Jude 2

we did last week, I want us to read the entire letter of Jude. We missed the first week because of sheer excitement, the fact that we get to be a church, so we didn't do that.

But by the end of our time in the book of Jude, you'll have read through the book 13 times, probably 12 since we missed one week.

So let's read the book, we're gonna pray, and then we're gonna talk about what Jude says. Verse 1,

Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are the called, beloved in God the

Father, and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints.

For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our

God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.

And angels who did not keep their own domain but abandoned their proper abode, he has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.

Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they were in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and they went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

Yet in the same way, these men also by dreaming defile the flesh and they reject authority and they revile angelic majesties.

But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, the

Lord rebuke you. But these men revile the things which they do not understand and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals.

By these things they are destroyed. Woe to them, for they have gone the way of Cain and for Peh have rushed headlong into the era of Balaam and perished in the rebellion of Korah.

These are men who are hidden reefs in your love feast. When they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves, they're clouds without water, carried along by winds, autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted.

Wild waves of the sea crashing up their own shame like foam, wandering stars for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever.

It is also about these men that Enoch and the seventh generation from Adam prophesied, saying, behold, the

Lord came with many thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment upon all and to convict all of the ungodly for all of their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way.

And of all of the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him, these are grumblers, finding fault, following after their own lusts.

They speak arrogantly, flattering people for the sake of gaining an advantage. But, but you, beloved, ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that they were saying to you in the last time there will be mockers following after their own ungodly lusts.

These are the ones who cause divisions. They're worldly minded, devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved, building yourself up on the most holy faith, praying in the

Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our

Lord Jesus Christ through eternal life. And have mercy on some who are doubting. Save others, snatching them out of the fire, and on some have mercy with fear, having even the garment polluted by, or hating even the garment polluted by flesh.

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, authority before all time, now and forever.

Amen. Let's pray. Father God, we see in this short letter that Jude has such a heart for the saints, that he loves them, that he cares for them, and that he wants them to thrive and to flourish even in the midst of really, really terrible circumstances.

Lord, I pray for us as a little church 2 ,000 years after the writing of this letter that we would be unified in the gospel, that we would love you like the saints of old that Jude is describing loved you, and that Lord we would, in everything that we do here today, honor and glorify you.

Lord, let the words that I'm gonna share right now be from you and for your people, and Lord if there's anything that is of my own machination or design, that Lord you would let it fall to the floor and you would let it not be heard.

It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. All right, so as we approach this responsibility of opening up the word for the third time as a church,

I wanted to share two observations from the book that we haven't been able to cover yet. We've talked about the situation in the context of the book that savage false teachers are infiltrating the church, we've talked about the persecutions that were happening on the

Roman front, the Gentile front, the Jewish front, and we've talked about all of that, but there's two things that we have not yet been able to talk about, and that's how logical

Jude is. Jude is a logical man who is structuring his argument in a very logical way, so I want us to explore some of that logic.

Also, Jude is a pastoral man who loves the people of God, and he's exhibiting great love for his people, and I want us to explore that just a little bit more fully, and then we will get to the text that is at hand for today.

So on the point of logic, Jude is a wonderful logician. It just means he likes logic. I didn't say magician.

He's like a great attorney. Jude uses fierce and exacting logic to confront the problems that this little church is facing.

He's wielding his pen in a very ferocious way against this aberrant sect of wolves that are seeking to destroy the church.

For this group of charlatans, Jude has no mercy. He organizes the entire book as a scathing rebuke against these men whose only goal is to steal away the sheep with sinister doctrine, and Jude uses his gift of logic, his gift of precision, to undermine them at every turn.

For instance, as he begins the book, when the church is being invaded by arrogant men,

Jude introduces himself as a slave. He meets their arrogance, not with showmanship and not with more arrogance, but with humility.

He responds to their pride by introducing himself as a slave. This is the brother of Jesus, but he doesn't tout that status.

He introduces himself as a slave of Jesus Christ, because that is the way that a true man of God must see himself as a slave of Christ, not as a high and mighty man, not as a man of vast significance and importance, but as a lowly servant, a man wholly dependent upon his master,

Jesus Christ. And by doing this, Jude is not only being humble for the sake of humble,

Jude is showcasing where true power and authority come from. He's saying to these men, you may think you have all the power, but I'm a slave.

