How to Stand When Others Fall - Part A

Let's be honest, sermons have become sermonettes.

And last time I checked, sermonettes are for Christianettes. We need the real deal. We need the Bible, truth, full strength, holding nothing back. The world is constantly striving to challenge and undermine our faith. So how do we persevere?

Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Skip shares how you can keep building your faith in the face of opposition. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will encourage you even more in your faith. Here's what Norm Geisler said about the book Tactics.

There is no better book to equip Christians to think clearly. Here's Skip Heitzig on the need to engage in active spiritual warfare. You'll never fight God's battles from a sofa.

You'll never contend for what really matters 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. Become a contender for biblical truth with Fight for the House, a six message series through the book of Jude with Skip Heitzig. This teaching series on CD equips you to get in the ring to defend the gospel and guard against false teachings. And it's our thanks when you give to connect more people to the truth of God's word. And when you give $35 or more today, we'll also send you the book Tactics by Gregory Kochel to help you speak the truth about Christianity with confidence and grace. Call 800-922-1888 to give or visit connectwithskip.com.

Okay, we're in the book of Jude as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. Falling down is a part of life. Every human being does it when they're learning how to walk. But falling down can be dangerous. You can get injured, you could become disabled, and believe it or not, a good number of people have died just falling. According to the World Health Organization, falling is the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide.

According to their estimations, 684,000 people die every year from falling. That's mostly in low-income and mid-income countries. Age is a factor. Unattended children is another factor. Poor working conditions is another one.

And lack of regulations, safety regulations in place. Old age is especially dangerous. One out of four elderly people fall down every year and less than half of them ever tell their doctor that they did. Now, a number of these people become hospitalized.

It's estimated that 800,000 people a year are hospitalized from injuries like a hip fracture or a head injury due to a fall. Several years ago, I went to go visit my mom. She was in her 80s at the time. I drive up to her house in California, get out, I'm walking toward the front door, and I hear a voice above me calling from above. I know it's not an angel, I know it's not God, because it sounded an awful lot like my mother. But I was astonished that I would hear my mom's voice from above. So I hear my mom's voice from above. So I look up and on top of the roof is my mom. And I said, uh, mom, uh, mom, first of all, you're a nurse, so you know better.

This is not something you should be doing. She goes, I know, but something broke with the air conditioner. And I'm thinking, what, and you are suddenly an air conditioning repair person in your 80s? You've become that?

I mean, how does that work? So I said, you come down, and I made her promise me you will never do that again. That's dangerous. Now, just as certain conditions make falling down easier physically, I think that there are certain conditions that make falling away spiritually easier. And I would even say that the church today is more susceptible than ever before to people falling away. And I'll lay that at the feet of church leadership, pulpits, pastors. I think that there is an enormous amount of biblical ignorance.

Not just culturally, but I mean in the church, that there is a biblical illiteracy even. If you were to compare the average sermon today with the average sermon, say, a hundred years ago, you'd find a massive difference. If you were to compare a Christian book written today by a Christian author, Christian pastor leader, with a book written a hundred years ago, you would see a huge difference for a lot of reasons.

If you were to compare a Christian seminar or conference to one that was done a century ago, again, you would see a marked difference. What has happened is Bible teaching has been dumbed down. And it has been made shallow. It has become oversimplified. It has been reduced to slogans.

And why is that? Well, for a number of reasons, and I'm not here to tell you all those reasons, but I think Christian leaders think that people just don't have it in them to understand the depth of doctrine and what the Bible really has to say. So, since they have a short attention span, let me just sort of pander to that short attention span. Or, maybe my audience doesn't truly believe or they're just not as interested, so I will dumb it down. And then the subject of so many sermons is anemic.

It's often about successful living or self-esteem or a number of felt needs or cultural fads. In fact, let's be honest, sermons have become sermonettes. And last time I checked, sermonettes are for Christianettes.

We need the real deal. We need the Bible truth, full strength, holding nothing back. But today, discernment isn't really important. Depth really isn't important. Doctrine really isn't important.

What's important is dazzle. So, some time ago, one of my associate pastors was driving me to the airport. Brian, you were the pastor. Thank you for taking me that day to the airport. So, I had to catch a flight to go to Canada to speak, and Brian asked me a question.

He goes, how are you doing? How many pastors under the age of 40, or he put it this way, can you name five pastors under the age of 40 who are Bible expositors? And I've got to admit, I was flummoxed. I just like that word. I was flummoxed. And I didn't know how to answer. I kind of went, yeah, and I named one and then two. And I said, that's an interesting question.

Why do you ask that? He goes, well, actually, it's a question that was asked by one of our School of Ministry students. She said, can you name five pastors under the age of 40? She goes, I'm a millennial.

