Jude 1a

The Shepherd's Church

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Which means that there is nothing other than the gospel which will save men and will bring healing to our land.

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There is nothing other than the gospel for which we should structure everything in our churches.

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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.

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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.

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God has not called us to partner with the world and to use its tricks and its schemes in order to reach it.

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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.

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You see, the spectacle of the Christian church is not our performances.

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The spectacle of the Christian church is the triune God. He is what we come to marvel at.

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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.

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We're the bride of Christ. We've not been called to dress this whole thing up to make it attractive to the world.

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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.

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That's the power of God. We're called to preach like our lives depended on it.

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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.

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And you think about this as a church, a brand new church. Our first week that we're meeting, we're trusting in the

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Lord that he is gonna accomplish what he wants to accomplish so long as we're faithful.

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And being faithful is relying on the gospel. It's having everything in our ministry structured around the gospel.

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And that's not easy in a culture where compromise is easier, where entertainment is easier.

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Easy is not what I believe that the American church is called to if we wanna see revival happen.

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Easy is what compromises. Easy is what accepts everything. Easy never challenges the status quo.

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Easy is garrison. Now, you may not be familiar with that word. But when

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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.

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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.

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A garrison is when we shined our shoes. And garrison is when we ironed pretty creases in our uniform.

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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.

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And garrison is when we weren't worried that anything was going to happen. But when the

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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.

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We went to war. We sprung into action. We went completely out of the garrison mindset to prepare for what was coming.

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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.

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We've forgotten who we are. We're soldiers for Christ.

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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.

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And 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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Instead of clinging to this book, instead of faithfulness, instead of understanding that we're soldiers for Christ, called to faithfulness, in the

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American church we've abandoned the gospel for the social gospel, for the liberal agenda, for entertainment, emotionalism, psychology, sociology, anthropology, for anything other than God.

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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.

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We cannot live at garrison. We cannot forget who we are.

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We must live our lives as if every single moment matters for the kingdom of God.

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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.

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But one church is not the answer. We need dozens and dozens and dozens of churches to reach this region.

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One church, as incredible as it is that we are here and that we are gathering, is not enough.

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We need men who will step up and accept the call to go and plant churches in other towns and cities.

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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

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God. We need churches that will draw a line in the sand and they will say, this book is all we need.

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This book is sufficient. We need the spirit of God, people, to keep us faithful.

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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.

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And I say all of this as a matter of introduction, just to say that I'm thankful that we are here.

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I'm thankful that we exist. And I'm thankful that we get to open up the

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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.

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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.

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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

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New Testament. And it details many of the problems that we are facing today. There's nothing new that we're going through.

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It's an old story. We face the same struggles that they were facing, the same heartaches, the same persecutions of a sort.

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We face the same infiltration of false doctrine from withinside the church that they were facing.

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This is an old problem for a new church. So with that,

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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.

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And then I want us to understand just one thing for the rest of our day today. I want us to understand what

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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.

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He went back to who am I and who am I gonna be moving forward?

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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?

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Because until we know who we are, we can't actually face the problems. So let's talk about Jude for a second.

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Jude was written early, I believe. It was actually a well -circulated letter and a popular text in the early church.

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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.

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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

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Roman world so that it means that it not only had widespread approval, it had widespread readership.

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It was probably read in many churches early on. And it was a text that brought immense comfort to many

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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

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Christian in a world that hates the truth, especially when the false teachers were creeping in.

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They were distorting the pure teaching of the word of God. So this book was an important book right at the very beginning.

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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.

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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

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Peter chapter two and then sit down with Jude and look at how

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Peter is using Jude and how he's incorporating the truths from Jude.

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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,

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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.

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Peter died in 68 AD. He was killed by the emperor Nero in a

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Roman prison, no less. And if Peter died in 68, that meant the book would have needed to have been written earlier than that.

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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 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.

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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

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New Testament. So here we have a book that's widespread approved by the apostolic fathers.

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It's widespread read throughout the Roman Empire. It's early, which means that it goes all the way back to the events.

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It's got Peter's stamp of approval. Here we have a book that was a favorable book.

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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

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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?

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Well, I think there's three reasons for that that I'd like to go through now with you.

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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.

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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.