It's counterintuitive, but he's saying I belong to Jesus Christ. That's where true power and authority come from.

No matter if you have all the powers of earth and hell on your side, you can come with that. I stand, this is

Jude talking, in a more firm and solid and steady and fixed position than you, because I am a slave of Jesus Christ.

I belong to him. I belong to the one who has infinite authority, all authority in heaven and on earth.

Who could have a better status than that? The Lord is my master, and the

Lord will not stand for what you're doing in his church, and neither will I. That's what Jude is saying. This is not passivity on the part of Jude.

He's not just saying, well, you know, let the Lord deal with you. He's saying, kind of like a dad who's watching as his kids are bullied.

He's angry. He's livid. He's looking at all of this playing out, but instead of fighting in his own strength, he's decided to fight in the strength of Christ.

He's decided to stand in the shadow of Jesus, which leaves everyone else in the darkness. That's the weapon that Jude is fighting with, and also by showing that he's submitted to Christ, he's using great logic to show that they are not.

By showing, by his great rhetorical power, he's revealing who they really are. They're not like Jesus Christ, who humbled themselves to the point of death on a cross.

They're not like that. They're men who follow after their own lust. They're men who follow after Satan himself. They're men who are filled with pride and with arrogance.

They're looking for notoriety and gain. They're men who have no legitimate right to be in leadership of the church, and Jude undermines their entire argument right away with a single phrase,

I'm a slave. I'm a slave. That's why he begins the book this way. We know

Jude really believes this, and yet we also see that he's structuring his argument in a certain way on purpose to show that true power, true humility, comes from Jesus Christ.

You can't just do what these men are doing. Jude took a very standard practice of writing a letter.

This is common in the ancient world. Greetings were common at the beginning of letters, just like they are today, but he transforms it into a powerful weapon of the gospel,

I'm a slave of Christ. That's where true power comes from. It's my contention that Jude structured his greeting in that way.

Another example is when Jude uses his logical mind one word later. He says, if you've noticed this already,

Jude loves series of threes. He says, I am Jude, I am slave of Christ, and I'm the brother of James.

And this is not accidental. He is undermining their whole argument by claiming that he's the brother of James.

Of course he's the brother of James, but what he's doing is he's attaching himself to the most important leader of the early church,

James, in Jerusalem. Because these men were claiming outside alien authority.

They were claiming they had authority outside. He claims apostolic authority. He claims James as his authority.

These men were saying that Jesus is not the only way to God, that personal holiness is not important, that grace gives you a license to do whatever you want, and most scholars believe that these men were rising up in the church to seize it and take control of it from Jude the pastor, and they were doing so with sinful doctrine, with sinister motives, and Jude says, not on my watch.

Jude is saying that I have apostolic authority to be here. Your limited earthly authority gives you no position in the church.

He's appealing to God -ordained authority. So what Jesus is doing with these men who are trying to legitimize themselves on illegitimate grounds is he is appealing to his status with Christ and his status with the church, and they don't have that.

He is the man who's been ordained to lead this church. Jude appeals to James.

He's saying, if you don't approve of me, go talk to James. This is why I think that the letter was written early. What good would it have been to appeal to James if James is already dead?

And James dies in the mid -60s, so that's why I think the letter had to have been written before that, so that Jude could vouch for...

James could vouch for Jude. Now, so what Jude is saying is that whatever trumped up authority these men think they have, he has more.

He's not only a slave of Christ, he's the brother of James. In these three simple words,

Jude, brother, slave, Jude undermines their entire attempt at leadership. By doing that, he establishes him as the rightful pastor of this church.

That leads us to point number two. Jude is a great pastor. Jude loves his people, and just like a faithful pastor, he's gonna do anything and everything he can to protect his flock, and he does that in two ways.

Jude decisively acts in addressing the problem that's going on in the church, and he spends the majority of the book actually going after the wolves in the congregation.

He spends the minority of the book talking to his people, and there's an intentional reason for that, because if you're a faithful shepherd, you will love the sheep, but you also kill the wolf.

Faithful shepherds do not allow the wolf to remain in their flock. Faithful shepherds do not allow them for a moment to get even a smell of the sheep, because wolves kill sheep.

