Jude 17-19

Amen, let's pray.

Remembering the Word, the Spirit, and Christ’s Return

Father God, thank you so much that we can gather here to discuss your word. And Lord, I pray that just as the Old Testament prophets said that there would come a day when you write these words on our heart, Lord, I pray that we would have this word written on our heart today.

That Lord, that we would put down any of our self-sufficiency and our self-trust and self-love and that we would come to the throne of grace and that we would look to you for everything. Lord God, I pray that you would be with all of us as the word is going to be preached.

Lord, I pray that it would be the word that is preached and not my ideas. Lord, I pray that you would speak through me in a way that only you could get the glory, only you could get the credit. And Lord, I pray that you would grow this church deep in the gospel.

And Lord, as we go out, I pray that you would use us out in the world for your kingdom, for your glory. It's in Christ's name that we pray, amen. So, I wanna just first of all say welcome. We've got a couple people who are guests tonight and I just wanna say welcome to the Shepherd's Church.

The church for us was, we planted this out of a conviction that the Bible is the word of God and it must be preached. So with that, I want us to look at Jude and we're gonna be in 17 through 25. Now, if you remember last week in verses eight through 16, Jude leveled a case against the false prophets that were coming into his church, the false teachers that were coming into his church.

And what he did was, is he organized this case against them and he really leveled three indictments that would lead to their unmistakable judgment. The first indictment was that they hate God's word. It says in the text that they leaned into their own, their own dreams and their feelings and they reviled angelic witnesses.

Essentially what they were being indicted for is that they hated God's word. The second indictment was that they hated God's people. The text says that they were like hidden reefs that destroy. They were like clouds without water that disappoint God's people.

They were like wild waves that disappoint and lead sailors astray, just like Christians are led astray by false doctrine. And they drag people away like a wandering star that explodes into black darkness.

These are vivid metaphors that Jude uses to describe these people. And the point was, is that they not only hate God's word,.

They hate God's people.

And then the final point that he made last week is that they hate godly living. They're like Cain and their anger. They're like Balaam and their jealousy and they're like Korah and their desire for power.

These are the men who had snuck into Jude's congregation and the case against them was total. And the thing that we learned, the thing that convicted them was not necessarily their sin because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Every single person has fallen short of God's glorious standard. The thing that convicted the people in Jude's church was that they didn't have an advocate. There was no one there to stand for them. Remember that we read in verse nine that Moses, in the apocryphal book of 1 Enoch, there's this story about Moses and that Satan comes to claim his body and the angel says, no, the Lord rebuke you.

And remember we learned that the only reason why Christians do not also suffer the judgment is because we have an advocate in Jesus Christ who that if the enemy were to ever come and try to claim us, we cannot be claimed because Christ's sacrificial death on the cross has already claimed us and we cannot be lost now that we have been found.

So that was the point of last week. This week, Jude is gonna enter us into the final section of the book. This is verses 17 through 25 and these verses are Jude's treatment on how to encourage the church that's been suffering.

Jude is essentially gonna take his focus now off of the false teachers, off of the wolves and he's gonna focus on his congregation and he's going to encourage them with four different truths over the next four weeks.

Those are gonna be that we are to remember, which is what we're gonna talk about today, that we are to remain in God's love and that we are to rescue the broken, that's week three and then week four, we are to rest in the truths of Christ.

This is how the book is gonna end with these four poignant examples and today we're gonna talk about why it's so important for Christians that we remember as we await the judgment of God. So turn with me to verse 17 as we begin our time in these verses.

It says, 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 lust.

These are the ones who cause division, who are worldly minded and devoid of the spirit. Now think about it this way, Jude is talking to a group of people who have been persecuted and who have been hurt by false teachers, who have been, all of this stuff is going on and he is telling them that the fundamental thing that they have to do is they have to be a people who remember.

They have to be a people who remember not just who they are, but who Christ is and what we're gonna see today is that there's three things that we must remember as we live in a world that hates truth and as we live in a time where Jesus has not yet returned, where false teachers still exist in the church, where all kinds of trouble is happening, we have to remember three things and if we remember those three things, it will bring us hope, it will bring us peace, it will bring us joy.

