Jude 1a

The Call to Preach the Word and Trust the Gospel

Hello everyone, welcome to our very first service at The Shepherd's Church. My name is Kendall and I just wanna welcome everyone here for the launch of what God has been putting on my heart for the last eight years.

This church was born out of a biblical conviction that the word of God must be preached. It must be preached. And if we're ever gonna see revival come to New England, if we're gonna see lost people come to know Jesus, if we're gonna see the kingdom of God advancing in this part of the country, then we've got to preach the word of God.

It says in Romans 1 16, which is a verse that's been central to my heart, central to my thinking for the last five, six months, it says, for I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes.

Which means that there is nothing other than the gospel which will save men and will bring healing to our land. There is nothing other than the gospel for which we should structure everything in our churches.

It means if we wanna see the power of God come down on this place and fall on this place, then we must be preoccupied with nothing other than the preaching of the gospel of God. If we wanna see God's power overwhelming sinners and bringing them to repentance, if we wanna see the true knowledge of God and salvation for their souls in this place, then we have to preach the gospel.

God has not called us to partner with the world and to use its tricks and its schemes in order to reach it. We've not been given permission to create fancy shows and concerts that put all of the focus onto ourself and take the focus off of God.

You see, the spectacle of the Christian church is not our performances. The spectacle of the Christian church is the triune God. He is what we come to marvel at. He is what we come to worship. He is what we come to be in awe of.

Not our programming, not our performances, not our shows. We're the bride of Christ. We've not been called to dress this whole thing up to make it attractive to the world. We've been told to love and adore him, to be faithful to him and to structure everything that we do around his great and glorious gospel.

That's the power of God. We're called to preach like our lives depended on it. You're called to sit under the word of God as if heaven and hell lie in the balance. We're called to be like dying men to dying men, going out into the culture and telling people about the gospel because our life is but a vapor and only what we do for Jesus is gonna last.

And you think about this as a church, a brand new church, our first week that we're meeting, we're trusting in the Lord that he is gonna accomplish what he wants to accomplish so long as we're faithful.

And being faithful is relying on the gospel. It's having everything in our ministry structured around the gospel. And that's not easy in a culture where compromise is easier, where entertainment is easier.

Easy is not what I believe that the American church is called to if we wanna see revival happen. Easy is what compromises. Easy is what accepts everything. Easy never challenges the status quo. Easy is garrison.

Now, you may not be familiar with that word, but when I was in the army, there was two fundamental ways that we would view life and the world. Either we were at war or we were in garrison. And garrison just means that there's no active threat, there's no hostile situations that we can go on about our lives at a lower alert level.

A garrison is when we shined our shoes. And garrison is when we ironed pretty creases in our uniform. And garrison is when we went to work at nine o 'clock in the morning and got off at five and we went out and had a drink with our friend.

And garrison is when we weren't worried that anything was going to happen. But when the Twin Towers struck with that rogue plane that was weaponized against our people, no one was worried any longer about shiny boots or creases in our uniform.

We went to war. We sprung into action. We went completely out of the garrison mindset to prepare for what was coming. And you know, it's my belief that the American church has been under attack for countless years, but it's forgotten to stop living in garrison.

We've forgotten who we are. We're soldiers for Christ. There's a war going on in the spiritual realms. There's a war going on in this nation against the church and against Christ. And we've settled into a place of sin.

We've settled into a place of safety. We've believed that we have freedom of religion when that freedom might not always be there. We've believed that we can just settle into this sort of comfort that takes us to church week in and week out, not ever imagining that there may not be a faithful church one day.

You look at New England. There's not many faithful churches. What happens if our grandkids don't even have a faithful church to go to? We live in a region, ladies and gentlemen, that the fabric of society is decaying all around us and the church is no longer the answer that people are looking to.

We live in a time where many inside the church are even abandoning their faith that was delivered once and for all by the apostles and through God's holy word. Instead of clinging to this book, instead of faithfulness, instead of understanding that we're soldiers for Christ called to faithfulness, in the American church, we've abandoned the gospel for the social gospel, for the liberal agenda, for entertainment, emotionalism, psychology, sociology, anthropology, think for anything other than God.