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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

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New Testament but that's a false view of what grace is.

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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 the tone.

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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.

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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

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American view of what the right way to say something is. Jude and his society was much more frank than even

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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.

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We don't like this book because it's too honest. We don't like this book because it's in a dozen mince words.

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Well, that's us putting onto the book something that shouldn't be there. This is God's word. 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.

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You can never challenge anyone from the word of God. You can never call out their sin.

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You can never talk about things like that. It assumes that truth is personal and that everyone has their differing truth claims.

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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?

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Especially when we're talking about the word of God. Who made us the standard bearer of what is real and what is actual?

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See at the Shepherd's Church, we don't share this cultural opinion. We believe that all of God's word is true.

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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

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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.

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And that that is for our joy and for our benefit and for our correction and for our exhortation and sanctification.

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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.

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So in the series, we want people to learn to love the book of Jude like the early church loved the book of Jude.

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We want men and women to rest in its truth and become acquainted with its divinely inspired message.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And that's sad to me because that assumes that God got it wrong when he decided to write this book.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This makes us God in our own eyes. If we like it, it's true.

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If we don't, it's false. And we can throw it out completely. And I don't see that as the best method.

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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.

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And the Bible should offend us. The Bible should offend us entirely because we are wretched creatures who sin constantly.

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For all have fallen short of the glory of God. No one is righteous, no, not one. The Bible should offend us.

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The Bible shouldn't mess with us. The Bible should pinpoint those areas of our life that are still not sanctified.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of understanding, not the love of ourselves. That's the second reason.

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The third reason is, I think that this book has fallen out of favor is that it typifies the typical

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Christian life. And I think that the typical Christian life, according to Scripture, has vastly been thrown out.

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We live in a world today where typical Christian life is not anymore consistent with what typical

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Christian life was in Scripture. And this book strikes right at the heart of this concept known as antinomianism.

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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

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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.

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God's given you grace. You've raised your hand. You've made a decision. You've done something like that.

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And you no longer feel like you need to do anything for Jesus. You don't need to live for Jesus even.

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You don't need to serve him, sacrifice for him. You don't need to do anything like that because you made a decision.

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You chose Jesus as your savior. Jesus is gonna give you heaven because you made that decision.

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And now you move on about your life and you do something else. You've already handled that part of it.

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You've already checked off that box. So that when someone comes and starts talking about obedience, you say, no, no, no, no, no.

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Don't tell me about that. That's legalism. Don't tell me to be more loving.

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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.

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Don't tell me to be more sanctified. Don't tell me all these things because I'm gonna call you a legalist.

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I'm gonna call you a fundamentalist. Why would you tell me to obey? Is that legalism?

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And because of that, there's this Christian idea of freedom that many have used as a license for sin.

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That we say God is a forgiver and I'm a sinner and we make a perfect match.

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And this is very, very common in the modern church. Sanctification has been thrown completely out of the window.

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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

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Bible. We believe that we're somehow utterly free to do whatever we want because God cares about our free will and our decisions.

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And he doesn't wanna 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.

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And we don't include God in our decisions. 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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I want us to sit under the heavy topics of Jude and be humble and say, Lord, this is your word.

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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.

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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?

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These are things that I hope that we will get out of the book of Jude. But before we go there, before we start talking about that, like I said earlier,

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I want us to begin where Jude begins. Jude doesn't begin with all the problems.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It's standard letter writing practice, but I think Jude does it for a powerful reason. You see,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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No, Jude did what all of us must do. Who live in turbulent times as these.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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So we gotta know who we are. We have to know that.

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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.

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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.

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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 wanna be a church that sees

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God's kingdom expanding in our region, and if we wanna be a church that brings hope and healing to the culture, and if we wanna see lost people saved and discipled in his gospel, then we must do what

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Jude is doing. We must stop and answer the question, do we know who we are? Do we know who

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God is? And do we know in Christ who God has called us to be?

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Jude knew. In verse one, he identifies who he is. He says, I'm Jude.

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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 the series of threes.

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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.

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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.

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It was common knowledge at the time that Jude wrote this book that he was the younger brother of Christ.

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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.

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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.