Those three things that we're gonna talk about today is that we must remember to stand on the word of God alone. The second thing that we're gonna see is that we must stand on the Holy Spirit's power alone and then finally, as we end, we're gonna talk about, we're gonna stand faithfully until Christ calls us home.

Standing on the Word of God Alone

The first thing is we must stand on the word of God alone. Jude says in verse 17, beloved, you ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. In opposition to the false teachers who had forgotten the word, Christians are called to remember the word and to not be like these men.

Destruction had come to the false teachers because they had forgotten the word of God so Jude commands his church to remember the words of life, the word of God. Now, he uses this phrase, the words of the apostles, as we learn in verse three and throughout the book, that is Jude's way of saying the Bible.

The words that the Holy Spirit authored inside the apostles that they handed down to the individual churches and that were eventually written down into the Bible that we have, that's what Jude is saying, remember the teachings of the apostles, aka the Bible.

And the reason that Jude says this is he's contrasting with these false teachers. These false teachers have come in and they've said many words. They've said many things to try to undermine the faith of this church.

They've said many things to undermine Christ. So he's saying, don't listen to their words, listen to the words of the apostles. That's the authentic message of Christ, not the counterfeit, this new flashy counterfeit that's being told to you.

And this is a relevant thing for us to understand as we live in a society today where everyone is so concerned about novelty and new ways of presenting the truth. We are called to remember the good truth that was revealed 2 ,000 years ago in the Bible and it is still good today, as good as it was 2 ,000 years ago.

If somebody comes preaching a false gospel, we are to reject it because we have the gospel of Christ. We are to remember that we stand by the word of God alone. 500 years ago in the Reformation, when the Catholic church had taken the doctrines of the Bible and had twisted them and manipulated them, the rally cry of the Reformation was sola scriptura, the word of God alone.

That is the people that we are. We wanna lean into that because when we are attacked, the word of God is our defense. When we are being misled, the word of God is our guide. It's a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

When we come into trouble and when we are doubting, the word of God is true and it gives us hope. For every problem that the church has faced from Jude's time all the way until our time, the word of God has an answer.

The word of God is central to everything that we do. And when it is preached in truth and when it is clung to by God's people and when it is upheld and honored, the church lives and is vibrant and is healthy.

But when the word of God is maligned and when the word of God is thrown away and when the word of God is undermined and new doctrines come in, the church always dies, every time, every time. Jude is saying that the health of the community and the individual Christian is fundamentally tied to how you view the Bible.

Do you believe that it's God's holy word or do you believe that it's just some words by some people and it's helpful if it's helpful, but not if it's not? If you believe that, then you will eventually slide into error.

But if you make the word of God central to everything that you do, it will bring life. Now, when Jude calls us to remember the Bible, remember the word, he's not telling us to simply think about the Bible that we have on our shelf.

He's not telling us to think about the new Bible that we wanna buy that has the coloring pages in it and you can do all, those are great. What he's saying when he tells us to remember the word, he's saying to have a healthy and ongoing, committed relationship to the word of God.

And he is so serious about this that he commands it. Not only to read it, but to remember it. Think about it this way, you cannot remember what you have not committed to memory. Jude is saying not only to read the Bible, but to get it into you so that it will produce fruit in you.

Now, Jude uses a type of verb called an imperative. In English, if I'm gonna command someone to do something, I might use exclamation points. I might say, I command you to do X. In Greek, you use an imperative.

And this is the first time in the book that Jude has used an imperative, which means that he thought this thing was so important that he would need to command it. He's not saying that it would be a good idea to think about the Bible or the word of God, he's saying that you must get into the word of God so that the word of God can get into you.

It's like an apple tree. If the apple seeds just lie in the bag, that's great, but you'll never have any apple trees. You actually have to dig and plant it. And it has to be in warm soil. If it's frozen soil, it won't work.

And in the same way, the word of God is just words on a page if it doesn't actually get open and if it doesn't actually get into you. And if your heart is cold and not receptive to it, it's just carbon and leather and words on a page.

