food; on the other hand, food isn't the source of our life! It’s almost illogical, but it’s true: we can’t live without food, but food doesn’t give us life. How do you explain that? Well, I think we might say that food helps our bodies to keep up with the life that’s in us. Adam had life before he had food, so obviously the food didn’t give him life. But food allowed Adam’s body to continue holding that life inside, and grow with that life. The life, though, came directly from God. There’s only one source of life.
This leads us to the following conclusion: life cannot life without life. I’ll say it again: life cannot live without life. There was life in Adam without food, but there was never life in Adam without God, who is life. That’s why I said “life cannot live without life.” It’s the same thing as saying “life cannot be without God”.
Now, for God, this is not a problem. He has always been the source of His own life. But for man this is a problem. We are not the source of our own life! And on the day when man sinned against God, God said, “You will die”. Death came in and interrupted the connection of life to life. Man cut himself off from the source.
Only if we understand this can we begin to grasp the magnificence in the words of Jesus Christ in John 6:32-40 (read).
These words make me think of four “times”. There was a time when God simply was life. Then there was a time when God gave life – to Adam. Then there was a time when God gave food to the living Adam and his children. But then, there was a time when the living God became “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” This is JESUS.
All the parts of this amazing story come together in Jesus Christ because he is the Bread of Life. Why is he the Bread of Life? He is the Bread of Life because he is God, the very source of life. He is the Bread of Life because he became man, so that our humanity might be saved by his humanity. He is the Bread of Life because he dwells in the hearts of his people, nourishes and sustains them with his own self. He is the Bread of Life because he satisfies the deepest need of the soul: our hunger for the love of God. Jesus says, “No one who comes to me will I cast away.” God’s perfect love radiates through these words. The love that filled the life of God in eternity expresses itself on the lips of Jesus: “I will not cast away anyone who comes to me.”
Jesus is the Bread of Life because true life can exist only in perfect harmony with God’s will. Remember, death came in the Garden when man rejected God’s will. But the Bread of Life says, “I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.” Perfect harmony. And what is this will? “The will of the Father who sent me is that I lose nothing of what He has given me but raise it up on the last day. The will of the one who sent me is that whoever sees the Son and believes in him, will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life because he gave something physical, something earthly and material in order to save us: he gave his body, his life: “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread I give is my flesh, which I will surrender for the life of the world. (6:51)” He gave physical “food” for our spiritual life. Jesus’ body and blood became the saving food of life. As Jesus says further: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. (vv.54-55)”
At the beginning I pointed out an interesting paradox, that our life depends on food but food doesn’t give us life! But now, when we speak about the Bread of Life, the paradox evaporates like mist in the sun. There’s no more paradox, because now the source and the food are one. The living Bread is both the food of our life and the source of our life. This is Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life – who has life in himself because he is from the Father who has life in himself. And Jesus promises that whoever takes this life, this bread, this food for the human soul, will have life forever, in God and God’s love.
For God loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Titus: Three Mountain Peaks
This sermon started out as a valiant attempt to cover the whole epistle at once. I quickly realized that was too tall an order. In the process, however, I was deeply impressed by three glorious “peaks” in the epistle, where Paul zooms out to view the whole marvelous picture, and it was quite a curious thing how the same word showed up on each “peak”....
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
From Jude, in Light of the Emergency
It’s not often we get a single sermon covering an entire epistle. But when the epistle is only 25 verses long, that’s not such a tall order. Yes, of course, it would be quite possible to do a “sermon series” even on a short epistle like “Jude”, pulling each verse apart concept by concept, syllable by syllable, drawing all sorts of extrapolations and scriptural cross-references (not to mention a colorful and preacherly illustration or two). I feel, however, that that sort of thing is done so much that we actually lose something of profound worth. We lose the good, clean, solid punch of the particular, unique idea of a single epistle, the way it would have hit the first hearers when it was read out loud to them (all at once, not over a year). The problem with the sermon-series-approach to working-through-an-epistle is this: after a church has spent a year or two on, say, Ephesians, and the church folks are marveling over how the pastor could “get so much out of it”, if you ask the church folks, “So... tell me what Ephesians is about!”, you may get blank stares in return. “About?” Well, it’s “about” everything the pastor talked about for the last two years, of course, which was... pretty much everything. Problem with that is, when something is about everything, it tends to be about nothing in particular. And an epistle actually tends to be about something in particular. This is why I enjoy preaching epistles in large chunks – if it’s a short epistle, then the whole thing in one sermon. If it’s a long one like Romans, then at least a chapter at a time, to really try and encapsulate the key idea or two the apostle was working out. By the way, I will post a series of sermons I delivered on Romans here a bit later, where I take this approach.
