Good morning church family. I want to invite you to turn with me this morning to the book of Jude and we're going to read basically the entire letter. We're not going to read it all at once. We're going to work through the text of Jude together this morning. For the last several weeks on Wednesday nights, Pastor Jeff has been taking us through a biblical critique of critical theory. And it's my understanding that Michael Seawald is going to be adding a contribution to that as well here in the near future. And I'm not really planning to talk so much about critical theory this morning. I want to deal with maybe an issue that's a little bit further reaching or more permeant in the church. But I think the reason it's been so important and so encouraging and helpful for Jeff to go through this study with us has been because critical theory faces us as one of the heresies of our own time, one of the false gospels of our own day. And so when we look at our place in the history of the church and our moment, we're going to see that this is one of the false teachings that we had to combat. So it's been helpful to have the wisdom and the insight of Jeff teaching on that. It's going to be great to have Michael contribute to that as well. Something I would mention parenthetically that we are unusually blessed with in this church are pastors who love the Word of God, who are committed to the Word of God for Brother Tommy Walls and for Danny Thursby and Drew Hargrave as well. We have a remarkable group of men here who by God's grace consistently give us truth. Now we've been confronted the last few weeks with critical theory. So what we've been confronted with is a false teaching. But you know and I know that critical theory is only one of many false teachings that permeate the church. Right now in evangelical churches, even some of the largest Protestant denominations, battles are being raged and splits are inevitable over the ordination of women to pastoral ministry and the ordination of homosexual clergy to pastoral ministry. There seems to be this irresistible temptation of churches to replace the biblical gospel with a man-centered gospel. that aspires to man's achievement, that wants him to feel content and fulfilled and successful as the highest aim in life. And so in this gospel that is man-centered, the villain is discontentment, the villain is suffering, and the hero of the story is man when he finds contentment or when he finds enlightenment. We're faced with these kinds of teachings and the presence of false teachers, the presence of bad doctrine in our churches. And I know that for you and for myself, this can be discouraging because we look around and we're constantly confronted with, Lord, how am I supposed to live? as a faithful, godly husband, or wife, or father, or mother, or child. How am I supposed to live in this world where I'm one of just a handful of people that are still committed to you? We have Elijah syndrome. We say, Lord, I'm the only one left. There's no one else but me. I'm the father of two young girls. Don't think that I don't spend nights thinking about where in the world are these girls going to find two godly men to marry them. to minister to them, to someday raise my grandchildren and to perpetuate the faith. I think we all share that. I think we all have this tepidation because we see ourselves as something of an isolated group of people and we're disconnected from a culture that's very different from us. And here, again by God's grace, we're somewhat disconnected from the raging wildfires that are bad theology and poor doctrine and false teachers that have infiltrated the church. It's for that reason that I wanted to turn to the book of Jude this morning. It was barely 30, maybe 40 years since Jesus had died and been raised from the dead that Jude wrote his letter. And already in that short amount of time, while there were still people walking on the earth who had seen the resurrected Jesus, the church was being infiltrated by false teachers. It was being infiltrated by people who had selfish desires, who had motivations that were antithetical to the glory of God. Instead, they wanted to promote self. And so they had found something of a soft target in these young churches, and they had entered in and began to perpetuate gospels that were quite different, even heretical, and stood in opposition to the gospel that they had received from the apostles. The message of Jude to these people is simple. And I don't know if we have any Jude scholars here today, so I know I risk something of an oversimplification of this issue. But essentially what Jude was telling the people of the church there is that their commitment was to remain steadfast in spite of the presence of false teachers. What they were to do is they were to hold on to the faith that they had received from the apostles and to not let it go. No matter what was being perpetuated within the church and other churches, no matter what heresies had come into the church, their responsibility was to contend for the faith. And I want to give you three motivations this morning that I hope will allow you and I to enter into this letter of Jude together and to contend earnestly for the faith in spite of the presence. of false teachers and bad doctrine that we have to contend with in our own day. I want to invite you to read with me, first of all, beginning in verse 3. Jude says, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found 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 were long ago designated for this condemnation. Ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ. The striking thing about this, and that's, by the way, probably the most well-known phrase in the book of Jude is this idea to contend for the faith. If you were like me and were raised on the King James Bible, it's to earnestly contend for the faith or something along those lines. The striking thing about this is that it's presented in conjunction with the fact that there are false teachers that are present in the church. And so he's writing to them and he's saying, brothers and sisters, my appeal to you is that you need to contend for the faith. And we're going to unpack that in just a minute. But he's saying, look, I need you to contend for the faith. I need you to stay faithful, stay committed, stay engaged in the work that you were to do. Don't let go of the rope, so to speak. Continue in what you've received from the apostles. Continue in the evangelistic effort. Continue in the work of raising your families to love the Lord. Continue in the efforts that you have been given from the apostolic doctrine that you've received. But right up against that, he says, well, by the way, there's also false teachers in the church. See, what I think we learn from this is that the presence of false teachers in the church and the presence of bad doctrine in the church does not negate our calling to be faithful to our only Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. You and I have responsibilities that we've been called to. And because things around us are not going well, it doesn't negate those responsibilities in our life. And so one way that we respond that's probably an unbiblical response, and trust me, I share with you in this, is I often look around and I say, Lord, if things are trending in this direction, what good can I do? What power do I have to stop it? Even when this building here this morning, if it's full to the gills, We represent just such a small fraction of what is the evangelical church, such a small community of what is a culture that's in a moral spiral. Lord, what can we do? And the answer coming from Jude is you can be faithful. What you've been called to do is you've been called to be faithful and by doing so to contend earnestly for the faith. I think one way to understand what Jude is talking about when he mentions contending for the faith is really to see this as being a personal conviction about the truthfulness of the gospel that then works from the inside outward. It's something of a Christian worldview that's applied outwardly. And so earnestly contending for the faith, first of all, means that we have this commitment to good doctrine. I'm talking about a personal commitment to good doctrine. We hold up the Bible before our eyes as an inspired and infallible record from God himself. And we commit that whatever this Bible teaches us, we're going to conform ourselves to it, that we're going to believe it, we're going to obey it. And all good doctrine begins with this conviction given to us by the Spirit that this is God's Word and that it is authoritative and it is sufficient to instruct us in all forms of godliness. We commit ourselves to Jesus then and we say, this is our only Lord. We know because we've received God's word that there's no hope for us outside of Christ. That it's appointed unto man once to die and then comes the judgment. And that none of us escape judgment except that we do so in the blood of Jesus. And so we look to him and we commit to him as our only Lord and master. It was the Apostle John who asked the question in 1 John, who is a liar except him that denies that Jesus Christ is Lord? Here the same phrase is adopted and it's used by Jude to point out that the great error of these false teachers is that they deny that Jesus Christ is the only master and Lord. If we settle our convictions that Jesus Christ is our master. If we settle the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord. If we commit ourselves to his word to obedience to loving him by obeying him and by loving his people. Then we have this opportunity now to let our Christian worldview and convictions grow outwardly. Fathers and husbands, your responsibility is to minister to your families. Your responsibility is to lead them in godliness. Worship should be taking place in your home. And it's your responsibility. But not only that, it's your great joy and it's your great opportunity to be the one who shepherds your family at home. We apply this Christian worldview to our families, and then we do exactly what you and I are doing this morning. We find other believers who love the Lord and are committed to Him. And we gather together in the visible body of the local church, and we find a church that preaches truth. We find a church that has deep convictions. We find a church that isn't afraid. We find a church that isn't tepid. And we find a church that's going to stand and hold Christ and hold Him supreme over all. And we gather together and we preach the word. And we teach truth. And we pray. And we sing. And we observe the ordinances. We see Christ in the Lord's Supper. And we see Him in baptism. We fellowship together. We become a family. And in doing this, we earnestly contend for the faith. And we do so without apology to the culture. We do so