Nathan W. Bingham

If everyone hates you, you are a problem.

Don't be contentious.

You contend.

Again, notice Jude, he did not want to write as he wrote to them.

He didn't want to do this.

He wanted to write about, as he said in verse 3, our common salvation.

It was only because of the disruption that he saw in the churches that he felt like he needed to contend and to encourage them to contend.

He's not contentious for the faith.

He's contending for the faith.

It is godly, it is godly to be a reluctant fighter.

We only contend because we have to.

We are, as the Apostle Paul said, as far as it is possible to live at peace with all men, contending reluctantly but with no less resolve is godliness.

That's what it looks like.

I think back, some of the staunchest defenders of Christian truth through the ages have been marked by this.

They contend, but they're not contentious.

Some of my favorites are Old Princeton Theological Seminary.

when it was a faithful seminary and they were standing against liberalism in their day, and those old Princeton scholars and theologians, they contended for the faith, but they were reluctant to fight about everything.

I was reading a number of years ago, I was reading through all these different memorial addresses of some of these early men at Princeton.

So Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller, Charles Hodge, and on we could go.

And something kept jumping out to me as I was reading these memorials at their funerals, you know, the sermon that was read.