We have forgotten that we are a priesthood of all believers, a holy people that is set apart for the ministry that God has given us. We cannot live at garrison. We cannot forget who we are. We must live our lives as if every single moment matters for the kingdom of God.

And you know, we're thankful that we get to gather here today as a church. As a brand new church plant, we are thankful to God for that. But one church is not the answer. We need dozens and dozens and dozens of churches to reach this region.

One church, as incredible as it is that we are here and that we are gathering, is not enough. We need men who will step up and accept the call to go and plant churches in other towns and cities. We need women who will come alongside of other women and raise up the next generation of disciple makers and men and women who love God.

We need churches that will draw a line in the sand and they will say, this book is all we need. This book is sufficient. We need the spirit of God, people, to keep us faithful. We need the spirit of God to keep us humble.

We need the spirit of God to keep us on mission because without his ministry and this ministry, we won't even be a ministry. And I say all of this as a matter of introduction, just to say that I'm thankful that we are here.

I'm thankful that we exist. And I'm thankful that we get to open up the Bible today and that we get to study it because we're gonna be looking at a book that is roughly the same situation that we're in right now.

We're a young church. We're in a culture that is walking away from God. We're in a church where wolves are coming in and where they're teaching false doctrine. And I could think of no better book in the Bible for us to open up our very first weekend studying than the book of Jude, which is found right at the very end of the New Testament.

And it details many of the problems that we are facing today. There's nothing new that we're going through. It's an old story. You know, we face the same struggles that they were facing, the same heartaches, the same persecutions of a sort.

We face the same infiltration of false doctrine from withinside the church that they were facing. This is an old problem for a new church. So with that, I want us to do two things. I want us to look at the book of Jude and I want us to understand a little bit more about this great book.

And then I want us to understand just one thing for the rest of our day today. I want us to understand what Jude understood about himself. I want us to understand who he thought he was because before he deals with the problems and before he deals with the cultural issues, before he deals with the false teachers, he dealt with himself.

He went back to who am I? And who am I gonna be moving forward? And I think for us as a church, we have to ask ourself the question, do we know who we are? Like Jude, do we know who we are? Because until we know who we are, we can't actually face the problems.

Jude’s Place in the Early Church and the Neglect of His Letter

So let's talk about Jude for a second. Jude was written early, I believe. It was actually a well-circulated letter and a popular text in the early church. Many church fathers actually, like Tertullian and Clement and some others, mentioned the book of Jude by name, which means that it had widespread approval among the early church.

It was also a book that archaeologists have found lots of copies from, either full copies or fragments of copies. And they found these scattered all throughout the Roman world so that it means that it not only had widespread approval, it had widespread readership.

It was probably read in many churches early on. And it was a text that brought immense comfort to many Christians who were struggling and who were wondering what hope that they had in Christ. They were wondering if they were secure in their faith or they were wondering how to navigate the pressures of being a Christian in a world that hates the truth, especially when the false teachers were creeping in.

And they were distorting the pure teaching of the word of God. So this book was an important book right at the very beginning. Peter, even, the Apostle Peter, one of the great early founders of the church.

Many scholars now believe that Peter used the book of Jude in his second chapter and his second epistle as his primary source material. You know, a great thing that you could do this week is as you sit down and as you read the text, sit down with 2 Peter 2 and then sit down with Jude and look at how Peter is using Jude and how he's incorporating the truths from Jude.

And this is important because it teaches us that not only did the apostolic fathers have widespread approval for this book, not only did it have widespread readership, but one of the great early leaders of the church, Peter himself, affirmed this book.

And he loved this book. And because we know that Peter did that, we can also know a little bit about the dating of the book. Peter died in 68 AD. He was killed by the Emperor Nero in a Roman prison, no less.

And if Peter died in 68, that meant the book would have needed to have been written earlier than that. It would have needed to be written at least by 68. But if you think about the fact that it takes books a long time to get into the circulation of the people, and it might would have taken a couple of years before Peter had access to it, so that if you think if Peter wrote this book on the last day of his life, right before he was murdered, then the book probably would have needed to be written by 65 or 63 to give it enough time to get into the circulation of the churches.