without backing down from the doctrines that compete with ours. We do so really with courage, with conviction that what we're teaching is right. That if we're going to stand for anything, we're going to stand for truth. That if the church needs to stand for anything, that's what it must stand for. That it must stand for truth. We earnestly contend for the faith then by applying this Christian worldview that begins with us as individuals with this conviction wrought in us by the Spirit. We apply it to our families, we apply it in the local church, and then we stand strong in a culture that wants to compete with us and really wants to silence us. I don't think that's going to happen in Grace Bible Church, and it's not because of me. It's not because of Jeff. It's not because of Danny. It's not because of Jimmy Federley here. It's because God will sustain us. It's because the Lord loves his people. And whatever befalls us, God is going to be faithful to us and he's going to keep us close by his side. We get into then the meat of Jude's letter. This largest section in verses 5 through 16 is really where Jude builds the bulk of his argument. He says, I want to remind you that although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of that great day. Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desires, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet in like manner, these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment but said the Lord rebuke you. But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand and they are destroyed by all that they like unreasoning animals understand instinctively. Woe to them for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error. and perished in Korah's rebellion. These are the hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves, waterless clouds swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted, wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. Now, I want to motivate you. And so far, this has not been all that encouraging. I'm not a very good motivational speaker. So I'm not making you any promises. And I wasn't even sure that I could motivate you. I wasn't even sure that we could all get on the same train of thought. I almost joked with Jeff. I think he's watching this morning. I almost sent him a text that said, send me an outline for tomorrow. I wasn't going to use it, but if I bombed, then I would be able to say, well, Jeff sent me the outline. I want to motivate you. I want you to think with me about why we should contend earnestly for the faith. We do it, first of all, because that's what God has commanded us to do. He has said, contend earnestly for the faith. And it doesn't matter that there's false teachers in the church. It doesn't matter what the church next door is preaching. It doesn't matter that people with unpure motives would try to defile even this church. You contend earnestly for the faith. You hold to sound doctrine. You shepherd your families. You gather together with like-minded believers. But the second thing is this. Remember that the history of God's judgment on the wicked is there for us to recall. Let me put it another way. Stay motivated because you know how God deals with the wicked. Because God's Word tells us that He doesn't let any good deed on the one hand go unnoticed, but He doesn't let any evil deed go unpunished or unaccounted for either. Jude goes back to the Old Testament here. And you look at this and you read several allusions to the Old Testament. Some of it may be kind of traditional material from the Jewish literary canon. And he's going back here and he's looking at the Old Testament and he's saying, wait a minute, you're telling me you can't be faithful? Even though Jesus rescued the Israelites out of Egypt? You're telling me you can't be faithful in these difficult times, as we like to call them, these trying times, you're telling me you can't be faithful. And yet Jesus was able to take the Israelites, who were suffering in slavery and in bondage, and he was able to take them out of the hand of Pharaoh, just as we've been reading every Sunday morning from the book of Exodus, and he was able to deliver them out, he was able to bring them to the land that he had promised them. And then how did he deal with Pharaoh? Well, he dealt with Pharaoh. And he pronounced judgment not only on Pharaoh, but on all of the Egyptians for oppressing them. So the issue here wasn't that Moses needed to stand up and take matters into his own hand. God didn't tell Moses to go in there with a big stick and tell Pharaoh what's what. He said, go in there and tell them the Lord has told you to let my people go. And he goes in and he pleads with Pharaoh and Pharaoh is back and forth and his heart is being hardened. At the end of this story, what happens is God delivers his people. And after God delivers his people, he delivers judgment upon the Egyptians. Have you met a Pharaoh lately? Me neither. I know Egypt has a government. But the point is that God pronounced his judgment upon the Egyptians. We look back to that story. And if we don't do anything else, what we do is we say, OK, God, you are a faithful God. You are faithful to your people. You are committed to the people that you have made a covenant with. And by no means are you going to forsake us now. We look back and he uses an example here of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was reading