That is what they do. If you don't put down the wolf, the wolf is gonna kill the sheep. That's the reality of it.

Now, in the modern evangelical church, I think sometimes we get confused when we bring this metaphor in.

We understand the need to put down the wolf in the field, but when they come into the church, we show a different strategy.

We show grace to the wolf. We love the wolf. We welcome them in. We try to convert the wolf, and while I recognize that that is a good, intentioned approach, the wolf is already eyeing its next target.

Shepherds, faithful shepherds, do not allow wolves into the flock of God. They do not allow men with sinister motives to come in and pervert the

Church of Christ, and that is what Jude is doing. He's taking the best course of action that he can to remove these faithless men by any means necessary, and that is why

I say that Jude is a faithful pastor, because he's doing the job of a shepherd for his community.

The second reason is that he turns his focus on the church. Yes, he focuses on the wolves.

Yes, he gives decisive action, but he also turns his focus on the church to encourage them and to build them up in the gospel.

The first words that we find in verse 1b are to this little struggling church. They're looking for answers.

They're looking for hope, and what does Jude do? He tells them that they are called, that they are beloved, and that they will be kept by Jesus Christ.

He's saying that they've been called by God with an irrevocable calling, that they've been invited into his love, and that it is

God who is going to watch over them, preserve them, protect them until the day that Jesus Christ returns. What he is saying is that in the midst of all the trial, in the midst of all the struggle, you are safe and you are secure because of what

God has done in Jesus Christ. He's reminding them of truth. Jude is encouraging the suffering church with truth.

He's not placating their emotions. He's loving them with the truth. He's reminding them of the truth, and as a faithful pastor, he's telling them not only what they want to hear, but he's telling them what they must hear.

They must hear the truth about who they are in Christ. He doesn't say, well, I'm really sorry that you're going through that.

I hope it gets better. He doesn't say, well, you're really awesome just the way you are.

You're God's special snowflake, and you should just go and do you and everything will be fine. He doesn't say that.

He reminds them of who they are. He reminds them of the gospel. He reminds them of the truth, that you are called, and you must believe that, that you are loved in God the

Father, and you must receive that, that you are kept safe for the day of Jesus Christ.

We don't know when Jesus Christ is going to return. We have no idea. We've been waiting 2 ,000 years for that. We're praying for that.

We're waiting for that, but until that day, Christian, you are safe in the arms of God because he is keeping you safe for the day of Jesus Christ.

You cannot, if you were called, be uncalled. You cannot, if you were loved, be unloved, and you cannot, if you are kept by Jesus Christ, be lost.

You are secure in the gospel. Amen? He's a wonderful pastor, and we get to see the benefit of that today.

We get to receive the hope and the encouragement that he gives to us in the gospel.

Now today, I want us to go one verse forward. We're brazing our average. It took us two weeks to go through verse one.

This week, we're gonna go through an entire verse. How can it be? We're gonna see today that Jude not only loves his church enough to share the truth and remind them of who they are.

That was last week. He's gonna tell them now what they must do. That's this week. So if you will, turn with me to Jude.

We're gonna be in verse 1b to give us context, and then we're gonna be in verse 2, and that's where we will conclude our time.

To those who are called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

Every word of that phrase is vitally important. Every nugget of that five -word

Greek phrase, may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

Again, Jude loves series of threes. Jude, brother, slave. Called, beloved, kept.

Now, mercy, peace, and love. He's teaching us something here.

So what I want us to do today is do three things. I want us to describe why these three words are so unique, and so beautiful, and so important.

That's the first thing we're gonna do. The second thing I want us to do is why would Jude pray for this? Why would

Jude mention this? And then the third thing is how is this exactly what we need today as followers of Christ?

So let's begin. Why are these words so unique? I really love the fact that you allow me to be a nerd at this church, and today will be no exception.

It will actually be quite worse. Jude uses a very rare kind of verb in this verse.

That verb multiplied. It's not the word itself, it's the construction of it. It's so strange, so weird.

It's extremely rare, and he's doing it as one of the most intriguing verbal constructions that I think

I've ever seen. This construction is so rare, we didn't even talk about it. We didn't even talk about it in seminary, and I was a glutton for punishment.

I didn't just take the Greek that was required, I took extra Greek, because I just wanted to punish myself in the midst of everything else that I was doing.