And then if you think probably Peter didn't write it on his deathbed, then you could even see how some scholars would come to the conclusion that Jude could be as early as the 50s, which would make it one of the earlier books in the New Testament.

So here we have a book that's widespread approved by the Apostolic Fathers. It's widespread read throughout the Roman Empire. It's early, which means that it goes all the way back to the events. It's got Peter's stamp of approval.

Here we have a book that was a favorable book. Here we have a book that was a beloved book in the New Testament. So why is it then that when we come to our day that it's one of the most neglected books in the entire Bible?

How did that happen? How did that come about in the course of 2 ,000 years that a book that was beloved in the early church has now completely fallen out of favor? Well, I think there's three reasons for that that I'd like to go through now with you.

Why Jude’s Tone, Hard Topics, and Call to Holiness Are Often Rejected

The first reason is that it has a tone. We live in New England and we understand that it's good to be frank and it's good to say what you're thinking and Jude does that. Jude doesn't mince any words. He goes right after the problems that are going on in the church and he doesn't waste any time getting there.

He starts right away in verse three. And the tone of the book, actually, has caused many people to believe that it's an intolerant book, that it's overly judgmental, that it's unloving and maybe contrary to the message of grace that they believe that permeates the rest of the New Testament.

But that's a false view of what grace is. That's a false view of what loving is when we look at a book that God inspired and we don't like it just because of the tone. You see, we live in a world, and I've experienced this myself, that I can sometimes be right, but I can have a certain tone about me.

And because I have a tone about me, everything that I've just said is completely dismissed. You know, we have a way of saying that you can be right in the wrong way. But you're still right. You've still spoken the truth.

And the wrong way, when we say that you've said something in the wrong way, that's an American view of what the right way to say something is. Jude, in his society, was much more frank than even New Englanders.

They said the truth just as it was. So for us to look at a book like Jude and say, we don't like this book because it's too direct, we don't like this book because it's too honest, we don't like this book because it's in a desert mince words.

Well, that's us putting onto the book something that shouldn't be there. This is God's word. There's this stream of cultural relativism in our society that assumes that you can only agree with someone if they're agreeable.

Or you can only be loving if you agree with what people say. You can never challenge anyone from the word of God. You can never call out their sin. You can never talk about things like that. It assumes that truth is personal and that everyone has their differing truth claims.

And if it's true for you, then great. If it's not true for me, then fine. But when did we get to decide what is true? Especially when we're talking about the word of God. Who made us the standard bearer of what is real and what is actual?

See, at the Shepherd's Church, we don't share this cultural opinion. We believe that all of God's word is true. All of God's word is true and it's useful and it's profitable for the church. And we're not gonna cherry pick Bible passages just because it's not popular in the modern world.

Because we believe that the flock of God lives most healthy under a steady diet of the word of God and that that is for our joy and for our benefit and for our correction and for our exhortation and sanctification.

We don't believe like many in the modern church that some parts of God's word must be avoided. We believe that all of it is for the people of God and to deprive people of portions of scripture that are inspired by God is to mimic their sanctification.

So in the series, we want people to learn to love the book of Jude like the early church loved the book of Jude. We want men and women to rest in its truth and become acquainted with its divinely inspired message.

That's point number one, the reason why I think the book has fallen out of favor. The second point is that I believe the topics that it covers are hard for a lot of people in the modern church because we don't talk about anything really of substance anymore.

We give sermons that basically pump you up and make you feel like you're special and tell you to go and do three things to make yourself feel better about your life, but we don't talk about deep things anymore.

We don't talk about unpopular themes and doctrines like sin and judgment, false teaching and hell, which are not only unpopular, but they're completely avoided in a lot of churches. And that's sad to me because that assumes that God got it wrong when he decided to write this book.

It's almost like if God had it to do over again, what he should have done is he should have rewritten the book in such a way that it was more loving and more gentle and it didn't offend our modern sensibilities.

That's what we're saying. That's what we're saying when we look at a book like this and avoid it because it has hard truth. What we're saying is you shouldn't have had hard truth. You should have pandered to me.

It also assumes like Thomas Jefferson assumes and like Mark Twain assumes that when you come to the text of scripture, that if there's a problem, it's not you, it's the text. Scripture must be the problem instead of me because it doesn't make me feel good.