(Begin by reading the whole epistle of Jude.)
Jude wanted to write the believers about the holy faith “delivered once and for all to the saints”. That is, his initial plan was just to write and teach them about the truths of the faith, perhaps to write about Jesus’ atoning death and about the resurrection, perhaps about the Holy Spirit, maybe about the second coming of Christ and the coming judgment. But here is the fascinating thing: something changed Jude’s plans. He changed his mind. Why?
Jude recognizes a grave danger in the church, and feels compelled to address it, to deal with it. So he devotes this whole letter to the problem. What is the problem? It is people inside the Church who are distorting and denying the gospel by their teaching and their lifestyle. They show no real repentance or faith, and their main goal seems to be to recruit admiration clubs around themselves. In short, they have never understood that the Church is the Lord’s. They think of the Church as their own private little playground.
Jude attacks this problem by giving the believers a quick history lesson, reminding them that all this is nothing new. God has always known about these people, He always judged such people in the past, and He told us through the prophets that such people would arise in the end times. Jude goes on to say that we who truly devote ourselves to Jesus Christ must beware of such people – yes, certainly, pray and hope for their salvation, but also be careful. And the best response to the danger they pose is to purify ourselves and live in the true power of the Holy Spirit, with overflowing confidence that God is going to perfectly complete His eternal plan for us in Christ. Which reminds me of the apostle Paul’s words: (Philippians 1:6) “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” The lesson in Jude is that the antidote to spiritual corruption in the Church is not timidity or denial. The only antidote is the “the most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints” – the very faith Jude originally wanted to write about. That faith is the victory over every lie and temptation.
Jude was probably a brother of Jesus – that is, one of Joseph and Mary’s children. If so, consider how meaningful the first few words of this letter are: “Jude – brother of James, slave of Christ.” In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, his brothers and sisters didn’t believe in him, and now, here, Jude calls himself a slave of Christ. Consider the spiritual earthquake that had to happen in Jude’s life for him to recognize who Jesus really was. Just think about the total transformation God brought into Jude’s life, and how much that meant to him. If you can grasp that, it will help you understand, too, why Jude was so furious over seeing the real meaning of Jesus get manipulated and distorted in the Church.
It’s precisely because of how deeply Jude treasures this Church that he starts by addressing the “called”. “Called”! Believers are the “called” of Jesus Christ: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” What great comfort that must have meant for Jude: the assurance of God’s calling, of God’s choosing, of God’s love graciously poured out, as life’s bedrock reality. How important it was for Jude, then, that believers should really understand the meaning of this calling, and have the joy of living it out.
Remember that at that time the Church didn’t use the word “Christian”; they had to refer to themselves, as a group, with other words. We read these words in scripture: such words as “saints”, “brothers and sisters” and “the called”. These words tell us something about how they saw themselves and how they grasped God’s work of salvation. Now as for us, we often refer to ourselves as believers or Christians. But how often do we call ourselves “the called”? It’s worth meditating over, because that’s what we are! It’s both a high honor and a high responsibility. There is no greater love than the love God shows by calling us and giving us life in His Son. There is no higher calling than to serve Him.
Some people learn from their mistakes; others simply repeat them or even make them worse. Obviously, Jude is not going to repeat his mistake of disbelief. He is going to fight for the faith, for the truth that was revealed in Christ. And his letter makes it clear that he means we all should be joining this spiritual battle to defend the purity of the truth. That’s also what it means to be called.