just yesterday, I have no way to verify whether this is true or not, that Philo of Alexandria made an allusion to the fact that in the first century when he lived, that the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah were still smoldering. And I have no idea whether that's true or not, and I'm not even going to try to investigate it. But we know that there's no more Sodom and Gomorrah. We know that they lived in a blasphemous way. We know it was a culture that was overrun with sexual immorality. We know that they rejected their creator and their God. And that their knees did not bow to Yahweh as the only Lord and master. And we also know that their names are now lost to history. that God sent judgment upon them. Rather than telling Abraham or taking someone else to take it into their own hands, God is the one who sent judgment. That's how it'll be with false teachers. That's how it's going to be even if we don't live to see it. That's how it's going to be for those who try to infiltrate our churches and who infiltrate the church at large, not just talking about Grace Bible Church, but the evangelical church at large. Listen, there are all kinds of heresies and bad doctrine and false teachers that would infiltrate it today and it's so easy to become discouraged and say, Lord, is there any respite from this? Are you ever going to restore us? And the answer is that vengeance belongs to the Lord and that the story of redemption tells us that he will judge the wicked. I'm thankful that this belongs to him. Now we could go on. There's other examples that are given here. There's this interesting story about the archangel Michael and he's wrestling with Satan over the body of Moses. And we're not even certain to what we would attest that story. But we read these strange things and they all come back. All these stories come back to the same point. that judgment belongs to the Lord, and that we can trust Him, that we can trust Him to judge those who are doing wickedly. I think one of the things that makes it difficult, and for the sake of time to not run through every story here, I think one of the things that makes this difficult for us to understand, and it makes this hard for us to accept and understand the way that God is working in the world, is that our concept of justice is badly skewed by man's failure to carry out true justice. Now, I have not consulted with Michael, so Michael, I'm sorry if I... I may say something that he has to come back and fix later on when he's teaching us more about biblical justice. But you and I all know that man doesn't have the ability to carry out true justice. And I would suspect even those who perpetuate things like critical theory that they know also that man is not able to carry out justice perfectly. He's not even truthfully able to carry it out well. I don't watch the news frankly ever, but we're all familiar with news stories of men who will spend sometimes 20 years or 30 years in prison. And then new evidence comes out that acquits them of the wrongdoing, and so they're released from prison. They've spent all this time behind bars, away from their family, isolated from the world, living in a little cell. And this complete abortion of justice has been carried out where they attempted to do it, but they couldn't bring it through to completion. And they administered it wrongly. And in the worst cases of that, which maybe we don't have so much of here, this is done intentionally. that people would be imprisoned and they would be imprisoned without being guilty of any kind of crime. And then we've seen the other side of this. We've seen what we can only assume is great and obvious crime or wrongdoing and there's no accountability for it. There's a reason that judgment belongs to the Lord. And it's because only he can perfectly administer it. Only the Lord can really make the wrongs right. And only the Lord can really restore his people by his powerful hand. I know it's tempting. I know it's tempting to look at the degradation of the culture in the church and say, Lord, what's the point of continuing on? Will anybody know? Will anybody notice? Am I going to have any impact in this world? Well, he tells you contend for the faith, and then he calls on you to remember that justice belongs to him and that he's the one that will administer the justice to the wicked. And so our focus cannot be upon them, but our focus has to be on ourselves. I saw a comic one time and I spent weeks looking for this because I wanted to use it in a previous sermon sometime back I think when I was still preaching equipment and I couldn't find the comic again so if any of you could find this I would be greatly appreciative if you could pass it on to me. there's a comic that comes out and it's in the Sunday papers and it's a guy and he's a little soldier. And he's got, I can't even describe the comic well, it's been so long since I've seen it, but he's a little soldier and one guy's a general and he's got the stars all the way across his deal or maybe they're on his helmet. And then there's a little guy and you get the sense that he's at the bottom of the totem pole. I don't really know how to say that in army terminology, but that's what he is. He's at the bottom of the totem pole and he seems like he's a little bit maybe dim-witted. And he's standing one day looking over a hillside with a pair of binoculars. And you know that he's looking for