And again, this makes us the standard of whether something is true or false. This makes us God in our own eyes. If we like it, it's true. If we don't, it's false. And we can throw it out completely. And I don't see that as the best method.

I'm being tongue in cheek here of approaching the text. I see that in the Bible, that we're supposed to submit our lives under this text humbly. And the Bible should offend us. The Bible should offend us entirely because we are wretched creatures who sin constantly.

For all have fallen short of the glory of God. No one is righteous, no not one. The Bible should offend us. The Bible shouldn't mess with us. The Bible should pinpoint those areas of our life that are still not sanctified.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of understanding, not the love of ourselves. That's the second reason. The third reason is I think that this book has fallen out of favor is that it typifies the typical Christian life.

And I think that the typical Christian life according to scripture is vastly been thrown out. We live in a world today where typical Christian life is not any more consistent with what typical Christian life was in scripture.

And this book strikes right at the heart of this concept known as antinomianism. And I know that's a word that most people are not familiar with. It just means no law. It means that you're a Christian who's been saved by grace, but because you've been saved, you're no longer bound to any kind of standard of morality to live by.

God's given you grace. You've raised your hand. You've made a decision. You've done something like that. And you no longer feel like you need to do anything for Jesus. You don't need to live for Jesus even.

You don't need to serve him, sacrifice for him. You don't need to do anything like that because you made a decision. You chose Jesus as your savior. Jesus is gonna give you heaven because you made that decision and now you move on about your life and you do something else.

You've already handled that part of it. You've already checked off that box. So that when someone comes and starts talking about obedience, you say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't tell me about that. That's legalism.

Don't tell me to be more loving. Don't tell me to be more generous. Don't tell me to be more gracious with my time. Don't tell me to stop swearing or to stop doing this or this or that. Don't tell me to be more sanctified.

Don't tell me all these things because I'm gonna call you a legalist. I'm gonna call you a fundamentalist. Why would you tell me to obey? Is that legalism? And because of that, there's this Christian idea of freedom that many have used as a license for sin.

That we say God is a forgiver and I'm a sinner and we make a perfect match. And this is very, very common in the modern church. Sanctification has been thrown completely out of the window. We believe that we're saved through a decision of raising our hand, which is not in the Bible.

We believe that our salvation requires absolutely nothing of our life, which is not in the Bible. We believe that we're somehow utterly free to do whatever we want because God cares about our free will and our decisions and he doesn't want to violate our decisions.

So he basically leaves us to do whatever we think is good, whatever we think is right, whatever we want to do in our life. And we don't include God in our decision-making processes at all, which is not in the Bible.

And while it's true that Christ has offered us grace and he's delivered us from the demands of the law, it's also true that if we love Christ, we will obey his commandments. Jesus says that if you love me, you will obey me.

So while it's clear to me that this book has fallen out of favor in the modern world, I think it's an important book. I think it's an important book for us to focus on. I think it's an important book for us to listen to the tone and the urgency of Jude and to learn something about what he's saying because it is urgent.

The situation is dire. We live in a culture that if we don't do something, if we don't plant churches, if we don't see faithful churches replicate, if we don't see unfaithful churches repent or shut down, then we won't have a church to send our grandkids to.

The situation really is dire. So I want us to sit under this teaching and learn from his tone that this is an urgent call. I want us to sit under the heavy topics of Jude and be humble and say, Lord, this is your word.

And even if it offends me, I'm gonna sit under it and I'm gonna love it and I'm gonna learn from it and I'm gonna submit my life under it because it's your word, it's your standard, it's your authority, not me.

And I want us to understand what the typical Christian life is, especially how do you live the Christian life faithfully when we live in an unfaithful world? These are things that I hope that we will get out of the book of Jude.

Jude 1a: Who We Are Before We Face the Problems

But before we go there, before we start talking about that, like I said earlier, I want us to begin where Jude begins. Jude doesn't begin with all the problems. He does get there in verse three and he goes all the way through the book until verse 19 talking about the problems that are in the church.