Jude first planned to write a “teaching letter”, but it turned more into a “warning letter”. Nevertheless, Jude hasn’t completely abandoned his teaching instincts. He gives the readers a history lesson in the sorts of sins that are now raising their ugly heads in the Church.
The sin of disbelief was an old story with plenty of examples. Jude reminds the Church about the generation of Israelites who never made it to the promised land because of disbelief. The sin of pride is even older; Jude reminds them of the angels who refused to be content with their assigned place in God’s order. Jude ironically uses the same verb “keep” twice: the angels refused to “keep” the place God made them for; therefore, God is now “keeping” them in a place they weren't made for. It reminds us that God’s judgment is righteous. It is not God who rejects people or angels; it is they who reject God. Finally, in this terrible trio of sins, Jude reminds the Church about Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin of sexual immorality and how the fire from the sky foreshadowed the eternal fire of judgment on sin.
So this is the “terrible trio” Jude is compelled to warn the Church about, precisely because he has gotten wind of the fact that there’s some sort of group going around in the Church acting like these are perfectly acceptable: disbelief, pride, sexual immorality. If Jude were simply warning the Church that such things can be found in the world, it wouldn’t surprise us in the least. But he’s talking about people who have joined the Church and are spreading this among believers! This is what’s so horrifying, almost unbelievable, to Jude the slave of Christ.
To make the point even stronger, Jude contrasts these people with the great archangel Michael who, if anybody might be excused for acting high and mighty, perhaps Michael the Archangel could. But even Michael kept his place. Knew his place. Loved his place in God’s glorious plan. Never showed arrogance, faithfully followed God’s perfect will.
“But these”, Jude says, “but these”; in your English Bible it may say, “But these men” or “But these people”, but actually in the original Jude didn’t even waste that many words on them: he just says, “But these...”. These are dreamers, living in a world of fantasy, puffing themselves up with imagined spiritual power. There’s a lot of this around us today, too. You only need to turn on your television to watch it. Their great boast is that they have the Spirit of God and can do many miracles, and they’ll even send you a miracle in the mail as an expression of gratitude for your “love gift”. These boast about the way that they exercise power over the devil and demons. Instead of genuine faith in the person Jesus, they sell the name of Jesus like a magic amulet guaranteed to protect you from everything bad. The concept seems to be that the louder you shout it, the better it works.
I have noticed that such people often lose the ability to think coherently. They don’t even seem to believe they should think. Instead, it’s like they really believe their heads should be constantly buzzing with direct verbal transmissions from the Spirit, which leaves no room for anything so “unspiritual” as thinking, of course. And I’m sure you see what that leads to: if you disagree with such a person, he’ll tell you you’re disagreeing with God. After all, all his thoughts are God’s thoughts. So how can he be wrong? What a horrible state for any person to come to. He is a danger to the weak, the naïve and trusting and, even more, he is his own worst enemy, because he believes every lie he tells himself... since he thinks it’s all coming from God.
Jude gives the Church several illustrations of this kind of person: There was Cain, who wasn’t content with second place; it had to be his way or no way. There was Balaam, who was willing to sell “ministry” to the highest bidder, promising to “loose” the power of the spirit world any way he wanted. There was Korah, who decided with his friends that nobody had a right to authority that they couldn’t have, and that Truth was defined by opinion poll. You could call Korah a very early post-modernist!
Jude gives a few more illustrations: these people are like shepherds who feed only themselves; picture the poor flock of hungry, distressed, helpless sheep, watching the shepherds feed themselves! If those poor sheep really understood, then they would know these shepherds have nothing to give them.
We, however, are not literally sheep; God has given us understanding – yes, even the mind of Christ. So Jude calls us to exercise intelligent discernment regarding such people. They are empty clouds blown by the wind. They are blown along by the wind of their own caprice, their own fantasy, saying it is all from the Lord, but there is nothing substantial in it, nothing that can truly nourish the soul. They are like fruitless and rootless trees. Their so-called fruit is false: it is not from God. If you dig deeper, you discover they have no roots: no faith, no relationship with Christ, no obedience. Though they may present an image of great spirituality, though their faces may seem to radiate peace and joy, on the inside they are actually like roaring ocean waves in a storm or like wandering stars that have no home.