We didn't talk about this verbal construction because it's that rare, and here Jude applies it skillfully.

It's beautiful. So let's go back to high school grammar for a second. I want to talk about active and passive action, okay?

And we'll talk about some other things. If I say that I want to use active action, then what I'm gonna say, let's just, for instance,

I hit the ball. Very simple sentence. I am the one exerting my will and my energy onto the ball.

I'm the one acting. The ball is the one receiving. That's called active action. Now passive action is different.

When I go into passive action, I would say instead of, I hit the ball, I was hit by the ball. Now I'm no longer acting out the action,

I'm receiving the action, and it hurts. I've been hit by the ball many times. The verb hit,

H -I -T, doesn't change spelling at all. It doesn't change position in the sentence.

It's the exact, it's active or passive by the construction of the sentence itself. So we know by context whether the action is active or whether it's passive.

So tuck that away for a moment, we'll come back to that, and that will be an important point. You're like, how could it be?

Trust me, you will see. But there's also many other ways to communicate action.

There's time. You can communicate action as a past, a present, or a future. I hit the ball yesterday.

I hit the ball today. I will hit the ball tomorrow. Same word.

Different, totally different context. You can also describe action as ongoing or static.

I am hitting the ball. We had an I -N -G, that means I'm doing it in an iterative way, or static.

I hit the ball and I got bored and I left. It stops. So you see, you can really structure the sentence to mean exactly what you want it to mean, and the precision of it is important.

There's one other way that you can describe action, and that's confidence. I don't know if this is a grammatical term, but you can describe your confidence in the action, and you can do that with the exact same verb.

For instance, we may say, I think I'm gonna hit the ball. Same word, hit.

But yet now I've infused some doubt into the equation. Let's go even further.

I may hit the ball. It's not entirely certain.

I actually have low confidence at this point that I'm gonna hit it. Then there's one more layer. Well, I really wish that I was the type of person that could hit the ball.

All the same word, hit. But yet in every one of those circumstances, the spelling doesn't change, the way that it's spelled doesn't change, but yet the meaning is vastly different.

And in English, that's how we do it. In Greek, we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but you don't do it that way. You do it a different way.

You take the word and you build prefixes and suffixes, and you can take a small little word and make it almost an entire sentence long from from adding different suffixes and prefixes and all of that stuff, and it's fascinating.

But Jude uses a very rare verb in this text, and I wanted to give you some context so you would understand what he means.

This context or this verbal case is called the optative. You never have to remember that again. I just had to say it.

It's not common at all. I had to research this in order to be able to tell you. The optative case is the lowest level of certainty that you can communicate.

It's not that I may hit the ball. It's not that I think I'm gonna hit the ball. It's that I'm really hoping that I hit the ball.

It's the lowest level of confidence that you can describe. It's almost on the account of wishing upon a star, hoping against hope, or praying by some miracle that I hit the ball.

That's what the optative case is, and it's infrequent because, you know, how often do you have that little confidence when you're trying to describe things?

The New Testament usually speaks in very concrete terms, usually speaks in very black and white with great certainty, not with this level of uncertainty, so it's not common in biblical

Greek. Now, when we read in English, may—that word's not in the

Bible, that's word given there by the translators to communicate uncertainty—may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

What we cannot see there is that Jude is just being socially nice, that he's just writing a greeting.

Hey guys, I love you. I hope you can get some grace. I hope you get some mercy. I hope you get some love. That's not what he's saying.

He's wanting us to feel the uncertainty of it because he uses a particular verbal construction.

It cannot be otherwise. He's wanting us to read it like, I really hope that you're gonna experience the mercy.

I really hope and wish that you're gonna feel the peace of Christ. I really hope that you're going to feel

God's love, and what he's doing here is he's showing that these things are not firm in the

Christians' life. That's very interesting. We'll get to that in just a moment. He anticipates that some in his community will not respond to the trials that are happening with mercy.

He's saying that, I think some of the Christians are gonna respond unmercifully to the trials because the trials are gonna force them and hurt them so badly that they're gonna forget who they are and they're gonna respond with a lack of mercy.

He's saying that for some, they're not gonna have peace. The trials are gonna come in their life and they're gonna be wrecked and they're gonna have fears and doubts and insecurities and they're gonna feel something that they should not feel because the trial is pulling it out of them.