What Jude is saying is not only read it, don't only look at it, that let it get inside of you because when the word of God gets inside of you, it will produce fruit. Now, when we think about commands as Americans, we don't like commands.

I don't like commands.

When I drive in the country in New Hampshire somewhere and I see a 25 mile an hour speed limit sign, I'm like, it's totally arbitrary. I wanna defy that and go 45, maybe. We are American people who wanna be free, autonomous agents.

We're democratic people. We're not all Democrats, but we're democratic. We wanna vote on everything. We're the people that say, give me liberty or give me death. A strong statement. If you don't give me my freedom, I wanna die.

That's what New Hampshire says. Live free or kill me, essentially. We have this idea in America that it's unloving for anyone to tell us anything if we don't wanna do it. So when we come to the Bible, it's really difficult for us when we are commanded to do things.

But the Bible, we must remember, was not written in a democracy. The Bible was written under a monarchy. And for every moment of faithful biblical witness, it's when the people of God viewed him as their righteous king.

There's 613 commands in the Old Testament given by God to his people. There's hundreds of commands in the New Testament. And it's not because God just wants to show his authority and push us around. The commands are given because God is wiser than us.

He's more intelligent than us. He's more loving than us. And he's trying to protect us. It's like a mother who looks across the room and yells, stop, when her two-year-old child is about to grab a cup of coffee.

She's being authoritative in that moment because she doesn't want the child to get burned because the child is ignorant. It doesn't know. How often do we get clear commands in the word of God?

No.

And yet out of ignorance, we defy God and we get burned. God is giving us commands because he loves us. God is giving us commands because he knows what's best for us. Now, if God says, this was something that I had to ponder this week.

If God says, just read the word, dwell on the word, let the word get in you richly, why don't we just obey? Why don't we just do what God says? It's kind of like, I was thinking about it this way. A person who's clinically depressed, they go to the doctor and the doctor commands them, essentially, writes down on a prescription, you must take this particular medicine.

And if you take this medicine, it's gonna help you. Why doesn't the person take it? When they take it, their whole life sometimes gets out of track. Their mind gets off course, they become depressed. Why don't they just take the medicine?

And then I asked myself,.

Why is it that we don't just listen to what the good physician has already told us, that the word of God is life instead of allowing ourselves to be so spiritually depressed? Is it any wonder that we often struggle with spiritual depression when we don't read his word, when we don't have a relationship with him by understanding what he has said to us in the Bible?

Jude says, beloved, you ought to remember the words that were spoken because he wants them to have hope. He wants them to have joy as they await Christ's return. This is a command, but it's very loving.

Think about it.

Our lives have this innate ability to push God out if we're not careful. But if we're not careful, our life will push God out and let everything else come in. Think about it. Jobs, kids, families, schedules, and everything else ends up choking out the word of God out of our life.

And without a steady diet of the word of God and our life will be famished.

It's easy.

And what I love about Jude is that he does not do this shaming them. He doesn't say, you know, well, how dare you guys? You didn't do this and you didn't do that. Jude doesn't do that. He doesn't shame them.

He doesn't guilt them. He doesn't say, well, you know, to get you back on track, we're gonna make you sign up for a year long Bible plan and I'm gonna be your accountability partner. And if you don't do it, then I'm gonna, you're really gonna be in trouble and you're gonna have to go to church discipline.

He doesn't do any of that. That's not the kind of commanding that Jude is doing here. Jude is a loving pastor who knows what's best for his people. He's not a dictator. He's kind of like a guy who stands on the edge of a boat and throws out a life vest.

He might yell and say, grab the vest. He's doing it because he knows that that's where life is. He's doing it not to be a dictator. He's doing it to be loving. It's certainly commanding. It's certainly authoritative, but it is also the most loving thing that Jude can do.

Now, I wanna talk about for a second the word remember here. In the Greek, this is an interesting word. There's a couple of different words that Jude could have used to talk about when he talks about remembering.

There's some where the word would almost be like, remember the good old days and remember the things that happened in the past. It's not the word that Jude uses. He uses the word memneskomi. I love saying Greek words.

Isn't it fun?

Memneskomi.