Though they are spiritually fruitless, they do bear a certain fruit, a particular concrete result, in the Church: division. Division begins when such people start distinguishing between the so-called spiritual and the so-called unspiritual in the church. Not surprisingly, the “spiritual” are the ones who agree with them. Which is really amazing because, as Jude says, “They are devoid of the Spirit.” When this game starts in a church, it is like a cancer; if it is not removed, it will destroy a church.
So what is the answer? What measures must the Church take to see that this sort of disease doesn’t take root? Start an Inquisition? Hunt for heretics? No. Jude says, “Build yourselves up.” Build ourselves up in what? In joy? In power? In worship? No. Build yourselves up “on your most holy faith.” It goes right back to the first sentences of Jude’s letter: he wants the believers to stand up for the true, pure faith which was “once delivered to the saints”. In the NT, “the faith” is, before all else, the central historical message about Christ which was preached by the apostles – the message of God’s great act and the saving power of that message. “The faith” is also the way of life that grows out of new birth in Christ – a life formed by holiness, love, self-control, humility, wisdom and faithfulness to the scriptures. Jude calls this faith “most holy” and it is holy because it is faith in God’s “holy servant Jesus.” Christians build themselves up by having fellowship with the Lord and his people, by adhering to the gospel and the Word of God, and by worship in spirit and truth – especially by remembering the Lord at his table. This is the way of life which shows who belongs to Jesus Christ.
Now, to some that sounds dry and uninteresting, even unspiritual. Where are the fireworks? Where’s all the shouting and jumping? How do you show your spirituality? I have to ask: why is that spirituality? It looks physical to me. What makes it “spiritual”? I’ve seen people act that way at football games; does that make them spiritual? Please don’t misunderstand me: I have nothing against joy or emotion. But we make a big mistake when we equate outward, visible manifestations with spirituality. Such spirituality is too easy to fake. Jude doesn’t say “build yourselves up in spirituality”; he says “build yourselves up on the most holy faith.” It is the faith that will make you spiritual in the truest way.
A key element in building ourselves up in this most holy faith, Jude say, is to pray in the Spirit. How do we do that? Well, I think the testimony of the New Testament is clear and unambiguous: we pray in the Spirit when we pray from a heart of faith that yearns only for Christ’s exaltation. We pray in faith in the name of Jesus; we pray out of the same whole, childlike faith in which we first invited Christ into our hearts. We pray in the same faith by which we received baptism, when we confessed Christ before the world as our Lord and Savior. We pray in the same faith we have when we receive communion, remembering the body and blood of the Lord. The prayer of faith in Christ is prayer in the Spirit. Such prayer will not often accompanied by ecstatic feelings or supernatural manifestations. Often, it will be difficult and require perseverance. It will always, always require faith. And it will always reach the throne of God.
I began by saying how Jude wanted to write the believers about this most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints, and how it turned instead into an “emergency letter”. I mentioned that the emergency was the great danger Jude saw in the Church – the invasion of disbelief, pride, immorality – and also how Jude started off by reminding the believers that God saw everything beforehand, how it was all an old story already. Well, now at the close of this letter, Jude says it again: this was all predicted; none of this throws God’s plan off-kilter; you just hold on to the most holy faith, to the glorious expectation of Jesus’ coming and his total victory, and you'll be all right! Just hold on. You don’t have to fix everything; you only need to hold on to the One Who does.
That’s what makes this most holy faith so glorious. That’s what makes this good news so great. It is great and glorious news not just about what God has done, perfectly, wonderfully for us in the past. No, it’s news and a faith that swallows up our whole past, present and future in one single sweep in absolutely perfect completeness. The “good news” isn’t only that “Jesus died for your sins on the cross and rose from the dead”. The good news is also that He’s coming again with victory in his hand, that our life is hidden and kept in Him to the very end – and the very end will be a beginning, in Jesus, that never, ever ends again. Such grace, such perfect-ness and absoluteness of hope! Cain, Balaam and Korah couldn’t grasp grace like that; their pride wouldn’t let them. Same thing with their partners in disbelief in the days of Jude and the early church.