So we're gonna get there, but I don't want us to start there. I want us to start where Jude begins and that's in verse one. So if you will, turn with me to verse one. We're only gonna cover a half of verse one today, verse 1a, and then next week we'll cover the second half of verse one as we continue on in the series.

So Jude 1a, it says, Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James, which is a fascinating way to open up the book. It's standard letter writing practice, but I think Jude does it for a powerful reason.

You see, Jude doesn't begin with the problems that he's facing, even though they're urgent. He doesn't begin with the persecutions that they are enduring. He doesn't describe the false prophets and the heretical teachers that have swept into the church.

He doesn't even begin with the plan to overcome the mess that the church is facing. Why? Because I think for Jude, the bigger problem that is going on in the church was not the things that are being done from the outside, but the total lack of understanding of who we are on the inside.

At the start of this book, during all the turbulent times that are going on in the church, Jude did not begin touting his accomplishments and performances. He didn't come up with a new church growth strategy.

He didn't try to find a silver bullet solution and then unpack that right at the beginning of this document. No, Jude did what all of us must do. Who live in turbulent times as these. Jude realized in the course of his life who he really was.

And he tells us right at the very beginning of the letter, because when you know who you really are in Christ, you have a better framework to understand how to live your life. Before Jude dealt with any of the external problems he saw in the world around him, he knew that the real problem plaguing his life and plaguing the life of the church is that people very easily forget who they are.

The problems are easy to see, they're all around us. The issues that we face are right in our face, but how often is it that we forget who we are? We need to remind ourself, because when people don't know who they once were without Christ, when people don't know who they now are in Christ, they're ill-equipped to face their life.

And don't get me wrong, the problems that we face are very important. The mission that God has called us to is very important, but there's something more important than that. So we gotta know who we are.

We have to know that. If we're gonna be a healthy church plant, if we're gonna be healthy people who have our identity shaped and formed by Christ, if we don't, we're fooling ourselves. If we don't know who God has made us to be, none of this matters, it's all gonna fade away.

We will be a flash in the pan. We'll be a single spark, a momentary vapor that just disappears as quickly as it appears. If we want to be a church that lasts 100 years, and if we want to be a church that sees God's kingdom expanding in our region, and if we want to be a church that brings hope and healing to the culture, and if we want to see lost people saved and discipled in his gospel, then we must do what Jude is doing.

We must stop and answer the question, do we know who we are? Do we know who God is? And do we know in Christ who God has called us to be? Jude knew. In verse one, he identifies who he is. He says, I'm Jude.

He begins with his name. And just so you know, Jude loves triplets. All throughout this book, he's gonna describe things in series of threes, and it's no shock that in verse 1a, he begins describing even himself in this series of threes.

He says, I'm Jude, I'm a slave, and I'm the brother of James. And in Jude's self-identification of who he is, he tells us three very important things. The first thing is I want you to know is that he tells us who he once was.

He tells us about the man that he was because Jude is not ignorant to the fact that people are gonna know who he is. It was common knowledge at the time that Jude wrote this book that he was the younger brother of Christ.

He knows that he shows up in the writings of Matthew and in the writings of Mark and the writings of Luke and of John. He knows that he shows up in the book of Acts. So when Jude says, my name is Jude, he's appealing to a tradition of knowledge about him because he wants us to know who he was.

He wants us to know his story. Look at Matthew 13, 53 through 55. Here, we learn how Jude shows up in the Gospels. It says, when Jesus had finished these parables, he departed from there and he came to his hometown.

And he began teaching them in their synagogue so that they were astonished. And they said, where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not his mother, Mary, and his brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?

You see, in our book, Jude is saying he's the brother of James. In Matthew, it's saying that Jesus had brothers. There were four of them. One of them was James and another is Judas. Now, just so we're not confused, Jude is the shortened form of Judas.

Actually, in the Greek text of this book, it actually does say that this book was written by Judas. In our English Bibles, it says that it was written by Jude. And that's probably because over time in church history, to differentiate the faithful Judas, the one who wrote this book, from the unfaithful traitor who betrayed our Lord and Savior to the cross, there was a movement that happened to call this man Jude so that he would be differentiated from Judas.