People are like oranges. When you squeeze them, you find out what's really in them. What Jude is saying is that while we are perfectly loved by God, we are not always loving.

While God is always merciful to us, we are not always merciful. While God is perfectly, gives perfect peace, peace that surpasses understanding, how many times in your life do you feel chaos?

My goodness, I know I do. I had just finished the sermon this morning so proud of myself and it was two o 'clock,

I'm running late and I'm furiously flying around the house to get myself dressed and I'm not experiencing God's peace.

It is almost like the default mode of my heart is rebellion to God. Almost as if that's true.

By Jude using this verbal case, he's not certain that mercy, peace, and love will be a reality for his people, which is the second reason why this is so unique.

It is a great contrast to verse 1. Verse 1 describes things that cannot be untrue.

You are called, you are beloved, and you are kept. These are always true. These are things that must be true.

They cannot be false. These are things you cannot earn, things that you cannot lose. You cannot invalidate them. They're always true because you were called, chosen, loved, kept, and they can never be false.

Feel the firmness of that and the security in that, but yet when you get to verse 2, Jude switches his tone.

He's like, I'm confident when I'm talking about God, but you, I'm not as confident.

I'm gonna use the most unconfident verbal construction that I can find. He went from a level of certainty now to a lack of non or a lack of confidence.

He moves from concrete to the abstract, from the firm to the shaky. He talks about things that we could not lose now to things we can barely hold on to.

Mercy, peace, and love. He's contrasting God's calling on us with our character.

One is firm, one is shaky. He says mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you because mercy, peace, and love is a struggle for you, for me, for all of us.

When it comes to who you are, that's fixed. You can't undo it. When it comes to what we're supposed to be doing in response to that, we barely do it.

We sin, we fall short, we fail, we struggle to live out this calling.

Everyone here does. When you're firmly called by God, you would think that this would come easy.

It doesn't. To the day that you breathe your last breath and you open up your eyes and you see

God for the first time, you will struggle to be merciful, you will struggle to be peace, struggle to be loving, and yet it's so interesting, we've experienced the perfect mercy of God, still struggle.

And perfectly loved by God, we've been modeled that through Christ, still struggle. For me, peace, peace is the hard one.

And all of my thoughts and all of the machinations and all of the things that I'm thinking and wanting and hoping,

I dream things, I'm a dreamer, I'm an idealist. How can you have peace if you're an idealist? You look at the world around you and you're crushed, but yet I'm supposed to grow in this, we're supposed to grow.

Jude is essentially saying, I'm not gonna stop at the truth of who you are in God, I'm gonna tell you who you should be in response.

And he prays that prayer. Now let me be clear, Jude doesn't begin the opposite way.

I think that's important to note. Jude doesn't begin with, this is what you're supposed to do and now as a result this is who you are, because we don't derive who we are from what we do.

We don't try to earn God's favor and approval by perfect obedience. We could never do that. That's why he tells us who we are first, because when you fail, go back to the gospel.

Because when you fall short, go back to the gospel. Because when you're unloving, unmerciful, and when you have no peace in your life, your whole world has been thrown upside down, go back to what was said before, go back to the gospel.

None of that, even though we fail, threatens our status with God, but it does threaten our experience.

It does threaten our experience. Think about it as a marriage. I'm gonna use very general things that I don't struggle with right now.

That's sarcasm. When a husband forgets to take out the trash, that doesn't invalidate his marriage.

He's still married. Still married while he's sitting reading a book. Again, not applicable to anyone in particular.

He's still married when he watches Duck Dynasty, and I don't know why this person does this, but they do sometimes.

He's still married even though he didn't take out the trash. It doesn't affect his status, but it does affect his experience.

I let my, I let, she let, he let, whoever I'm talking about let their spouse down, and because they let them down, there's a break in trust.

There's experience that's wrong. A wife who speaks an unkind word or any other type of thing that you can imagine doesn't invalidate the marriage, but it does affect the experience.

Judah's speaking to a people who are firmly rooted in God, but yet they still have to walk it out.

They still have to live day to day, and their experience with God can be affected by the way they respond to the gospel.

It doesn't invalidate their relationship, but it affects it. It affects the experience of it.

