Chapter 1: What does Jude's letter teach about contending for the faith?
A lot of people accuse Jude of just being heavy, of being absent of love, of being absent of grace. Well, to say that is just faulty and wrong. Jude is filled with the love and the grace of Christ and the hope of the gospel. But he's going to speak a hard word because he's concerned.
We cannot pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe and which parts we can reject. As others have said, it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian. And so today we continue our look into the book of Jude, a book filled with love, grace, and the hope of the gospel, yet with an urgent call to contend for the faith. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
It's good to have you with us. Well today, our guest teacher will consider perhaps the two most well-known verses in Jude.
Chapter 2: Why do some people criticize Jude's message?
Here's Jason Holopolis.
All right, we're going to look at verses 3 and 4. I promise we're not going to go through every single verse like this, but those first two set the tone for the book and letting them know who they are in Christ. And now 3 and 4, we're going to see the meat of what he's trying to get at. So I want to read those together as we work our way through them.
Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I find it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.
For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. He begins, if you'll note there in verse 3, he begins with a confession. This isn't what he wanted to write to them about. He says he wanted to write to them about our common salvation.
Chapter 3: What are the urgent concerns addressed in Jude's letter?
There were things that he wanted to write about, but this was the thing he felt like he needed to write to them about. As a preacher, there are some things I like to preach a lot more than other things in the Bible. I like to preach a good gospel narrative. Give me just Christ up front and that, that delights me as a preacher.
There are other texts that are a little harder to preach and have a hard word in them. and yet I still preach them. Why? Because it's necessary. It's necessary and he sees that there is necessity here. And a lot of people don't like the book of Jude for this reason.
Chapter 4: How do false teachers impact the church according to Jude?
It's not just that Jude is kind of tucked in there in our Bibles before you get to the exciting revelation that it gets looked over. It's not just because there's some odd things, as we're going to see as we get further in this book, that we're going to have to wrestle through. But a lot of people accuse Jude of just being heavy, of being absent of love, of being absent of grace.
Well, I think you only have to return back to our introduction in the first lesson or go to the end as we will see the benediction to say that that is just faulty and wrong. Jude is filled with the love and the grace of Christ and the hope of the gospel. But he's going to speak a hard word because he's concerned.
There's something that is before him that he is concerned for these churches that he is writing to. He feels compelled to write to them. In fact, this letter finds its entire reason in these two verses, in 3 and 4. My favorite city in the world is Edinburgh, Scotland.
Chapter 5: What does it mean to 'contend for the faith'?
Love Edinburgh. I feel like if you could take Chicago-style pizza and put it in Edinburgh, it becomes the best place in the universe, maybe. But I love Edinburgh because it's a clean city. There's a lot of things to do. It's the old and the new just kind of colliding there. And what I especially like is the old. I love to walk around the city and look at all the different architecture.
What I especially love is the history. And what I especially love about the history is the old Presbyterian history. And it seems like as you walk through old Scotland, you can't go a block, literally a block, without there being some massive stone old Presbyterian church on every corner, every one.
Chapter 6: What are the characteristics of ungodly teachers mentioned in Jude?
And I walk through Edinburgh and it just delights me because I can do it with a number of those churches where I can point at that church and I can, ah, this pastor served in that church back when. Or this missionary was sent out from that church back then. And it just delights me to think about that rich history. It also incredibly demoralizes me as I walk through Edinburgh.
Because most of those churches are no longer churches. They become community centers. They become non-profits. Some of them are just boarded up. And it didn't just happen. That's Jude's concern here.
Chapter 7: How does Jude emphasize the importance of safeguarding the faith?
That this could happen to these churches. He gives us the cause for his letter in verse 4, ungodly teachers teaching error. He gives us the purpose of the letter in verse 3, contend for the faith. And his overriding concern is he doesn't want these churches lost by this ungodly, false, heretical, divisive teaching. So let's walk through that.
His overriding concern is he doesn't want these churches lost. So let's consider the cause of this letter, ungodly teachers teaching error. They were doing two things. If you look there in verse four, they were perverting the grace of our God into sensuality. And second, they were denying Jesus Christ as master and Lord.
Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from Jude's warnings for today's church?
So first, they were perverting the grace of God into sensuality. That is, they were living as if there was no moral law for the Christian life. They were what we will call in theological circles antinomians. They were anti-namas, anti-against-namas the law. They were against the law. They believed because they had received the grace of Christ that they could live any way that they wanted to live.
We'll know that in the Christian life, the law leads us to grace, and the grace of Christ leads us back to the law. Not to earn favor with God now that we have the grace of Christ, but rather now because I have the grace of Christ, I could not fulfill the law, so I'm led to grace. I know that I can't do the things that God has prescribed for me. I have inability because of my fallenness in Adam.
And so I need grace. He has to call me because I'm beloved, right? And now that I am in that grace of Christ, now I'm led back to the law, desiring to live according to the law out of thanksgiving and praise and glory to him. And this, these false teachers, they were denying. And by doing this, they were denying the faith. Why? Because our faith requires living to the praise
It requires living to the glory of Christ. I'm a slave of Christ. My life is now about Christ. It is now to be lived as a living sacrifice to Christ. Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do to the glory of God, the apostle says. As Jude says here, this grace we have received is from our God. He's our God. And we're his people. I'm just not my own anymore.
And that may be especially why Jude begins the letter that way, slave of Jesus Christ. They see themselves as not only antinomians against the law, but they also see themselves as independent of Christ, as we're going to see. Jude is telling them this is false teaching of the deadliest kind. If you're saved by the grace of God, you're saved to live for God. Charles Spurgeon once said it this way.
He said, what the law demands of us, the gospel produces in us. Else ours is no gospel at all. And theirs was no gospel at all. Remember, when this first hit me, I was in college. I was a freshman. I went to university as an atheist, an avowed atheist, and was a very committed atheist. And I was invited by some Christian students to come to a Christian fellowship.
And I had promised a friend back home before I went off to school that fall that I would attend at one time. And she called a couple of upperclassmen who called me every single day for the first week of school and said, he promised me. And so they hounded me. But it was really the hound of heaven that had me in his eyes.
And so I finally, just to fulfill that promise, I went to this Christian fellowship and I sat there under the word. And it was a... A day that I was in a college dorm room, all the guys on my floor were together in this college dorm room. And I was feeling pretty good about myself this day because I had new red wing boots. Oh, they were lovely. Manly, lovely, manly, lovely.
And I loved them and was so proud to be wearing them. And a guy in that crowded room, he stomped on my boots. And jokingly, I pushed him. Well, he didn't receive it as a joke. And he turned around and he launched me across the room. And I turned around and I pulled back my arm with a fist, ready to clock him. And I heard all the guys in the room yell, punch him, punch him.
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