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He wants us to know his story. Look at Matthew 13, 53 through 55. Here, we learn how

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Jude shows up in the Gospels. It says, when Jesus had finished these parables, he departed from there and he came to his hometown.

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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?

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Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not his mother Mary and his brothers

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James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? You see, in our book,

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Jude is saying he's the brother of James. In Matthew, it's saying that Jesus had brothers.

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There were four of them. One of them was James and another is Judas. Now, just so we're not confused,

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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.

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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

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Lord and Savior to the cross, there was a movement that happened to call this man

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Jude so that he would be differentiated from Judas. It's almost like you wouldn't name your child

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Jezebel and you wouldn't name your son Benedict Arnold. It was a way of differentiating

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Jude from Judas. But we see right here that Jude was the youngest brother of Jesus Christ.

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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

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Jesus was a teenager. It meant that he was probably burped and changed by teenage

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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.

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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 that we know that Joseph died the father sometime before Jesus went into ministry.

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I don't know how long before. But if Joseph is dead,

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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.

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

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And you can imagine their shock when Jesus went into ministry instead of carpentry.

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You can probably imagine his dilemma when Jesus started claiming that he was God in the flesh.

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Can you imagine if your older sister started proclaiming that they were God? If your older brother started saying,

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I'm the Messiah, I'm the one who's come from the Lord? Apparently, Jude didn't handle that very well at all.

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You see, early on, we have evidence of this in the Gospel of John.

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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.

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It says, after this, after this miracle had happened, after the wedding is over, he, meaning

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Jesus, went down to Capernaum and he and his mother and his wife and his brothers and his disciples and they stayed there for a few days.

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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.

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And we see early on that James, Jude, Mary, all of these brothers and sisters, they're with Jesus.

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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.

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Just four chapters later in John 6, which is maybe a year later in the ministry, Jesus says to a crowd,

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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When he said that, it caused an uproar. This is one of the very things that caused the

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Jews to want to kill him, it says in verse 41. Therefore, the Jews were grumbling about him because he said,

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I'm the bread of life that came down from heaven. And they were saying, isn't this

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Jesus? The son of Joseph, whose father and mother that we know?

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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.

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Can you imagine hearing your older brother saying something like this? And as we end chapter six in the

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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.

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After these things, after this encounter with the Jewish leadership, Jesus was walking in Galilee.

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For he was unwilling to walk in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.

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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.

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For no one does anything in secret when he himself seeks to be known publicly.

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This is the mocking him. If you do these things, well then show yourself to the world,

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Jesus. Do you see what's happened? In John six, the

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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.

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And let's just be clear here, Jude, the writer of the book that we are studying was standing there mocking his brother,

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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.

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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.

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And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him for they were saying he is out of his mind.

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And who could blame them? No one had a brother like that. Nobody else's brother was saying these things.

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I'm sure it would have been difficult to not think that he was a little bit crazy in a human sense, no one had ever acted like this. Maybe they thought he had some sort of PTSD from when

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Joseph died and carrying the weight of the family on his shoulders. Maybe he was now trying to make a name for himself somehow else.

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Maybe they thought the pressures of ministry were too much for him and he should have stayed in the carpentry business. Maybe they were thinking a lot of different things but they weren't bowing down and worshiping him, they were mocking him.

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And they even went beyond mocking him to pitying him, hoping to seize him by force because they thought he'd lost his mind.

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Jude was there to seize Jesus Christ, to take him home, to stop the ministry.

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Jude was there mocking him. Jude was there rejecting him. Jude tells us his name because he's not ashamed of his past.

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He wants us to learn from it, he wants us to know who he is. And after this moment, he disappears from the gospel narrative.

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He doesn't show back up again in the entire gospels but he does show up in the book of Acts.

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After Jesus has died, after he's risen from the dead, after he's ascended into heaven, the text says, when they had entered the city, that's the disciples, they went up to the upper room where they were staying and that is

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Peter and John and James and Andrew and Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, the son of Alphaeus, Simon Zealot, Judas, the son of James.

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These were all with one mind and were continually devoting themselves to prayer because they had seen

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Jesus Christ raised from the dead. And because they knew that everything that he said must be true if this man rose from the dead.

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No one can rise from the dead unless they're the son of God. And who else do we see?