Trials, persecutions, the infiltrations of wolves will either do one of two things to you, and this is a rule of life.

Trials will do one of two things to you. They will either make you harder against God, or they will make you softer.

They will make you love him more. It all depends on how you respond. Judah's attempting to remind these people that their status with God can't change, but their experience can, and he's reminding them to respond and such a way that's pleasing to God and builds up their faith.

Judah's praying that these people will learn how to be merciful, because showing mercy builds you up. Being unmerciful tears you down.

It tears others down around you. He's praying that they will learn to have peace, because with a lack of peace, it tears you down.

It doesn't build up your faith. It shipwrecks it. He's praying that these people learn how to respond and love, even in hostile circumstances.

Remember the context. They're being hurt. They're being persecuted. They're being punished, but yet he's calling them to do the unthinkable.

Why? Because it builds them up. It's what Jesus did for us when he was hanging on the cross and people were mocking him and cursing him and reviling him, and he loved them.

We have a model for who we are to follow. Now, we'll talk about this more in just a moment, but I just want to bring up the simple point in all of this, that we don't respond well to conflict.

Maybe you do. I don't think you do. I know that I don't. Some of us, when we respond to conflict, we blow up.

Some of us, when we respond to conflict, we try to bury it and pretend like it doesn't exist. Some of us stew over it and muddle over it for decades before we even actually deal with it.

Some of us do other things, but we don't know how to manage conflict well, and I think that's what Jude is getting at.

He's highlighting our unchangeable status before God, and he's showing us that we can have a different circumstance in the moment, in the time that we're living in, by how we respond.

He knows the pain that they're going through, and he's not trying to dismiss it, so he's praying and he's hoping that mercy and peace and love will be built up in them, that contentment will grow.

Now, that's the first thing. The second reason why I think this phrase is so interesting is because, again, it's an extremely rare New Testament word.

We're going to go back to the Greek for a moment. We get a clue as to how mercy, peace, and love are cultivated in the life of the believer by this rare verbal construction.

Let it be known that grammar is important. An entire theological point is going to come out of one phrase, whether it's active or passive.

So if you're in high school, don't hate your grammar teacher. This is very important.

As we discussed earlier, the optative case is rare, but it's even more rare when it's in the passive. Remember, the active is,

I hit the ball, the passive is, I was hit by the ball. This is probably one of the most rare constructions in all of the

New Testament that I can find, because it's not only the optative case, it's the passive optative case, which is why it's so important, and I'll tell you why.

Because if Jude is saying, in the active, mercy, peace, and love, then he's telling you, go and you be merciful, go and you be at peace, go and you be loving, you exert your will and your morality and your thinking and your processing and do everything you can religiously to go do this, and you do it actively, and that would be slavery.

That would be a millstone tied around our neck. That would be pharisaical obedience, and that's not what

Jude is saying. This is why this is so fascinating. He's saying it in the passive. He's saying that you're not the one doing the action.

He's commanding you to, or he's wishing, actually, that you will be merciful, that you will be at peace, and you will be loving, but he's saying you can't do it.

He's saying you don't possess within you the ability to be able to manufacture this in your life. It's passive.

It must be done to you. Jude is saying that God is the one who's going to have to bring peace into your life, because you can't make yourself at peace.

He's saying God is the one who's going to have to bring mercy into your life and help you respond to other people with mercy, because you don't have it in you.

He's saying that God is the one who must make you loving, because you are not by nature loving, and you can't do anything to will yourself that direction.

He's saying that the love of God must be loved on to you, that the peace of God must be pieced on to you, that the mercy of God must be mercied on you if you're gonna grow in grace.

That's what he's saying. The evidence that God is calling you, loving you, and keeping you from verse 1 is that he's working on you in verse 2.

He's active in the equation. We are passive. This is not a religion where we can just go obey and obey and obey in order to be accepted by God.

That's legalism. This is God by his sheer grace is working on us.

He's making us more loving, more peaceful, more merciful. Praise God.

Just as I am. Praise God, because just as I am, I would have went to hell. Praise God, though, that he continues working on us.

Jude is describing the fundamental way human beings change. I don't care what psychology has to say.

Jude is talking about how people change, and it's not by human will, and it's not by their theories and their hypotheses.