And what this word means is to recall information from memory, to recall something that is already in you. This word assumes that you have a prior knowledge. This word assumes that you've already been reading the Bible, depositing it inside of you.

It's not just words on a page anymore. It's in you. So when Jude calls them to remember, he's calling them to think about, meditate on, dwell on the truth that they already know. That's fascinating to me.

Now, I would say that in American Christianity, let's just make this personal to us. We have the greatest proliferation of Bibles that have ever existed. There has never been a time in human history where more people had access to the word of God.

And I would say that there's never been a time in American history where so many people had no idea what the word of God says. We have more Bibles than we actually know what to do with. And I would, I think we would all agree that there is a biblical literacy problem in the country.

Now, I don't say this at all to shame or guilt. I say this like Jude throwing a life raft. If you have no relationship with the word of God, if you're not reading the Bible, I just encourage you to try it.

You don't have to be a biblical scholar to do it.

Just try it.

Just try it. Get into the word of God. And then you can go to where Jude is saying to go because he doesn't stop there. He says to study it and to understand the doctrines of scripture so that they will be a reservoir of truth that's built up in your mind so that when the trouble comes, it'll be there.

I've heard it said by a pastor. I can't remember who it was, so I can't give credit. We'll just pretend like I said it so I can get the credit. The Holy Spirit can supernaturally remind you of a Bible verse that you've never read, but he doesn't do that.

The whole story of my life and the story of everyone's life that I've read on this issue is that the Holy Spirit normally reminds you and encourages you of the verses that you've read and the verses that you've studied and the verses that you've put inside your heart.

Now, he can remind you of those other verses. That's just not what he normally does. The fundamental contention that Jude is trying to get at is that we must be students of the word of God. We must get the word into us.

If we wanna know how to navigate this life with peace during the storms or chaos or hope when everything seemed hopeless, then we have to get into the Bible and begin stockpiling it in our brains, like a farmer, a farmer who fills his barns full of grain because the winter's coming.

Well, while today is today, we fill our minds full of the truths and the glorious, beautiful doctrines of the word of God so that when the spiritual famine happens or when life happens or when it feels like it's the winter of your soul, you have it and it's in there.

Charles Spurgeon once said, a Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn't. That's one of my favorite quotes. A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn't. And the point is not that they just have an old Bible that their grandma and grandpa had and that the binding is broken and just by nature of the fact that they have a broken Bible doesn't mean that their life is somehow better.

What it means is the person who gets into it, highlights it and underlines it, memorizes it and turns to it at three o 'clock in the morning when they're having difficulties or pain and opens it first thing in the morning, opens it whenever they feel compelled to know God and over the lifetime of that person as they open that Bible, it might be broken physically but the Bible that they have put inside their heart, no one can ever take away from them.

I think we take the Bible for granted.

I know I do. I know I do.

I've got probably eight Bibles on two different bookshelves stacked on top of each other. We have so many copies of it and yet I think about myself, Jude's church. The men and women in Jude's church didn't have copies of the Bible.

It was too expensive. Jude probably had a copy of the Bible. Maybe Jude's elder board, if he had such a thing, had a copy of the Bible but the average person did not have a Bible. Think about that. When you leave Sunday, which is when they gathered and you go into Monday, the only Bible that you would have is what was in your heart.

The only Bible that you would have is what you memorized. Think about how that would affect the way that you listen. Think about how that would affect the way that you, when scripture is just read in public,.

What would it do?

If we miss a verse now, we just Google it. If we don't memorize verses because it's easy just to look up the answers on openbible .com or Bible Gateway, think about if you didn't have access to the Bible.

Think about if one day it became illegal to own one, how much of God would you know because of what you studied diligently and what you put inside your heart if your Bible was ever taken from you? How would you be able to face life?

Would you have the words of life in you? Now, I hope that this never happens. I was thinking about this this week and it was really burdensome to me. If it ever became illegal to be a Christian in this country and your Bible was confiscated, how much of the Bible would you have inside of you?

It was a really powerful point to me because I know that there's more that I could read. There's more that I could study. These are God's words and I wanna put them into my heart. Not as a legalistic type of thing, but just to get them in there.