something. And the general comes up to him and taps him on the shoulder and says, Sir, have you found the enemy? And he said, No, I haven't found the enemy yet, but I'm still looking. And he waits around for a little while. The general comes back. He's looking through the binoculars again. And this time he sees himself and some of his own people down there at the bottom of the hill. And he turns and he looks at the general and he says, General, I found the enemy and he is us. And that comic has stuck in my mind when reading text just like this one. I know who the enemy is in my life, and it's not false teachers. The enemy in my life is not bad doctrine in the church. The enemy in my life is my own sin. It's my own wrestle in trying to be sanctified, trying to submit to the Lord, trying to trust him to make of me whatever he intended to make of me when he called me out of this world and started. The problems and the issues that we have in the Kelso household are not because of false teachers. They're not because of bad doctrine in the church. They're not because a denomination over here is ordaining homosexual women to be clergy. Those problems exist because I'm not the kind of shepherd in my home that I ought to be. The problems that we have in our churches, we have these problems in part because of the contribution, right, of bad doctrine or false teachers or poor teaching in the church. But ladies and gentlemen, if I should have brought my binoculars and I could look out here and I could say, okay, here we are. I found the enemy. He is us. In our battle for sanctification, in our battle to grow in the likeness of Christ, we need to come to terms with the fact that we are our own enemy. That's not the same as saying be comfortable with it or get used to it or be okay with it. But we have some motivation to continue on because we say, look, we can't come out here and change the minds of the person who perpetuates critical theory in the church. We're probably, Grace Bible Church has very little influence in these denominations that are going to ordain women to pastoral ministry, for example. We have very little influence in the other aspects and worlds and corners of the evangelical universe. But we have everything to say about what's going to happen here. We have everything to say about our own faithfulness, our own commitment to the Lord. We have everything to say about our own families. We have everything to say about the commitment that we're going to have to stand here for truth. And I hope that that motivates you. I hope that encourages you to press on because you're right when you sit there and conclude, well, I can't change the world by being faithful and I can't change and fix these problems. You're right, you can't. The Lord can. The Lord will. We may or may not live to see it. But vengeance belongs to him and we trust him with that. I want to look finally at verses 17 to 23. As I mentioned, I know we're given a rather quick and cursory look at this. But I want to give you a third motivation for staying faithful even in the presence of false teachers and bad doctrine in the church. He says, You must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you in the last time there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions. It is these who cause divisions, worldly people devoid of the spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up in the most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt. Save others by snatching them out of the fire to show mercy with fear, hating even the garment that has been stained by the flesh. I think, and I keep saying that a lot, that I think, it's because I don't know these things for sure. I can't really understand and know my own mind and my own heart fully, much less presume to understand everyone here's mind and heart. But let me put it this way. I would suspect that often when we want to throw our pity parties, that one of the things that we think about is we think, God, we didn't know it was going to be like this. We didn't know it was going to be so difficult to raise a family that will love you. We didn't know marriage was going to be so hard when we got into marriage. We didn't know that that childbearing was going to be so difficult, not just the giving of birth to children, but the raising of them. Lord, we didn't know it was going to be this hard. We didn't know it was going to be so hard to love our neighbor. We didn't know it was going to be so hard to bear one another's burdens. We didn't know we were going to be so isolated. We didn't know we were going to be out here alone in this fight. We didn't know it was going to feel like this when we committed to following Jesus. But we knew that's what he called us to. We knew that he called us to die to self. We knew that he called us to take up our cross day by day and follow him. We know that he called us to put him in a position of preeminence in our own lives, where he even said, if you won't leave behind mother and father and sister and brother and follow me, you're not worthy of me. How unthinkable is that? How difficult is that to do in the flesh? And then we go about this process of living the Christian life and we're bearing our cross and we're going through our tribulations and we're loving Christ more than we love all these others. And what we find is that even in his own churches, Even in his own churches, here is this body of bad