It's by God working on them. That's how human beings change. The Spirit of God at work in your life is how you will change, and this will save you from a lot of misery, because if you think that by sheer effort you're gonna make yourself better, live a decade, and you'll realize that you're right back where you were.

It takes God to sanctify the believer. That's how we change. What Jude is more accurately saying is that,

God, I pray that you would take these children of yours, and that you would make them merciful. You would put them at peace, and that you would make them more loving, because the situation that they're going through is really hard, and I don't want them to be the kind of Christians who disembodied

Christians, whose soul and their life don't match up. Their soul is called by God, but their body, sure, doesn't look like it.

Jude is saying that there needs to be an integration that happens, and that can only happen by the Spirit of God. Now, the second question that we're going to talk about is, why would you pray for these things in the church?

Why would you ask these things from God? And I think the answer is simple. When conflict comes, we all have unique and wrong ways of dealing with it.

There's some in this room who, when conflict happens, you will be the one who is not merciful. There's some in this room when conflict happens, you will be the one who's out of peace.

You're dealing with fear and dread and anxiety, and your hearts are worked up into a frenzy, and others, when you deal with conflict, you will be the one who's unloving.

All three of these are wrong ways to respond to conflict, and what Jude is saying, dear

Christian, I know you're experiencing these trials, but don't let them sabotage your experience with God.

Do not let your trials make you bitter. Do not let this situation make you unmerciful to fellow Christians, unloving to those who you're called to love, and don't let it rob you of your peace.

I think he's using these terms because these three ways are the ways that we fail in managing conflict, but I think it's clear that what

Jude is praying for is not only just these three things, but that we would have them in abundance.

Look at what it says, that they would be multiplied to you. Jude is taking this to the point of logical, almost absurdity.

He's saying, you, the sinner, can do none of these. I'm gonna pray that God would do all of these, and that he would do them in abundance in your life, that he would exponentially increase your ability to show mercy over the course of your life, so that when you die, you're the most merciful person, so that when you die, you're the most peaceful person, so that when you die, you're the most loving person, which means that if we're lacking in any of these, we cannot use it as an excuse.

Well, that's just how I'm made. That's just my constitution. That's just my personality. I'm the unmerciful one.

I'm the one who doesn't really get to show love. I'm the one who doesn't have peace, and we excuse ourselves all the time.

What Jude is saying is that he prayed that God would multiply these in your life, in our life, so that we would be conformed to the image of Christ.

Now, the last question that I want us to ask is, how are these things essential for us today, as those who are called, beloved, and kept by Christ?

What we've shown so far is that Jude is arguing that we should respond like Jesus in every circumstance, and that our outward life should mirror the inward reality that's happened to us.

Instead of responding out of anger, or blame -shifting, or stewing in unforgiveness, we would extend God's mercy, because God has been merciful to us.

And again, mercy is not giving someone what they deserve. Mercy is giving them what they don't deserve. Jude is saying, excel at showing mercy, because God has shown mercy to you.

And I want to highlight here that Jude is not talking about, be merciful to the heretics that are in your church.

Jude is not talking about, be merciful to the teachers who are bringing false doctrine. Jude is not saying, be at peace with them.

He's talking from believer to believer. He's talking to people who have been so hurt and so wounded that they're turning in on themselves, and they're having internal conflict, and he's saying, let it not be so among the people of God.

He's saying, excel at showing mercy. He's saying, excel at showing peace and love.

I think the point that we're trying to make is clear. When we experience conflict, especially the kind that Jude's church is experiencing, it's easy to forget who we are in Christ.

It's easy to forget. This morning, when I was rushing around trying to get my clothes on and get here in time,

I wasn't very merciful, wasn't very loving, and I definitely didn't have any peace.

This is why, for all of us here today, we take a moment and we do what

Jude did, and we pray. We say, God, I realize that it is almost an impossibility that I would be merciful.

It's almost an impossibility that I would be loving or have peace. But God, I'm gonna pray, and I'm gonna ask that you would multiply that in my life.

So, as we close, I want us to, if you struggle with any of these areas, if when conflict happens and you respond with a lack of mercy or a lack of love or you have a lack of peace, that you take a moment and that you pray and you would ask

God to multiply these things in your life because he alone can do that. It's not us willing ourselves, it's