And I'll tell you why. I was in a situation where this made so much sense to me and it showed me something. There's times where you just can't grab your Bible. As many of you know, I recently fell off of a house.

For those of you who don't know that, I fell off of a house. There you go, you know it. And as I was falling, I didn't have time to reach and grab my iPhone as I was spiraling out of control 20 feet down the roof to look up God's love for me or God's sovereignty.

I didn't have time for any of that. I was totally out of control, but yet it was the most peaceful I had ever felt. And the reason that it was is because three specific verses came to my mind.

As I was falling.

Time is so weird. People always say time goes so slow when something like that has happened.

It's totally true.

I remember Philippians 4 coming into my mind as I was falling, that the peace that surpasses understanding God will grant it to you. I wasn't, at least in my mind, if you would have seen a video of it, which there are none to my knowledge, go to YouTube and see if you can find it.

But if there were a video of it, I don't think I was flailing about out of control. I felt at peace because I remembered the word that Paul had spoken to the Philippians that the peace of Christ will overcome you.

And it's far better than human understanding. I remember that. I remember Philippians 1 .21, to live is Christ and to die is gain. I remember literally, the fall couldn't have been more than three seconds, but I remember thinking, God, you're a better husband than I am.

You're a better father than I am. You're a better provider than I am. And if this is the last moment that I have on earth, as much as I'm gonna miss my family, as much as I think that they would miss me, I'm okay because I know who you are.

And I'm okay to meet you right now. Like I was totally surrendered. And I can't even claim that that was from me. That was the Holy Spirit working in me using the word that was already in there. I didn't actively think about this.

These are things that just came to my mind. The other verse is that he who began a good work in you will see it through to the day of completion. These three verses were blanketing me as I was falling down this roof.

And when I got up, I didn't feel worried. I didn't feel fearful. I just felt total gratitude to God. I didn't have time to turn to a Bible.

That's what I'm saying.

There'll be times in your life when you don't have time to turn to a Bible.

I wrote down in my notes,.

I want you to experience the same things,.

But not to fall off a house. I wrote that down. But when things happen in your life and you can't just grab a Bible, what I'm saying is I want the Bible to be so deeply into you that it just happens, that you just, the spirit of God just starts using the word to minister to your heart.

The spirit of God just starts using his word to help you, to heal you, to make you feel loved, to make you feel grace and mercy and peace. What I'm saying is, is that you might not always have a Bible, but you can put the Bible down in your heart and it is beautiful when the spirit of God starts doing it.

And it's faster than you can grab a Bible. You might be looking for that verse for 20 minutes, but the Holy Spirit's got it. As Christians, practically, the way that we can do this is we can memorize passages of scripture.

That's the way that this happened for me. We can remember core doctrines like justification, sanctification, grace, mercy, love. We can learn what those terms mean and Bible verses that point us to those things.

The point is, is that we must be eager to learn. And again, I'll throw out a word that I think I've heard someone term before. The reason why I'm hitting this so hard is because in America, we have this sort of surrogate spirituality that happens.

We look to our pastors, we look to our leaders, we look to our elders, we look to our deacons, and they know the word of God. I don't need to learn it like they know it. I don't need to read it like they read it because they've got it.

I show up to Sunday and I learn from them and that's just what I do. I would say that in the earliest days of your faith, it is a good thing to let someone else help you. It's like a baby bird. The mother chews up the worms and spits it into their mouth.

As a baby Christian, it is a good thing to have someone with you and helping you and leading you and talking to you and digesting the concepts and helping you understand it. That's a totally a good thing.

But at some point, nature kicks in and the bird jumps out of the nest. And at some point, the Holy Spirit has to kick in and say, you can do this, you can read this, you can understand this. One of the fundamental reasons that I believe that Jude's church was struggling was because they were waiting on Jude and the other pastors and elders to rescue them when the Bible was totally sufficient for them.

This is why Jude tells them to contend because contending is for all Christians, not just a certain group of Christians. And I think this is why the American church limps along in immaturity and frailty because so many people are relegating their spiritual life to someone else, to either their wife or their husband or their pastor or their small group leader.

