Fighting For the Faith

Fighting sounds bad, has a negative connotation to it, but fighting is not bad.

It depends what you're fighting for or what you're fighting against. It's sort of like love.

Love is not necessarily good. It's not necessarily bad. It depends on the object of your love.

If you love God, that's good. If you love your neighbor as yourself, that's good. If you love evil, that's bad.

If you love Satan, that's bad. So love isn't good or bad. Fighting isn't good or bad.

It depends on what you're fighting for. In this life, you're going to fight for something. Some people are off fighting political battles.

People are fighting their neighbors. They're fighting their spouse. They're fighting. Hey, take that time and energy and fight for the faith.

Amen? So let's look at a couple things. We'll look at how we should fight.

I would say, again, be a joyful fighter. We should look at how we are to fight.

We'll look at when we should fight. But first, I want to reinforce this idea, the necessity of fighting, fighting for the faith.

Because a lot of people are going to try to convince you that Christians shouldn't fight at all. The scam is to try to get you to be loving and accepting of everything and everybody.

That's what a Christian should be. You should just accept everything and everybody. And yet, the people that talk about tolerance and acceptance the most, they're the first people to not tolerate certain things.

Now, it's true, as followers of Jesus, we should be patient. We should be kind. But nobody is accepting of everything.

This is the devil's trick, though, to try to get you to roll over and play dead and accept everything.

But the people who lecture us about acceptance, they're off fighting for their causes. Are they not?

Oh, yeah. They're fighting every day for their causes We have a cause, too. And that is the cause of Christ.

Preach the gospel to every creature. Baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Teach them all things that Christ commanded.

Support missions to bring this message all over the world. Promote godly worship.

And defend the faith. All right, back to the text. In verse 5,

Jude gives some Old Testament examples, as well as some things the church was going through at the moment.

I don't know about you, but my Bible has this section titled Old and New Apostates.

Who has that? Old and New Apostates. So he's talking about things that happened in the past in the

Bible, Old Testament, and what's going on right now. He says, but I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the

Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

And the angels, who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day, as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

So these are the two Old Testament examples that Jude gives. And these are examples of apostates, those who once professed to believe in God, but now they have turned away.

They have turned aside. The first example was the Israelites, who left the worship of the

Lord God, who delivered them out of the land of Egypt. And what did they do? They turned away from the

Lord, and they worshipped a golden calf. They got into idolatry. The second example are the holy angels, who followed

Lucifer in the rebellion, and they, like him, they fell.

So if you know your Old Testament, you know that Moses and the righteous

Israelites, what did they have to do? What's the title of the message? Defending the faith.

Moses had to defend the faith. Aaron, and his son, and Joshua, and Caleb, they had to defend the faith.

Joshua had to fight. Joshua, you realize, Joshua is known as a warrior.

He's known as a fighter. And Joshua is the Old Testament equivalent, his name, to the

New Testament name, Jesus. Do you realize Jesus is a fighter? I know he's portrayed as a long -haired hippie, but that's not the way

Jesus is. Jesus was a man's man. He was a fighter. So Moses was a fighter.

Joshua was a fighter. And they didn't fight only against the Egyptians or the

Canaanite tribes. They had to fight, here's the thing, they had to fight against rebels within Israel.

So what's the application? We need to fight against rebels within the visible church.

You know, it's always been this way. There's the attacks from without. This is the atheists and the agnostics, but the attacks from within are much more deadly.

And just as Israel was a physical nation, therefore they fought physical battles. The church in 1

Peter 2 .9 is referred to as a spiritual nation, therefore we fight what?

We fight spiritual battles. One current battle we're fighting against is the godless ideology of secularism.

You have Darwinism, Marxism, transgenderism, all types of different isms that are opposed to the

God of heaven. And again, some would say, well, you know, just talk about things in the Bible. I don't think you should talk about that stuff.

That's the devil's trick. Don't talk about anything that's going on right now. Just talk about stuff that happened 3 ,000 years ago.

You know, fight the battles that have already been won. Don't fight now. That's what people want you to do.

Don't fall for it. So this is the battle right now, secularism. So I've noticed that some well -meaning

Christians, I think, they have this idea that, yeah, you should talk about Moses fighting the idolaters.

You can talk about the prophets preaching against the kings of Israel, but don't talk about, shh, don't talk about anything that's happening right now.

No, we're not buying into that. We can't do that. Verse eight, why? Because Jude didn't do it.

He, remember, old and new apostates. Jude is talking about things in the Bible in the past.