doctrine, of false teachers, of heresy. It makes me sick sometimes just to hear and think what's being perpetuated in churches. And I suspect it's probably more gut-wrenching than I can even imagine. I saw a photo not long ago of a woman clergy member that said on it, Jesus died for abortion rights. How sick are we as a people? How evil, how wicked have we become? Well, Jude responds to him and he says, Yeah, but you have the apostolic doctrine. You knew that it was going to be like this. Maybe you didn't know about every trial, and you didn't know about every suffering, and you didn't know all the things about the difficulties of raising a Christian family and trying to live a Christian life in this world, but the apostles had told them that in these last days, really meaning this intervening period between the time when Christ had ascended to heaven until his second advent, when we celebrate what I can only assume we're going to call second Christmas, and he comes again, Michael shook his head and said, no, that's not the term for that. In this intervening period, we're going to have the presence of false teachers. Again, don't like it, don't be comfortable with it, but get used to it. Because we were told that there will be mockers, there will be scoffers. I think probably anybody in here that's reading a different translation has that word translated differently that shows you some of the ambiguity and some of the flexibility of the idea here, that this is going to be difficult, that you're going to be scorned, you're going to be isolated, you're going to be mocked. And that people will come in here and they'll come in here to do harm with the greediest and most selfish motives. A gospel that's totally antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And yet you're to remain steadfast. That's because our calling to faithfulness is not contingent on our circumstances. And that's our third motivation is that our circumstances don't dictate what God has called us to do. And so whether things are good or things are not going so well, whether we're in good health or we're in poor health, whether we have poverty or we have riches, whether we're in a place spiritually where we feel like we're walking close to the Lord, Jeff described it. a couple weeks ago is saying somebody that has God's ear in talking about prayer when you're there and you know that the Lord is hearing you and you're walking closely with him or you feel like you're out here and you're sitting in the desert and the sun's burning you up and you wish that God would do for you like he did Jonah and just put a little plant over your head to save you from the scorching heat. Your circumstances do not dictate your calling to faithfulness. Now this is somewhat related to the point that we looked at earlier in the book of Jude. This is related to the fact that the presence of false teachers within the church does not negate our calling to faithfulness. It's sort of heightened here in the latter part of the letter because he's drawing their attention and saying, look, you knew that these people were going to come in with their worldly passions, scoffers. He described them in the previous section with some interesting terms. Think about the term a waterless cloud, a waterless cloud. Clouds promise us rain. And that's what we're looking for when we're looking for clouds. Now, we're not always looking for rain, but when we see clouds, that's what we expect is coming. Every year, starting about mid-December until the end of February, I look out at waterless clouds, just waiting for snow. And I'm no snowbird. I'm from Arkansas, so I've never seen much snow at one time. But I love snow and I love cold weather. And so I'll wander outside on hazy days and you'll look and you'll see the clouds and you'll think, you know, if it would just rain a little bit, we would have snow. And I know all of you are thinking about that and I don't want to get your hopes up because I don't think there's any snow in the forecast. There's nothing more disappointing than a waterless cloud. Not the point of it itself, that it's a waterless cloud, but thinking about the anticipation of looking to a cloud. For instance, in a desert, I imagine it's unlikely that Jude was thinking of snow here when he was writing about a waterless cloud. And so you're looking in the desert, you're waiting for this cloud, for its shade and for its rain, and it comes and it passes over you and nothing happens. There's no rain. It's not satisfying. It's just one of the several interesting ways in the book of Jude that he describes these false teachers. that they come in and they're coming in to promise you everything that you've ever wanted. They're promising you freedom. They're promising you liberation. They're promising you that your troubles can be done away with. They're promising you that the chains and yoke of oppression can be taken off of you, that you can be made like everybody else, that you can be happy, that you can be content, that the power structures that exist in this society can be turned upside down, and you don't have to be the little guy with the binoculars at the bottom of the totem pole anymore. You can be the general with the stars across the top of your helmet. They're all of these promises that if you'll do these things, And not just critical theory, the promise of a man-centered gospel. If you'll just change your behavior, if