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At the end of verse 14, as all the disciples are gathered around to pray, to wait for the

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Holy Spirit to come upon them, we see that they are also joined by the women, by Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.

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And with Jude. Jude is there in the upper room.

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Jude is there waiting for the Holy Spirit to come upon them because he no longer believes that Jesus is just his brother.

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He now believes that Jesus is the son of the living God. And how does that happen? How does a cold -hearted skeptic turn from that to believe?

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How does a biological brother bow down and worship him as the son of God and that's the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

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The resurrection of Jesus Christ. When he appeared to Jude, when he appeared to James, when he appeared to the disciples, there was now nothing that their brains could do to argue with it.

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This man must be the son of God. And it's the resurrection of the son of God that brought these men into faith.

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And it's the resurrection of the son of God that brings us into faith. And that is what the gospel is.

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The gospel is the story of Jesus coming to this earth, living, breathing, dying, but then rising to life so that he could rescue his people.

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Paul says it this way. Now I have made known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you.

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And I've told it to you as in first importance what I received that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and then he appeared to the 12.

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And after that, he appeared to more than 500 brothers at that time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.

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And then he appeared to James, that's the brother of Jude, and then also to the apostles. What he is saying is that Jesus revealed his resurrection to these men and that was what saved them.

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You see, you can believe that Jesus is just a good moral teacher. You can believe that Jesus is just a good prophet or just a good man, but you have to come to grips with the fact that this man raised from the dead.

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More than 500 people saw it. Most of them were living when this was written. All of them could have objected to what

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Paul was saying if it were not true. No one objected. No one found a tomb with a body in it.

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There is a man who died and he left nobody behind because he rose from the dead.

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And if you're a skeptic today and if you don't believe in Christ, you have to wrestle with the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is what

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Jude, which is what James, which is what Paul, which is what people who hated Jesus had to wrestle with.

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And all of them, once they wrestled with it, came out as people who didn't only love Jesus, they worshiped him and bowed down at his feet as the son of the living

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God. Jude tells us who he is because he wants us to see that he was a skeptic, that he was a hater of God, that he was a mocker of Christ.

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But in the end, he bowed down and worshiped him. Before Jude deals with any problems in the church, before he deals with any problems in his own life, before he deals with any frustrations that he may be having over the current situation that he's writing this book about, he goes back to the beginning and he says,

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I'm Jude, I'm the man who denied him. I'm the man who mocked him.

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I'm the man who thought he was crazy. And by sheer grace alone,

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I have come to where I now stand so that I can have grace and mercy on others.

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You see, he reminded himself of who he was so that he could face the problems that he now faced.

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That's the first thing he tells us about himself is that he's Jude. He appeals to the common record.

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The second thing that he tells us is that he's a slave. Jude paints this picture that he doesn't want any of us to have any lack of clarity that he is a slave.

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It says, Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James.

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What Jude is saying here is that being Jesus' biological brother was not enough.

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He had been his biological brother all his life and he had never experienced salvation from that. You see, he knew that a transition had to be made.

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Jude knew that there was no advantage to being Jesus' biological brother. He didn't have anything at all that he could hold over anyone else's head.

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The only advantage that Jude had was the same advantage that all of us now have and that is, it is better to be a slave of Christ than to even be his own biological brother.

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The book begins with Jude's name to announce his humility. He doesn't say that he's the brother of Jesus because he's the kind of man that God typically uses, the humble, the unlikely, the ones who have come to the end of themself so they can begin with God, the ones who used to be adamantly opposed to Christ, the ones who are now bowing down at his feet.

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You and I are a lot like Jude in that sense that many of us at one time hated the

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Lord Christ. Many of us here have thought that he was crazy and by our actions, we've denied him.

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All of us here have deserved the wrath of God for rejecting him. But like Jude, we came to understand who

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Jesus Christ was through the gospel. We came to see that this man died to take away our sins and then he rose to life to give us new life and that he's reigning over his church to keep us secure and to put us on a mission.

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You see, we can't face our problems like I've said until we face God. We have to know who we are.

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We were the ones who rejected him but now by grace, we're the ones who love him. We're the ones who are ransomed and bought and purchased by our

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God, our everlasting savior. And when you know that, you can face anything.