When you can’t grasp grace, you’ll grasp something else: pride, immorality. But when you can grasp and embrace God’s grace, and gaze in awe at the glory of Jesus’ salvation, then the Cains, Balaams and Korahs in the world will never defeat you, and they will never defeat the Church.
“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”
(Begin by reading the whole epistle of Jude.)
Jude wanted to write the believers about the holy faith “delivered once and for all to the saints”. That is, his initial plan was just to write and teach them about the truths of the faith, perhaps to write about Jesus’ atoning death and about the resurrection, perhaps about the Holy Spirit, maybe about the second coming of Christ and the coming judgment. But here is the fascinating thing: something changed Jude’s plans. He changed his mind. Why?
Jude recognizes a grave danger in the church, and feels compelled to address it, to deal with it. So he devotes this whole letter to the problem. What is the problem? It is people inside the Church who are distorting and denying the gospel by their teaching and their lifestyle. They show no real repentance or faith, and their main goal seems to be to recruit admiration clubs around themselves. In short, they have never understood that the Church is the Lord’s. They think of the Church as their own private little playground.
Jude attacks this problem by giving the believers a quick history lesson, reminding them that all this is nothing new. God has always known about these people, He always judged such people in the past, and He told us through the prophets that such people would arise in the end times. Jude goes on to say that we who truly devote ourselves to Jesus Christ must beware of such people – yes, certainly, pray and hope for their salvation, but also be careful. And the best response to the danger they pose is to purify ourselves and live in the true power of the Holy Spirit, with overflowing confidence that God is going to perfectly complete His eternal plan for us in Christ. Which reminds me of the apostle Paul’s words: (Philippians 1:6) “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” The lesson in Jude is that the antidote to spiritual corruption in the Church is not timidity or denial. The only antidote is the “the most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints” – the very faith Jude originally wanted to write about. That faith is the victory over every lie and temptation.
Jude was probably a brother of Jesus – that is, one of Joseph and Mary’s children. If so, consider how meaningful the first few words of this letter are: “Jude – brother of James, slave of Christ.” In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, his brothers and sisters didn’t believe in him, and now, here, Jude calls himself a slave of Christ. Consider the spiritual earthquake that had to happen in Jude’s life for him to recognize who Jesus really was. Just think about the total transformation God brought into Jude’s life, and how much that meant to him. If you can grasp that, it will help you understand, too, why Jude was so furious over seeing the real meaning of Jesus get manipulated and distorted in the Church.
It’s precisely because of how deeply Jude treasures this Church that he starts by addressing the “called”. “Called”! Believers are the “called” of Jesus Christ: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” What great comfort that must have meant for Jude: the assurance of God’s calling, of God’s choosing, of God’s love graciously poured out, as life’s bedrock reality. How important it was for Jude, then, that believers should really understand the meaning of this calling, and have the joy of living it out.
Remember that at that time the Church didn’t use the word “Christian”; they had to refer to themselves, as a group, with other words. We read these words in scripture: such words as “saints”, “brothers and sisters” and “the called”. These words tell us something about how they saw themselves and how they grasped God’s work of salvation. Now as for us, we often refer to ourselves as believers or Christians. But how often do we call ourselves “the called”? It’s worth meditating over, because that’s what we are! It’s both a high honor and a high responsibility. There is no greater love than the love God shows by calling us and giving us life in His Son. There is no higher calling than to serve Him.
Some people learn from their mistakes; others simply repeat them or even make them worse. Obviously, Jude is not going to repeat his mistake of disbelief. He is going to fight for the faith, for the truth that was revealed in Christ. And his letter makes it clear that he means we all should be joining this spiritual battle to defend the purity of the truth. That’s also what it means to be called.
Jude first planned to write a “teaching letter”, but it turned more into a “warning letter”. Nevertheless, Jude hasn’t completely abandoned his teaching instincts. He gives the readers a history lesson in the sorts of sins that are now raising their ugly heads in the Church.