Can you name five pastors under the age of 40 who are Bible expositors? And she had written that on her Facebook page, and she wrote this, we're kind of done with glam rock liturgy and preaching for pizazz that masks the lack of biblical preaching. We want our souls fed, not our emotions tickled. And I thought, bravo for her.

That's such a great sentiment to say. What she is saying is, we don't want the show. We want to know. There's things we want to know about.

Teach us that. Well, that takes us to the book of Jude. And in verse 20, Jude says, But you, beloved, building yourselves up on the most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And on some have compassion, making a distinction, but others, saved with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh. You will note how verse 20 begins.

It begins with a shift. He's been talking about them, about these people, those guys, those spots in your love feast, those waterless clouds, those false teachers, those apostates. The whole book, this short little book has been filled with Jude's description of them. But in verse 20, he pivots and he says, But you, beloved. So he turns away from them and he turns to us.

They may be falling, you should be standing. And so what he does in these short verses, and Jude was a master at using the economy of words to give us a bulwark of strong principles. We have some ingredients of how to stand when others are falling. When you see people falling from the faith, falling around you, how do you stand? Well, there are a few ingredients.

I want to draw your attention to them. First, is keep building your faith. Keep building your faith. If people are destroying the faith of others, if people are falling from the faith, then the solution for us is to be building your faith.

The solution for us is to be building up our own faith. That's what the beginning of verse 20 is all about. But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith. Now remember how Jude begins this letter?

He sat down and he wanted to write a sweet little note of encouragement. He said, I wanted to write to you about our common salvation, but I found it necessary to exhort you to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Contend means put up a good fight for the faith. And he calls it the faith. And that term is not referring to your personal faith.

It's not your believing subjectively. It's the faith objectively. It's the bulk of Christian doctrine, Christian belief.

It's what's called in Acts 242, the Apostles Doctrine. So the faith are all those basic principles that we hold as truth. That's the faith.

So with that in mind, he says, building yourselves up on your most holy faith. The faith has become your personal faith. And that is because so many people were abandoning the faith. They were leaving the faith. We told you how Paul wrote to Timothy and said, the Spirit expressly says that in the latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines taught by demons. So if people are leaving the faith, then you should be loving the faith. If people are deserting the faith, then you should be determined in your faith. If people are going to be forsaking the faith, then you and I need to be fortifying our faith. In other words, if they're going to tear theirs down, we need to be building ours up.

That's the antidote to their falling. You know, it's sort of like this. Anything left to itself just goes to ruin. It's like part of life.

It's the second law of thermodynamics. Things tend toward disintegration, deterioration. Take your house, for instance. You buy a house, oh goody. Yeah, oh goody, but you're going to have to patch the roof eventually or put a new or put a new one on eventually. You're going to have to address stucco deterioration on the outside eventually.

You're going to have to deal with that heater or air conditioning eventually, right. There's a number of things that take regular maintenance. So too with our spiritual life. Our spiritual life requires maintenance. Any life left to itself will fall apart.

So we need to be building it up, building it up, building it up. There's a parallel passage to this found in the book of Peter, 2 Peter. In fact, 2 Peter and Jude, some of the wording of both of those letters is almost identical.

But even where it's not identical, some of the principles are the same. And this idea of building up your faith is part of 2 Peter. 2 Peter chapter 1. Peter says also for this very reason, giving all diligence, listen, add to your faith. Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge self-control, and to self-control perseverance, and to perseverance godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. And then he says, if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So that's an interesting way of putting it. Giving all diligence means exerting yourself. Do you realize that Christian growth is not automatic? It has to be intentional. If you think you can fall back on that little saying that just sounds so good, but it happens to be poor advice, let go and let God.

It's not going to work. You don't let go. You build up. You add to your faith, exerting all effort, add to your faith, virtue, etc. The Chinese church used to have a saying, a very, very simple but profound saying. And the saying was this, no Bible, no breakfast. What? No Bible, no breakfast?

What do you mean? How am I going to live? Read your Bible. Then you eat breakfast. No Bible, no breakfast.

That's interesting. I think what they're doing is summing up what Job said in his book where Job said, I've esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food. But I read that, no Bible, no breakfast.

And I thought, boy, if we followed that in America, how many of us would go hungry or at least lose a lot of weight? So the question is this, are you growing up? Are you growing strong? Or are you just growing old? Because spiritual growth is not always proportional to physical age.

I wish I could say it was. I wish I could say that a person, once they're a Christian, they just sort of give it enough time. They're going to become mature. But you know that you can be an older person, you know that you can be an old baby? Charles Spurgeon said, in the church of God there are children who are 70 years old.

Yes, little children displaying all the infirmities of declining years. One would not like to say of a man of 80 that he has scarcely cut his wisdom teeth and yet there are such. On the other hand, there are fathers in the church, wise, stable, instructed, who are comparatively young men. The Lord can cause His people to grow rapidly and far outstrip their years. So build yourselves up. Don't settle for junk food.

Don't allow yourself to be starved to death spiritually. And I'm just going to recommend this to you, but I'm going to recommend that you start coming to our Wednesday night Bible study. I mean it's great to come to Sunday morning or Saturday or whatever, but on Wednesday night we're able to go through every verse of every chapter of every book of the Bible.

Now, eventually. It won't happen all at once, obviously, but we do that. We'll go through a chapter or two and we have a longer time and we can go deeper and we can go longer and give a person what Paul called the whole counsel of God.

Not just a snippet of a Bible verse here and there, but the whole counsel of God. So keep that in mind. But that's the first ingredient. Keep building your faith. The second ingredient is keep praying with fervor. Keep praying with fervor.

Back to verse 20. But you beloved, building yourselves up on the most holy faith, your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit. Praying in the Holy Spirit. You probably by now know that the Word of God, reading the Word, building yourselves up in the most holy faith, and prayer go together. Because it completes the cycle of communication in this relationship we have with God. When you read the Bible, that is God speaking to you. When you pray, that is you speaking to God.

And you need both to balance out your spiritual life. So if all I do is read and not pray, I'll have a lot of light but no heat. If all I do is pray but not read, I'll have a lot of heat but no light. So to get both light and heat, I need to read the Word and pray.

Now I'm going to bring up a question because it's not often asked, but these are questions I have asked. Why pray? I mean if God already knows my needs anyway, in advance, He knows everything I need, I believe He does and He's a good Father. Why has He set this relationship with Him up where it requires prayer?

It's almost like He's kind of waiting there going, I haven't heard a prayer yet. So what's up with that? Why? Why prayer? Why is it so important?

Why make a big deal out of it? I'll give you one word to answer that question. Dependence. God likes dependence. God loves dependence. God loves trust.

God loves to be asked. In fact, I'll go a step further. God is attracted to need.

I'll even go a step further. God is attracted to weakness. Oh, I feel so weak. God's attracted to that. You know the Bible says God has chosen the foolish things of this world. He's chosen the weak things of this world. And then Paul the Apostle, when he asked God to heal him of something, he said, I prayed three times and the Lord said, my grace is enough for you. But then he said, my strength is made perfect in your weakness.

God is attracted to weakness. I remember hearing a story from an old man, from an old play that became, a stage play that became a movie. I think it was called The Barrett's of Wimple Street. I don't ever expect you to remember that or even know what that is. But it's about Robert Browning, the author, and his wife and the relationship they had. And she was growing weaker over time and she felt so embarrassed by that. And finally, the husband said to the wife, sweetheart, don't you realize that my strength needs your weakness? Just as much as your weakness needs my strength. And I thought, boy, that captures the heart of God when it comes to prayer. God loves our dependence. He loves our need. He loves and is attracted to our weakness. And so he says, ask, ask, pray. By the way, I need to say that God is not attracted to self-sufficiency.

He is not attracted to, no, I can do this. God is not attracted to pride. In fact, do you know God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. So build yourselves up on your most holy faith and pray.

Read the word, hear from God, and talk to God. You've heard me talk over the years about Billy Sunday. He was an evangelist. In fact, he was a revivalist in the classic sense of the word.

He was also, before that, a professional baseball player in America. He became a believer and one of his early mentors, a friend, said to him, William, that's what he called Billy Sunday, William, there are three simple rules that you should practice. If you do, no one will ever be able to write the word backslider after your name. He said, take 15 minutes a day to let God talk to you. Take 15 minutes for you to talk to him and spend 15 minutes a day telling others about the Savior.

He said, if you do that, you will never be a backslider. Billy Sunday made that the practice of his life. Every day he's going to hear from God. Every day he's going to talk to God in prayer, and every day he would tell somebody about the Savior. He became an incredible evangelist with that in mind.

That's Skip Heiting with a message from the series Fight for the House. Now, here's Skip to share how you can keep this broadcast going strong, connecting you and many others to the gospel. Did you know that Christianity is all about redemption? God redeemed us. He bought us out of slavery.

He took us from our sins, and he sent Jesus to pay for those sins on the cross. Now, that's good news, and we want to share that with as many people as possible. And you can be a part of letting others know about this abounding love of God. Here's how you can give today to reach others with the gospel. Call 800-922-1888 to give the gift.

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