Our walk with Christ is our responsibility and we must remember the words of Christ. We must not wait for someone else to do that for us. That's what I mean by surrogate Christianity. And I get it, right?

We take our car to the expert because if you had me fix your car, it wouldn't work. So there's a point here to where we take things to the experts. When we have a leaky roof, we let the experts fix it.

But when it comes to your soul, there are no experts over what God is doing in your life. You have a responsibility to know the words of Christ. You have a responsibility to get into the word. No one can do that for you.

Now at this church, we do preach and we try to unpack things in a deep way. And maybe there's times where we talk about things that maybe you've never thought about before. And one of the things that I've seen happen is that Christians can get discouraged because they say, you know, I can't read the Bible like we read it in church or I can't get all of the things out of it like we got out of it in church.

And that's discouraging. But I would just say that you're not called to read the Bible like anyone else. You're called to read it at your level. You're called to read it at the level where you can understand it.

And the most brilliant theologians in the world still find new things buried in these texts. And the most baby Christian still weeps over the simple truth. Children can understand it. If we just treat our engagement with the Bible as something that we do at church, that would be like going to a five-star restaurant and only eating one day out of the week and then going home and starving ourselves for six days because we can't produce the kind of quality that we get at the five-star restaurant.

That would be dangerous. That would leave us malnourished. Even if the only thing you have at home is a pack of ramen, it's better than nothing. Maybe science would disagree with me. I don't actually know the science on that.

But you get my point. If we don't have a steady stream of nourishment, we will atrophy. Our bones and our muscles will actually decay. And I don't want that for any of you spiritually. I don't want your spiritual muscles to become decayed and atrophy.

I want you to just have a relationship with God that's dynamic, where you read the words and you're ministered to by them. Jude assumes that encouragement and hope come from knowing the Bible. That's the first thing that he is telling us to remember.

Remember to stand on the word of God alone. The second thing that he wants us to remember is that we cannot stand by our power alone. Now, we might listen to a message like this and we might be tempted to think, all right, I need to go home and I need to just grit it out.

I need to spend 100 hours of effort and by sheer grit determination, I'm gonna memorize the entire book of Psalms. No, you're not. That's not the heart though, even of what Jude is saying. He's not saying to go home in some sort of meritorious legalism to just start grinding it out with the Bible.

That's not what he's saying. Look at what he says in verse 19 through 20. These, the false teachers, are the ones who cause divisions. They're worldly minded and they're devoid of the spirit. What Jude is saying is that these men don't know the Bible.

They're worldly minded because they don't have the spirit. What he's saying is that we can't even know what the Bible is saying without the spirit of God, that we can't understand what the Bible is saying without the spirit of God, that we can't apply the Bible without the spirit of God.

What Jude is saying is that we cannot by our own power and by our own will and by our own intelligence.

Understand the Bible.

We need help and we need help from the spirit of God. What I love about this passage is that in Jude 17, now the Bible does this a lot. You have to pay attention to the markers. He says, but you beloved, but you beloved, remember the word.

In verse 20, he says, but you beloved. This is what would be called a parallelism here. Jude is saying the same word and he's trying to draw our attention to two major things that we're supposed to remember.

We're to remember the word of God and we're to remember the spirit of God. But Christian, you must remember that you cannot stand on your power alone. You must stand on the spirit of God. It's both. We don't stand by our own power and yet we don't just stand on the Bible alone.

There's many Christians who stand completely on the Bible. Let's call them truth warriors and they're angry and they're hateful and they're always in arguments, they're always in debates and they throw up the Bible in your face like it's a weapon.

That is not what Jude is saying. And then there's the spiritual Christians.

Who don't know anything about the Bible,.

But they're so in touch with the spirit and it's this amorphous thing. That is not what Jude is saying. Jude is saying that it is both spirit and in truth, that if we're gonna navigate this life and understand joy and peace and contentment.

And everything else,.

That we must have both spirit and truth. Jude is contrasting these false prophets, the one who calls divisions, worldly minded, devoid of the spirit, they don't know the word, they don't have the spirit with the Christians who have both, both the word of God, both the spirit of God,.