The sin of disbelief was an old story with plenty of examples. Jude reminds the Church about the generation of Israelites who never made it to the promised land because of disbelief. The sin of pride is even older; Jude reminds them of the angels who refused to be content with their assigned place in God’s order. Jude ironically uses the same verb “keep” twice: the angels refused to “keep” the place God made them for; therefore, God is now “keeping” them in a place they weren't made for. It reminds us that God’s judgment is righteous. It is not God who rejects people or angels; it is they who reject God. Finally, in this terrible trio of sins, Jude reminds the Church about Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin of sexual immorality and how the fire from the sky foreshadowed the eternal fire of judgment on sin.
So this is the “terrible trio” Jude is compelled to warn the Church about, precisely because he has gotten wind of the fact that there’s some sort of group going around in the Church acting like these are perfectly acceptable: disbelief, pride, sexual immorality. If Jude were simply warning the Church that such things can be found in the world, it wouldn’t surprise us in the least. But he’s talking about people who have joined the Church and are spreading this among believers! This is what’s so horrifying, almost unbelievable, to Jude the slave of Christ.
To make the point even stronger, Jude contrasts these people with the great archangel Michael who, if anybody might be excused for acting high and mighty, perhaps Michael the Archangel could. But even Michael kept his place. Knew his place. Loved his place in God’s glorious plan. Never showed arrogance, faithfully followed God’s perfect will.
“But these”, Jude says, “but these”; in your English Bible it may say, “But these men” or “But these people”, but actually in the original Jude didn’t even waste that many words on them: he just says, “But these...”. These are dreamers, living in a world of fantasy, puffing themselves up with imagined spiritual power. There’s a lot of this around us today, too. You only need to turn on your television to watch it. Their great boast is that they have the Spirit of God and can do many miracles, and they’ll even send you a miracle in the mail as an expression of gratitude for your “love gift”. These boast about the way that they exercise power over the devil and demons. Instead of genuine faith in the person Jesus, they sell the name of Jesus like a magic amulet guaranteed to protect you from everything bad. The concept seems to be that the louder you shout it, the better it works.
I have noticed that such people often lose the ability to think coherently. They don’t even seem to believe they should think. Instead, it’s like they really believe their heads should be constantly buzzing with direct verbal transmissions from the Spirit, which leaves no room for anything so “unspiritual” as thinking, of course. And I’m sure you see what that leads to: if you disagree with such a person, he’ll tell you you’re disagreeing with God. After all, all his thoughts are God’s thoughts. So how can he be wrong? What a horrible state for any person to come to. He is a danger to the weak, the naïve and trusting and, even more, he is his own worst enemy, because he believes every lie he tells himself... since he thinks it’s all coming from God.
Jude gives the Church several illustrations of this kind of person: There was Cain, who wasn’t content with second place; it had to be his way or no way. There was Balaam, who was willing to sell “ministry” to the highest bidder, promising to “loose” the power of the spirit world any way he wanted. There was Korah, who decided with his friends that nobody had a right to authority that they couldn’t have, and that Truth was defined by opinion poll. You could call Korah a very early post-modernist!
Jude gives a few more illustrations: these people are like shepherds who feed only themselves; picture the poor flock of hungry, distressed, helpless sheep, watching the shepherds feed themselves! If those poor sheep really understood, then they would know these shepherds have nothing to give them.
We, however, are not literally sheep; God has given us understanding – yes, even the mind of Christ. So Jude calls us to exercise intelligent discernment regarding such people. They are empty clouds blown by the wind. They are blown along by the wind of their own caprice, their own fantasy, saying it is all from the Lord, but there is nothing substantial in it, nothing that can truly nourish the soul. They are like fruitless and rootless trees. Their so-called fruit is false: it is not from God. If you dig deeper, you discover they have no roots: no faith, no relationship with Christ, no obedience. Though they may present an image of great spirituality, though their faces may seem to radiate peace and joy, on the inside they are actually like roaring ocean waves in a storm or like wandering stars that have no home.
Though they are spiritually fruitless, they do bear a certain fruit, a particular concrete result, in the Church: division. Division begins when such people start distinguishing between the so-called spiritual and the so-called unspiritual in the church. Not surprisingly, the “spiritual” are the ones who agree with them. Which is really amazing because, as Jude says, “They are devoid of the Spirit.” When this game starts in a church, it is like a cancer; if it is not removed, it will destroy a church.