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You don't start with the problem because the problem is too big. You start with the identity that you have in Christ. And when you know that, you can face anything.

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When you know what Jesus Christ has done for you, nothing is too big. But when you try to face it on your own, everything is too big.

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Jude transitions and he says, this is who I once was. I know that. This is who I now am.

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I'm a slave. The text calls him a bondservant. That's not a helpful term.

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That's actually a made up term because the real word that Jesus, or that Jude uses in this text is that he's a slave.

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He's a dunas, he's a slave. And I think the reason why the term in all of our modern translations says something like servant or bondservant or something like that is because America has a pretty checkered history with slavery.

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And to tone down the word and to help modern readers understand what it is and to not get the wrong idea about what this is, they've replaced the word slave.

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But the word actually is slave. It's dunas. It's that he was purchased.

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It basically means that he was so broke in his spiritual condition that he could not pay for himself, that he was in such a debt that Christ had to come and ransom him and purchase him.

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And this has major, major implications, this word, for us as Christians, more so than I think just calling it a servant.

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I think this has major implications for us as Christians. If Jude was a slave of Christ, he's saying, essentially,

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I am not free to do whatever I want to do. I've been bought.

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I've been purchased. I now have a master. My master used to be the slavery of sin and death, but now my master's

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Christ. Jude is saying I've been bought and purchased and I've been ransomed by the

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Lord. He went under the knife so that I wouldn't have to, and he was made to be sin who knew no sin so that I could be called the righteousness of God.

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What Jude is saying is I'm not free. I've been freed from sin, but I've not been freed from sin to utter freedom.

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I've been freed from the wrath of God, but I've not been freed to sin. I've not been freed to this sort of libertine kind of freedom where I can do everything and whatever

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I want. Christian freedom is not freedom to sin. Christian freedom is not freedom to live loosely.

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Christian freedom is not a freedom from holiness or freedom from community or freedom from obedience or from loving

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God or from worship or from discipleship or evangelism or any other biblical injunction. You see, we often get this wrong.

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We think that Christ has freed us from the power of sin and not just that, but he's freed us to this sort of utter freedom where we can do whatever we want, and I reject that and you should reject that.

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Christ has freed us from our sin to him. He's freed us so that he would be our master and that we would be his slave.

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Jude is trying to help us see who we really are. We are not utterly free. We have been freed from sin and death so that we can be slaves of Christ.

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We are no longer under the damning taskmaster of the law that was looming over us and beating our backs into the frailty of our own inability.

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Now we're a slave of Christ, a loving master, a master worth serving, a master who loves us and cares for us, provides for us.

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We must begin seeing ourself this way, though, that we are a slave. Again, before we can get along in the problems in our life, before we can address the problems in the church, we have to understand our life and view it as it is in total submission to Jesus Christ, out of joy and out of gratitude for what he has done.

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We must begin seeing ourself as his servant, as his joyful servant, delighted and awestruck to serve him.

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We must begin seeing him as the Lord over our life, every facet of our life. He is our master and we are his slave.

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Now, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea about what it means to be his slave,

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I'm not saying that we are worthless. I'm not saying that we have no value.

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I'm not saying that Christ is angry over us and that he's the type of master like we would associate with slavery.

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You see, the term slave, which is, again, doulos in the Greek, signifies a person whose status and worth does not come from themselves.

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A slave's status and his worth doesn't come from within himself. It comes from the one to whom he belongs.

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He gets an alien type of status that's not his. He is a slave, that is true, but he inherits the status.

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He inherits the worth. He inherits the prestige, if you will, of the one to whom he belongs.

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You see, in the Roman world, a slave had the status that was consistent with their owner so that if you belong to a poor owner, a powerless owner, then you almost had no status or worth at all.

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But if, let's just say that you were the imperial slave, the slave of Caesar himself, and although you had no status on your own because you were a slave, you were a doulos, you still carried a level of respect and honor that would have been unrivaled in the ancient world because you belonged to Caesar.

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You got his status. You got his honor because you belong to him.

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You could stand before kings and queens and tell them what to do. You could issue commands to the greatest generals in all of the

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Roman Empire. Because you belong to him. Not because they were your words, not because of who you are, but because of whose you are.