It's almost like you wouldn't name your child Jezebel and you wouldn't name your son Benedict Arnold. It was a way of differentiating Jude from Judas. But we see right here that Jude was the youngest brother of Jesus Christ.

So he wants us to know a little bit about his history. It was known that Jude grew up in the household of Jesus as the youngest brother of five, which means that he was probably a baby when Jesus was a teenager.

It meant that he was probably burped and changed by teenage Jesus. He probably saw Jesus finish up his rabbinic training. He probably saw Jesus pack up his tools every day to go to work with Joseph in the nearby towns.

He probably looked up to Jesus and admired him greatly as an older brother, even almost like a father figure because scholars have taught us, and we know that Joseph died the father sometime before Jesus went into ministry.

I don't know how long before. But if Joseph is dead, Jesus is the oldest son, so he takes on a certain leadership in the family. So Jude, being the youngest brother, would have looked up to Jesus not only as an older brother, but almost as a father figure in his life.

He would have probably assumed that Jesus was going to go into the carpentry business and that the brothers were all going to join him in the carpentry business so that they could provide for Mary and for the sisters and for the family.

And you can imagine their shock when Jesus went into ministry instead of carpentry. You can probably imagine his dilemma when Jesus started claiming that he was God in the flesh. Can you imagine if your older sister started proclaiming that they were God?

If your older brother started saying, you know, I'm the Messiah, I'm the one who's come from the Lord? Apparently Jude didn't handle that very well at all. You see, early on, we have evidence of this in the Gospel of John.

When Jesus started his public ministry at Cana at a wedding feast, and he does a miracle by turning water into wine, we get a glimpse of what's going on here. It says, after this, after this miracle had happened, after the wedding is over, he, meaning Jesus, went down to Capernaum, and he and his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

So in John 2, the family is with him. Maybe they thought he should have went into the carpentry business, but he didn't, so they're with him, they're following along with him. And we see early on that James, Jude, Mary, all of these brothers and sisters, they're with Jesus.

But the tensions soon began to mount. Jesus began making claims that no other human being, especially not your older brother, should be making, if you're just a human. Just four chapters later in John 6, which is maybe a year later in the ministry, Jesus says to a crowd, I am the bread of life, meaning that I'm that same bread that God fed his people with by raining flakes of bread down from heaven, except I'm the true bread.

I'm the one who came from heaven. I didn't originate in Mary's womb, no. God sent me from heaven to feed my people because my people are hungry, and they need to be fed. And if you eat the bread that comes from heaven, you will always be hungry, but if you eat from me, if you eat from my flesh, if you eat from my body, I'm the living bread, I'm the true bread, I'm the one that's gonna feed my people.

When he said that, it was a claim to his divinity. It was a claim to his eternality, meaning that he didn't have a beginning, that he didn't just show up in Mary's womb one day, that his originations are from eternity.

When he said that, it caused an uproar. This is one of the very things that caused the Jews to want to kill him, it says in verse 41. Therefore, the Jews were grumbling about him because he said, I'm the bread of life that came down from heaven.

And they were saying, isn't this Jesus? The son of Joseph, whose father and mother that we know? How can he now say that I've come down from heaven? And it says later on that because of that, they wanted to kill him.

Can you imagine hearing your older brother saying something like this? And as we end chapter six in the Gospel of John, we see that the Jews are angry with him. Well, look at how John seven begins, the very next verse, as you turn the page.

After these things, after this encounter with the Jewish leadership, Jesus was walking in Galilee. For he was unwilling to walk in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the feast of the Jews, the feast of booths was near.

Therefore, his brother said to him, leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples may also see your works which you are doing. For no one does anything in secret when he himself seeks to be known publicly.

This is the mocking him. If you do these things, well, then show yourself to the world, Jesus. Do you see what's happened? In John six, the Jews are mocking him and in John seven, even his own brothers are mocking him.

And John gives the editorial note, for not even his brothers were believing in him. And let's just be clear here, Jude, the writer of the book that we are studying was standing there mocking his brother Jesus.

At another occasion, in Jesus's ministry, his family is so concerned with him that they attempt to take him by force because they think he's crazy. In Mark chapter three, which happens after the events of John chapter six, it says, then he went home and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat.