We don't just fight for the truth. We fight with the truth.
We combat error with truth. We don't have to yell. We don't have to slander. We don't have to malign. We don't have to send really nasty tweets.
We don't have to lob ad hominem attacks on people. All we have to do is hold up truth. The Christian life is a battleground, but God equips us with what we need not only to persevere, but to overcome. Connect with Skip Heitzig today as he shares about a powerful tool you have to fight for the faith. Right now, we want to tell you about a resource that will help you grow stronger in your faith. Listen to what Sean McDowell said about the book Tactics. This is the book I've been waiting for.
I enthusiastically recommend Tactics. Here's Skip Heitzig to comment on how Jesus spoke out for truth. We might think that Jesus never raised his voice, that he would never call anybody out. However, there was a side of Jesus that was contentious. The Jesus that took tables in the temple and overturned them and took out a whip and drove people out of the temple.
Yeah, that Jesus. Get equipped to defend the gospel and guard against false teachings with Fight for the House, a six-message series through the book of Jude with Skip Heitzig. This teaching series on CD is our thanks when you give to keep this Bible teaching ministry on the air. And when you give $35 or more today, we'll also send you a book by Gregory Kochel called Tactics, your game plan for communicating the truth about Christianity with confidence and grace. To give, visit connectwithskip.com or call 800-922-1888. Now we're in the book of Jude as we get into the message with Skip Heitzig.
Nobody likes to talk about fighting. I'd much rather do a series on the Acts of the apostles than on the Acts of the apostates. But he said, I found it necessary. Notice that I found it necessary to write to you exhorting. The word necessary literally means pressured. It means to compress or to squeeze. The idea is to have pressure come upon you. So the idea that I get is he sat down to write something really sweet, but the Holy Spirit kept applying the pressure until he wrote this.
And what is this? What is he calling us to exactly? Well, he tells us in verse three to contend earnestly or vigorously for the faith.
What does that mean? You know what contend means. It means to fight. He's saying put up a good fight for the faith. The New Living Translation puts it this way, defend the truth. The J.B. Phillips translation translates it, put up a real fight for the faith. The New English Bible says, join the struggle in the defense of the faith. The message translation by Eugene Peterson puts it, fight with everything you have in you. So you get the picture, you get the ideas, calling us to fight. I'll give you one more translation, the NSV.
Ever heard of the NSV, the new Skip version? I'll put it this way, put on your boxing gloves, get in the ring, don't be afraid of your opponent, don't be afraid of your opponent. Let's take it to task. Let's do this.
Let's get involved in the fight. Now the word contend happens to be an athletic term, an athletic term. Now I'm going to say the Greek word and you're going to try to listen really carefully and see what that sounds like. The Greek term is epagonizomai.
Let me do it again, epagonizomai. Agony, agonize. We get the English term agonize from that.
So picture an athlete, since it's an athletic term, running the Olympic whatever he's running or she's running in and just straining with the muscle to the point of agony to win. That's the idea of contend vigorously or earnestly. You'll never fight God's battles from a sofa. You'll never contend for what really matters to the point of victory by just cruising in your lazy boy all day. You're going to have to decide to get up as part of the house and join the fight. You say, wait, wait, wait, wait. What are we fighting for? What's this all about? Well he tells you that. Put up a good fight for or contend earnestly for the faith.
What is that? The faith is a term, a construction, a term in the New Testament that refers to the body of Christian truth as given in the New Testament. The body of Christian truth.
It's not some nebulous, believe whatever you want to believe thing. Faith, have faith. It's the faith. And the faith has a synonym, the apostles doctrine. They gave themselves, Acts 2 42, to the apostles doctrine. That is the truth the apostles passed on. They gave themselves to the apostles doctrine, breaking of bread, fellowship, and prayer. The term the faith is often used throughout the New Testament.
Here's a sampling. 2 Corinthians 12. Examine yourselves whether you are in the faith. The faith. Paul said to Timothy, the Spirit expressly says, this is 1 Timothy chapter 4, the Spirit expressly says that in the latter time some will depart from the faith. That's what we're seeing in Jude, apostasy. Some will depart from the faith giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines taught by demons.
At the end of Paul's life he wrote to Timothy again, 2 Timothy, and he said, I've run the race, I've fought the fight, I've kept the faith. So that's the faith. The faith is the complete New Testament teaching concerning Jesus Christ.
Who God is, who Jesus is, how a person gets saved. Fight for that. Fight for the faith. Something else. Go back to verse 3 because he says, contend earnestly for the faith which was once for what? Help the preacher out here.
What does it say? All. Once for all or better once for all time. The truth, the faith that we're talking about was once for all time deposited or delivered to the saints. Now that's a very important truth because what that means to me is, I can't tell you exactly when the book of Jude was written but it tells me this, that let's say AD 100 because that's sort of like the book of Revelation. By AD 100 all that God ever wanted to say in terms of Scripture was done. There is no more revelation.
He said once for all time delivered to the saints. So it's not like God later on said, you know I left out a few things. Here's the Quran.
Oh, oh I forgot some other stuff. Here's the book of Mormon. No, no it's once for all times delivered to the saints.
Revelation from God is over. Another caveat. Let me kind of give a little nuance to this. It says we are to contend. It does not give us permission to be a contentious person. See you can fight with a smile. You can contend and put up a good fight for, but you can be nice. You don't have to be mean.
You don't have to get really raunchy. You can just fight the good fight of faith. In fact in 1 Peter chapter 3 verse 15 he said, be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Or gentleness and respect the NIV puts it. Gentleness and respect. Okay fight the fight, but do it with gentleness and do it with respect. So you and I are called to build the truth. We are called to fight for the truth, fight for the truth, the faith.
Here's an illustration that might help. In the book of Nehemiah, remember they came back to Jerusalem to rebuild the city. The city had been broken down. The walls and the gates burned with fire.
Nehemiah comes back. He assembles the group. They start building the walls. The enemies on the outside try to sneak on the inside. They try to subvert the whole building process. They lob accusations at them.
You know the story probably. In chapter 4, here's the illustration. They were on the wall building. In one hand they had a trowel. In the other hand they had a sword. So they're building, putting cement in the cracks of the stones, but they got a sword in the other hand because you never know when that enemy is going to try to jump over this wall and sneak in.
So it was the sword and the trowel. So on one front we build up the church. On the other front we defend the faith against those who are trying to destroy it. And that is a calling for every believer, every volunteer, every staff member, every worship leader, every pastor, to fight the fight.
Martin Luther said this, a preacher must be both a soldier and a shepherd. He must nourish and teach and defend. He must have teeth in his mouth and be able to bite. Jude is not afraid to bite. Jesus was not afraid to bite. In fact, I think that's what made him such a good shepherd. Remember what David said Psalm 23?
You know this. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Why would a rod and staff comfort a sheep? Well, a staff is to guide sheep, but you know what a rod is? It's a club.
Think of it as a bat. So a shepherd would carry a rod to direct his sheep on pasture lands, but a club or a rod to beat off the enemy. The wolves coming, I'm going to just smack them down. And if I'm a sheep, I'm going, I'm comforted by that.
I don't have a shepherd who just wants to guide me high. He's going to fight for me. He's going to battle. That's the hostility. So we have the army, the hostility. Let's look at a third component in this battle, the artillery. I'm just going to touch on this, the artillery. So back to verse three, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all, now get this, delivered or deposited or handed over or put under our care to steward. That's the idea.
Delivered to the saints. Do you know that God has given us the most powerful weapon in the world? It's called truth. Truth. It's called the word of God. We have truth. We have his word. So not only do we fight for the faith, we fight with the faith. We don't just fight for the truth. We fight with the truth.
We combat error with truth. We don't have to yell. We don't have to slander. We don't have to malign. We don't have to send really nasty tweets.
We don't have to lob ad hominem attacks on people. All we have to do is hold up truth. Confront them with the truth. Preach the truth.
Declare the truth. It's exactly what Jesus did when Satan came against him in the wilderness to tempt him. I love how Jesus handled it.
Satan comes. Jesus doesn't say, you idiot devil. You know what he says? He says, it is written. It is written. It was the word of God. It was the word of God. It was the scripture. He confronted error with truth. And he did that to the religious leaders who also contended with him.
He didn't tussle with them. He just said, you're an error not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. That's why we spend most of every service we have here in the word. That's why when we have a worship service we spend 45 minutes in the Bible.
On Wednesday night a full hour, sometimes an hour and five or ten, in the word. It's simply me giving you ammunition. It's you reloading.
And the expectation is you'll go out into enemy territory and inflict damage by declaring truth. That's the artillery. Let me take you to the fourth and final component here. That's the enemy. What are we fighting against? Who are we fighting against?
Who are these people? Well there is a description in verse four that is sort of the introduction to the bulk of the epistle going forward. Let's look at verse four and notice some of the characteristics of these apostates. He says, for certain men have crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this condemnation.
Ungodly men who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. So we notice a few things about them. Number one, they're deceitful. He says they crept in unnoticed. That is they slip in secretly.
They don't announce themselves. They're sort of undercover. They're nothing more than Satan's undercover agents. They pretend to be Christians. They sit next to Christians.
They'll even sing some of the songs up on the screen, but they're not. They slip in unnoticed. Now, Jesus warned that they were coming. Paul warned that they were coming.
Peter warned that they were coming. Jude says they've arrived. They're here. They're in our midst. They have crept in unnoticed. So they're deceitful.
There's a second characteristic. They're ungodly. That's in verse four. Certain men have crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this condemnation. Ungodly men. Now, let me just say that for some reason Jude really liked this word because he used it a lot. He liked this description.
You'll see what I mean. Go down to verse 14. But Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also saying, behold the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment on all to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.
Wow, I get it. They're ungodly, right? Verse 18, how they told you that there would be mockers in the last days or the last time who would walk according to their own ungodly love. Now, I counted six times in 25 verses Jude uses the word ungodly. What is ungodly? It means ungod-like.
Ungod-like. It's a person who claims to belong to God but they are not like God in their thinking. They are not like God in their living.
That's ungodly. They are, to use Paul's description, 2 Timothy chapter 3, having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof from such turn away. They are Christians in name only. Nominal Christians. Oh yeah, I've always been a Christian.
My parents, grandparents, the church. Now, they say, well so what? I mean, you know, why are they so dangerous? Why do they merit a whole letter? Well, there's a principle that Paul said in the New Testament.
He said, you know, a little leaven will leaven the whole lump. You get enough people slipping in who are ungodly people and do not hold to godly beliefs and they're not only going to taint but they're going to influence a lot of other people. There's another part to this description. Not only are they deceitful, not only are they ungodly, they are manipulators of grace. Verse 4, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness. You know, you know what lewdness is? You know what a lewd person is?
You know what a person is? You know what a lewd person is? It's an immoral person. Lude means immoral. It's somebody who lives for and really only thinks about satisfying his or her own passions, desires, lusts.
That's a lewd person. Their mantra is you're saved by grace so live any way you want to. Really, you can do whatever you want because God is so good and so loving and so tolerant.
He'll just let you do anything you want. Just say you're a Christian. They turn the grace of God into lewdness. They'll turn the grace of God into lewdness. They'll even use the Scripture to promote that belief system. They want everybody to agree with their immorality. They want everybody to agree with their definition of morality. They want the church to say it's okay to practice homosexuality. They want the church to say it's okay to abort babies. They want the church to say it's okay to identify as a female even though you're a biological male. They want the church to say you can select any pronoun you want in the world to identify yourself and if you don't, we want to shut that church down.
If you don't agree with us, we will bring the full force of even government, if need be, to say that you are hate-mongering and it's hate speech because you don't agree with our definition of morality. I could give you thousands of examples of that. I'm just going to give you one, but we could give you so many and I'm giving you this one because it's so recent. It just happened really a month ago, six weeks ago. There is an organization that goes under the name Bethany Christian Services.
You may have read articles about this in the news. Bethany Christian Services has been one of the nation's largest, most successful evangelical Christian adoption and foster placement agencies. I think it is headquartered in Michigan, but Bethany Christian Services once held a very high biblical standard. That marriage was between one man and one woman. It was a biblical definition of marriage and they sought to place children in homes that were Christian homes, but all of that changed March 1st. It changed because Bethany Christian Services finally caved in to the LGBTQ community so that now they too can adopt children into their homes because that community cannot procreate. So now Bethany Christian Services provides children to be placed in those homes.
Now listen to the change. In 2007 Bethany Christian Services said, this is from their own words, God's design for the family is a covenant and a lifelong marriage of one man and one woman. That's as biblical as you can get.
That was 2007. Now the applause should die because March 1st they abandoned that and they are now redefining what a woman is, redefining what a man is, redefining what marriage is, redefining what the family is. What you have is this, they have turned the grace of God into lewdness. Now Jude is saying this 2,000 years ago and here we are today, this far down the road.
So it shouldn't surprise us because we find it in the scripture. Every generation faces it. Charles Spurgeon had his issues during his day over 100 years ago but I want to throw up what he said. He once said this, the new views are not the old truth in better dress but deadly errors with which we can have no fellowship. In other words, you know what? At some point you draw a line and you say love means telling truth to people. That's what love means.
I love you enough to tell you the truth and I'll accept the consequences but here's the final description. Not only are they deceitful or ungodly, not only do they manipulate grace but they deny Christ. For he says in verse 4, they turn the grace of God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and Lord Jesus Christ. Now I know in reading that it sounds like Jude is referring to two different persons, God the Father and then Jesus Christ. The Greek construction makes it refer to one person, the same person. A better translation is this, they denied our only God and Lord Jesus Christ.
But that's the point. They want to name the name of Christ. Oh yeah, I'm a Christian. I go to a church. I'm a believer.
They just don't want to live under the authority of Christ. That wraps up Skip Heitzig's powerful message for you from the series Fight for the House. Right now we want to share about an exciting opportunity you have to take your knowledge of God's Word even deeper. If you're ready to study God's Word beyond going to church and personal Bible study, you're ready for Calvary College.
Take your learning and your life's purpose to the next level with an education in biblical studies. Registration for the 2022 spring term is open right now. Classes happen on site at Calvary Church Albuquerque and online. Classes like biblical counseling, a study of the end times and the history and authenticity of the Bible, plus theological studies in the doctrine of man, sin and salvation. Calvary College partners with Veritas International University and Calvary Chapel University so you can earn an accredited undergraduate or graduate degree or simply increase your knowledge of God and His Word. Your application for the 2022 spring term is available right now.
Classes start January 10th. Apply today at CalvaryChurchCollege.com. That's CalvaryChurchCollege.com. Thank you for tuning in today. We're passionate about helping you strengthen your walk with God.
And you can be a part of connecting others to Jesus in the same way when you give a gift to help keep these teachings you love on the air. Just call 800-922-1888. That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Come back again tomorrow as Skip Heitzigs gets to the root of the battle for truth, helping you contend for the faith successfully. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.
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