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As a slave, you would have no authority whatsoever, but because you belong to Caesar, you had an alien authority that no one could ever harm you.

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How much more do you and I have an alien authority because we belong to Christ?

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In the same way, we in our flesh have no authority. We are simple and humble slaves.

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We bring nothing into our salvation except the sin that made it necessary. It's what Jonathan Edwards would say.

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But by the sheer fact that everyone in this room who belongs to Christ, while you have no authority on your own, you have an alien authority by the fact that you belong to Jesus Christ.

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Because our owner is Christ, we have his honor and his dignity because of him. We can speak his words with authority because we have his authority.

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We can stand before kings and queens and be unashamed. We can stand before the most powerful people in the society and we can tell them the love of God that we have found in Christ Jesus, not because we have authority, but because we have his authority.

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We belong to him. This is what Jude is hammering home. And again, before we can ever think about facing our problems, before we can think about dealing with problems in the church, we have to know who we are.

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Shepherds Church, we are men and women who are just like Jude.

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We were rebels of grace. We were mockers of God. By our behavior, we thought that following Jesus was crazy, but at just the right time,

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Christ purchased us. And transferred us out of slavery to sin, to slavery to him.

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To be slaves of mercy, slaves of grace, slaves of Christ. Slaves who have no status at all to brag about on our own, but we have an alien authority.

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We have intrinsic value and worth because of who we belong to. That's who

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I want us to be. The third thing that Jude tells us, and we will say this one rather quickly because it leads us into next week, is

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Jude says that he's the brother of James. He not only knows who he used to be as a hater of God and who he is now as a slave of Christ, he now is telling us who he is called to be.

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And he gives us the name of his brother, not because it's not incredibly obvious that he is the brother of James.

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Everyone would have known that. You can look back into the tradition in Matthew 13 and see, oh,

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James and Judas are brothers. You know, we get that. But he appeals to James because James was the most powerful leader in the early

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Christian church. He was like the elder of elders, as it were.

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So at the very beginning of this book, Jude is saying, this is who I used to be. This is who I now am as a slave of Christ.

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And I also have James's approval to write this letter. It would have been like a pastor coming alongside of a young man and saying, young man,

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I think you're called to ministry. I'm gonna approve and affirm you to go to seminary. And when you go to seminary, you give them the letter and says,

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I'm from the congregation of so -and -so. You would be going with that man's approval, with that man's basically apostolic affirmation.

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And that's what Jude is appealing to, is that I can write this letter to you because I've been appointed by James, because I have apostolic authority, because I've been approved by the elders, approved by the councils, approved by the leadership to write the message of this letter.

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I started with who I am. And now I'm gonna talk about who you are, and that'll be next week.

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And then I'm gonna talk about the problems in this church because I've been affirmed by the leadership to speak this message.

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So let's pray. Let's ask God to write this word on our hearts and our minds this evening.

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Father God, thank you so much for this beautiful book and the fact that we could dive in and we can look at this man,

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Jude, who has such a storied history, even a checkered past.

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But yet, Lord, by the power of your resurrection, you saved him and you ransomed him into your family.

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You made him a slave of Christ so that he believed that it was even more valuable to be a slave of Christ than to be your biological brother because being your brother never saved him.

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It wasn't until he was a slave of Christ that he was saved. Lord, may it be the same for us that we would not tout our accomplishments, tout our status, tout anything, that we would understand who we are, that we are slaves of Jesus Christ, ransomed and purchased by you.

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And now we have an alien authority about us that's not our own, that's yours. So we can't step outside of that authority and start thinking that we are now something special.

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We stand in Christ, we stand in you, we stand in your authority, we stand in your purposes. And Lord, like Jude, who then transitions to the letter by saying that I'm the brother of James and I have the authority to say these things based off of the apostolic affirmation.

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Lord, let us sit under the teaching of Jude. Let us hear what Jude has to say and let us learn as a brand new church.

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Let us learn how to be a faithful church. But God, like we've learned today, help us to always start and never forget to always start with who we are in Christ.

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We can do nothing on our own. We do all things in Christ. Lord, I pray that over this church,

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I pray that over this, whether we meet for a single day or for a million days,

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I pray that we would be men and women who understand who we are in Christ. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.