Jude

Jude is a dynamic and jam packed letter calling for believers to "contend for the faith"! This book might of well been written in 2020 as there are many similarities between his context and ours. Let's discuss the words of Jude and his encouragement to move from sensuality to sanctification!

@klarckorver
@bobbiekorver

@erclosangeles
www.erc.la
info@erc.la

Transcript

What's up everyone, welcome to the Wake Before the Day podcast. This is Klarc and Bobbie Jean, so glad you're here. Let's get started.

Hello everyone, thanks for hopping on the podcast today. Today we are looking at Jude, and Jude is only one chapter.

I was gonna tell a joke.

Let's give it to us.

No, I was gonna say like, oh yeah, chapter two is so good. Just one chapter, you guys. I thought it was gonna be funny.

All right, Jude chapter one. The whole premise of this chapter is around people taking advantage of God's grace and setting aside God's authority. Like, yeah God, you know I want you to be kind to me, forgive me, be merciful, but when it comes to me obeying all your commandments and your rules, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing and doing what I want. And so really, this applies to my heart. It applies to your heart. There's a little bit of this in all of us where we're like, I kind of want to just do what I want. I don't know if I always want to submit to you in your ways, Lord, but we believe that God and His way are best. Jude is throwing heavy words out in this chapter like "contend" and naming serious sin, and it's a battle. It feels like you're in the middle of a battle, and so we'll dive in and look at it. But yeah, Bob, what would you want to add as we look to kick off? If anything at all?

Yeah, I think let's just jump in. If you've read a little bit about the preemptive stuff about the book of Jude, it's kind of will say that Jude was excited to share in the gospel with them. This is some of the little background stuff that I read. But before he could really get to this exciting part, he felt like he needed to address more of the serious side of things with some false teaching that was being spread around. I love what it says in the message version. I think this is the end of verse 4. When he's talking about what's going on in this community, he says their design is to replace the sheer grace of our God with sheer license. Like, oh, we're able to do these things because of grace, we can do these things. No, which means doing away with Jesus Christ, our one and only master. And so I like that language too. Sometimes we don't want to say that Jesus Christ is our Lord or our Master. We want him to be our friend and we want him to have died on the cross and rose again for us so that we can have eternal life, but we don't want him to be Lord over our life right now. I am good enough at doing that, I can be in charge of myself. I just like what Jude is offering here to this body, but then also the Holy Spirit's giving it to us today too, saying no, let's get back to the basics here and let's get back to handing ourselves over to the Lord.

Yeah, and what Jude's getting at is we have personal encounters with God's grace that does not give us freedom to simply do what we want, when we want, how we want. A tagline from this chapter could be that God's saving us from sensuality and desanctification—sensuality being promiscuity and most often sexual sin. So who is Jude contending against here? Well, if you look at verse 4, it reads, "For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ as our sovereign Lord." If you keep going to verse 6, it talks about how angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling are kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day, referring to Jesus Christ's return and the judgment. Hopping up to verse 8, it talks about how in the same way these people, relying on their dreams, pollute their own bodies, reject authority, and heap abuse on celestial beings. Verse 7 right before that talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to homosexuality, homosexual acts being sin, and that's who Jude is going against. Then also verses 18 and 19 say, "In the last times there will be scoffers who follow their own ungodly desires. These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit." So it's kind of a laundry list of people that Jude's duking it out with.

At the heart of it here, when it comes to God's grace, one of the things that sometimes as American Christians we miss out on is that when you enter into a relationship with Jesus, He requires meaningful change. Bobbie, you always have a line that you've said to me that I think is very helpful. You took it from somebody else or maybe it was your own brain. Either way, it's really helpful. We've heard it said before, "Come as you are, but don't stay as you are." There might be some pushback even in your heart a little bit, might be a trigger word for you there. You know, like, no, Jesus loves me just as I am, and that's a hundred percent true. Romans says that while we're still sinning, Jesus died on the cross for us. At the same time, while we're in relationship with Him, there's also this calling that He invites us into that we actually get to be transformed into His likeness. We're not conformed to the pattern of the world, we're transformed. We have this ability to renew our minds in Christ, and so in that, you are literally changed as you follow, step by step. It's this beautiful picture of what we get to do in relationship with Jesus, not one day in heaven, but actually today, right here, right now, on earth.

When you look at how the chapter's broken down, verses 5 to 16 talk about the challenge Jude's having when it comes to speaking the truth, focusing on Jesus Christ's death, resurrection, ascension, and then verses 17 to 23 talk about how we can contend for the faith. I just want to stop for a moment because in it, he references this dude named Enoch and it's caused some confusion. So I want to pause just for a moment and ask who is Enoch, why is Jude referencing him, and what's he got to do with what's going on?

This Enoch that they're talking about is the seventh guy in Adam's genealogy. So Enoch's the seventh guy, you go back to Genesis, it's talking about him. I can read this straight out of the study Bible. He's quoting a quotation from the book of Enoch which purports to have been written by Enoch of Genesis 5 but actually doesn't appear until the first century BC. The book of Enoch was well respected in New Testament times. It was not canonical, meaning it wasn't part of the canon at the time contained in the Bible, but that does not mean it didn't contain any truth. Nor does Jude's quotation of the book mean that he considered it to be inspired. So when he's referencing other literature at that time, it's like me preaching my sermon this Sunday. I referenced an article from Psychology Today and from CNBC talking about how psychologists have found what they think is a legitimate genetic code that leads some people to happiness and other people not. Not saying I agree with that, but I'm referencing it as another reference point, another article to help make my case and point. That's simply what Jude's doing as he's writing. He's looking at other writers and seeing what they're saying and how does it help his message here.

So I guess how we want to end today is just asking ourselves what does it look like to actually contend for the faith? We could all agree that while we look around, there's all kinds of stuff on the news, stuff we're bumping into, maybe stuff you're even battling in your own thoughts, your theology, your understanding of God, His grace, His truth, what relationships look like. So Bob, what does it look like for us to contend for the faith?

I'm just gonna read verses 21, 22, and 23: "Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to others show mercy, mixed with fear, hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh."

So what does it look like to contend? What's the first thing I see you take away? Verse 21: Keep yourselves in God's love. One way that we know we show God's love is by obeying His commands. But anyway, before we even get to the rest of it, keeping ourselves in God's love is one of the most beautiful and also sometimes difficult things that we can do because there is this initiative. Whether it's sitting down and reading your Bible, or maybe it's just sitting down to be quiet, maybe it's meditating, maybe it's fasting, maybe it's—I'm not sure. Those are often referred to as spiritual disciplines because they're just helpful things that we can do to remind us and bring us back to center with who God is and what He's done in our lives. I do think that that is like, oh my goodness, how can we abide? How? Figure that out for you because before you can love anybody else well, you need to be able to receive God's love, new mercies every day. So for sure, yeah, that spoke to me. I feel like verse 21, for sure.

Verse 22: Be merciful to those who doubt. I think that's a different kind of contending. Sometimes, you know, you think contending, like Klarc says, this picture of boxing or fighting. Being merciful, being kind