So what is the answer? What measures must the Church take to see that this sort of disease doesn’t take root? Start an Inquisition? Hunt for heretics? No. Jude says, “Build yourselves up.” Build ourselves up in what? In joy? In power? In worship? No. Build yourselves up “on your most holy faith.” It goes right back to the first sentences of Jude’s letter: he wants the believers to stand up for the true, pure faith which was “once delivered to the saints”. In the NT, “the faith” is, before all else, the central historical message about Christ which was preached by the apostles – the message of God’s great act and the saving power of that message. “The faith” is also the way of life that grows out of new birth in Christ – a life formed by holiness, love, self-control, humility, wisdom and faithfulness to the scriptures. Jude calls this faith “most holy” and it is holy because it is faith in God’s “holy servant Jesus.” Christians build themselves up by having fellowship with the Lord and his people, by adhering to the gospel and the Word of God, and by worship in spirit and truth – especially by remembering the Lord at his table. This is the way of life which shows who belongs to Jesus Christ.
Now, to some that sounds dry and uninteresting, even unspiritual. Where are the fireworks? Where’s all the shouting and jumping? How do you show your spirituality? I have to ask: why is that spirituality? It looks physical to me. What makes it “spiritual”? I’ve seen people act that way at football games; does that make them spiritual? Please don’t misunderstand me: I have nothing against joy or emotion. But we make a big mistake when we equate outward, visible manifestations with spirituality. Such spirituality is too easy to fake. Jude doesn’t say “build yourselves up in spirituality”; he says “build yourselves up on the most holy faith.” It is the faith that will make you spiritual in the truest way.
A key element in building ourselves up in this most holy faith, Jude say, is to pray in the Spirit. How do we do that? Well, I think the testimony of the New Testament is clear and unambiguous: we pray in the Spirit when we pray from a heart of faith that yearns only for Christ’s exaltation. We pray in faith in the name of Jesus; we pray out of the same whole, childlike faith in which we first invited Christ into our hearts. We pray in the same faith by which we received baptism, when we confessed Christ before the world as our Lord and Savior. We pray in the same faith we have when we receive communion, remembering the body and blood of the Lord. The prayer of faith in Christ is prayer in the Spirit. Such prayer will not often accompanied by ecstatic feelings or supernatural manifestations. Often, it will be difficult and require perseverance. It will always, always require faith. And it will always reach the throne of God.
I began by saying how Jude wanted to write the believers about this most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints, and how it turned instead into an “emergency letter”. I mentioned that the emergency was the great danger Jude saw in the Church – the invasion of disbelief, pride, immorality – and also how Jude started off by reminding the believers that God saw everything beforehand, how it was all an old story already. Well, now at the close of this letter, Jude says it again: this was all predicted; none of this throws God’s plan off-kilter; you just hold on to the most holy faith, to the glorious expectation of Jesus’ coming and his total victory, and you'll be all right! Just hold on. You don’t have to fix everything; you only need to hold on to the One Who does.
That’s what makes this most holy faith so glorious. That’s what makes this good news so great. It is great and glorious news not just about what God has done, perfectly, wonderfully for us in the past. No, it’s news and a faith that swallows up our whole past, present and future in one single sweep in absolutely perfect completeness. The “good news” isn’t only that “Jesus died for your sins on the cross and rose from the dead”. The good news is also that He’s coming again with victory in his hand, that our life is hidden and kept in Him to the very end – and the very end will be a beginning, in Jesus, that never, ever ends again. Such grace, such perfect-ness and absoluteness of hope! Cain, Balaam and Korah couldn’t grasp grace like that; their pride wouldn’t let them. Same thing with their partners in disbelief in the days of Jude and the early church.
When you can’t grasp grace, you’ll grasp something else: pride, immorality. But when you can grasp and embrace God’s grace, and gaze in awe at the glory of Jesus’ salvation, then the Cains, Balaams and Korahs in the world will never defeat you, and they will never defeat the Church.
“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”
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