you'll just act better, God is going to love you. He's not just going to love you. He's going to love you maxing out the 401K. He's going to love you in the new vehicle. He's going to love you giving you the promotion at work. He's going to love you by giving you everything you've ever wanted. Were these not the words of Jesus, that if we would commit ourselves to Him, He would give us the desires of our heart? This is what false gospels promise you. They promise you something that you long for. They promise to fulfill all of these desires that are burning in your bosom. And what you find out is they're like waterless clouds. I say this sincerely. I've heard preachers say this sometimes passive aggressively, and I don't mean this passive aggressively at all. I mean it very sincerely. I hope. for the people of our churches in this nation. I hope for our family and for our friends who are maybe far from the Lord. I hope they learn that the promises of this world are empty in this life before it's too late and they must learn it in the age to come. I think we all pray for our children. We pray for our families to that end. Jude is writing to this church here and he's saying, look, these false teachers, these waterless clouds, they've come in. You were told that they were going to come in, that they were going to cause destruction and division. But in spite of their coming in to cause destruction and confusion and division and all of these things, what has that done to change your day to day life? It hasn't done anything. You can still hold deeply to biblical convictions even though there are false teachers in the church. You can still be a godly husband and a godly father. You can still be a godly wife and a godly mother. You can still be a godly brother or sister or child. even though they're false teachers and bad doctrine in the church. I've said it so many times at least in my own head it's starting to sound redundant and you're kind of looking at me like you're waiting for me to make a point to that end but I'm not quite getting there. That's because there's not much more to say about it than that. Our circumstances do not dictate our calling and they do not dictate what we've been called to do in the world. Look in verse 20. We'll even read down through verse 23. But you, beloved, building yourselves up in the most holy faith, and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt, and save others by snatching them out of the fire. To others, show mercy with fear, hating even the garment, that is stained by the flesh. What is Jude telling them to do? If you step back for a minute and you look at the book of Jude, I know we've gone through it very quickly and it doesn't really give us an opportunity to see the macro structure here, but if you think where Jude has been, if you walk the path that he's walked so far, he's written to them and he said, okay, look, You need to contend earnestly for the faith. That was his command to them. Again, probably the most famous statement that comes to us from the book of Jude is this statement or this command to earnestly contend for the faith. He says, earnestly contend for the faith and know that there are false teachers who have infiltrated the church and they've come into it to perpetuate division and ungodliness. And they've done this for selfish gain. And then he goes through describing what this looks like. He says, now, before you go into despair, remember that God judged Egypt. Remember that God judged Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember that even the archangel Michael didn't pronounce a judgment against Lucifer wrestling with him. But instead he said Yahweh will judge you. And as you know that, and you think about God being a just God, and a God who will administer justice and judgment well, then what you do is you stay committed, you stay faithful, even though there's division in the church, and even though there's fighting, and there's poor teaching, and there's bad doctrine, you stay faithful and build yourselves up in the most holy faith. Stay faithful and be praying in the Holy Spirit. Stay faithful and keep yourself in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. What do we do in this intervening period while we're waiting for the wrongs to be made right? You go about doing the same things that you would do under the most pleasant of circumstances. As a matter of fact, pleasant circumstances may not compel you to do the things with such urgency. One of the ironic notes here, and I'll mention irony because Jimmy loves irony when we find it in a biblical text, chiasms and irony, we talk about that in all kinds of biblical texts. One of the great ironies here is that he's saying you're not to be contending for the faith in spite of the presence of false teachers, you're to contend for the faith precisely because of the presence of false teachers. It becomes all the more important that you remain faithful because the false teachers are there. Now you're in the pressure cooker. What you really are is going to come out once you get into the pressure cooker. What Jude wants to see happen in this church is he wants to see these people continue to contend for the faith. He wants them to have mercy on those who are doubting. He wants them to be saving others by snatching them out of the fire. And to others showing mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. There's a juxtaposition there of the idea of the garment being stained with the flesh and loving these people and saving them out of fear for them. What it's saying is that as much as you hate sin, you ought to love the sinner. As much as you fear God's judgment and His wrath, you ought to long that these people would escape out from underneath it. Listen, these people are in many ways our enemies who perpetuate false doctrines, who teach, whether it's critical theory or a man-centered gospel, whatever it is. And we hate that sin, and we hate that it's perpetuated in our churches. But oh, would we not plead for their conversion? You're going to live, just as one example, you're going to live for the next four years under a president and under a vice president that don't share your worldview. You're gonna live under a number of senators and representatives and judges who don't share your worldview. You're gonna live under a collection of mayors and governors who don't share your worldview. You're going to live in this world under the leadership of people who do not share your worldview. And I would plead with them, if I had their audience in their ear, that they would trust Christ, that they would repent of their sin, that they would look to Him, that they would flee to Him for refuge. I would assure them that whatever evil they've done, that it's not so evil it's put them beyond the reach of His arm. I would plead with them. I would much rather live under godly rulers. And I would plead with them to submit to the Lord Jesus Christ. For these false teachers, we would make the same plea. We would plead not only that God sends, and I know this is what we want to do. We're tempted to do it. Say, God, just send lightning from heaven like James and John. Lord, just zap them. And we know that that's not a biblical response to the presence of false teachers, but rather it's to contend for the faith and remain faithful. Trust that God is going to judge them. And in the meantime, be about the work of evangelism. Be about the work of defining and standing for good and true doctrine. And in all of this, we're going to trust that finally the Lord is going to make it right. All right, I'm going to try to conclude this. When we think about justice and when we think about God's judgment. One of the places where we see God's judgment and where we see right justice administered is in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We see justice administered there because no evil is able to go unaccounted for. Because you and I know that we are sinners. And if we don't come to this understanding that we are sinners, if we don't have contrition and a broken heart and repentance, then we can never enter into this relationship with God anyway through his son, Jesus Christ. And so the gospel begins, first of all, by looking at the holiness of God, looking at his majesty and his beauty and understanding that he is perfect. And then it's looking at ourselves in light of that and saying, OK, we are sinners. And seeing that we are sinners, we know that what we deserve is we deserve God's judgment. We deserve His wrath to be poured out on us. And that's what all sinners share universally. We share this condemnation that deserves great punishment and great wrath. And God doesn't remove that responsibility in the presentation of the gospel. He doesn't send His Son into the world that He might escape wrath. He sends Him so that He may become wrath and sin for us. And Jesus comes into this world which we just celebrated in the Advent season and he comes into the world and this baby is in a manger and he is born. He is born to die. And he is born for the purpose of saving his people from their sins. I can't imagine what it must be as Jesus grows up and his faculties, you know, they grow as we grow in this crazy, mysterious thing that Brianna and I have been talking about and trying to sort out for weeks. And we just can't articulate it well that all of he's fully God and he's fully man. And so he's growing up and he's experiencing life as we're experiencing it. To know that you have come into the world for the express purpose of dying. There is no justice where evil goes unpunished. God punished our evil in the person of Christ. God will punish the evil of false teachers. He'll do it in due time. He'll do it in due course as he sees fit in the way that he sees is appropriate. But justice belongs to him and not us. In the meantime, I'm thankful that God has been merciful to us. that Jesus was born to die, but not only did He die, He was buried, and after three days He rose from the grave. And when we enter into Christ by virtue of our union with Him, we enter not only into His suffering and His death that was poured out as wrath against our sin, But we enter into the promise of resurrection and everlasting life with our Lord. This hope is what kind of stands as a shining beacon for us in what are pretty dark days. I don't know if things are going to get more dark or not. I don't think if I don't know if things are going to get more difficult or not. I'm tempted to say yes. I also know that God can relent. from the judgment that He is sending on our land. So I'm not going to make a call on that one way or the other, but I know this, whether the days ahead are bright or the days ahead are dark and gloomy, our God and our Christ is there and He will sustain us. In the meantime, let's be faithful to Him. Let's pray.