A Call to Battle - Part A

The book of Jude was written about apostasy. Ever heard that term apostasy? To apostatize or an apostate? It's a word that means those who defect from truth. They defect from the true faith.

Or they never really had the true faith, but they pretended to be a part of it. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Pastor Skip begins a new series titled, Fight for the House, and shares his message, A Call to Battle, looking at those who abandoned the truth. Now, hear Skip to tell you about a special resource we have for you this month. Vision for the future is not a blind leap of faith. This is Pastor Skip reminding you that present vision needs to be informed by God's past faithfulness, his actions in the present, and his promises for the future. That's why we have prepared a special vision package.

Here's more information on this resource. Listen to what the message version of the Bible says about the necessity of a clear vision for the future. If people can't see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves.

But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed. Vision for your life. That's the theme of our resource package that features five excellent full-length messages by Skip, including six things that will surprise you about heaven and God's purpose for people. Now, here's a comment from Skip Heitzig on the topic of purpose.

God has a desire. God has a purpose for you, and one of his purposes for you is that you know him, that he walk with you, that you do life together with him. Do you walk with God?

Is that a concern of yours? Is that a stated goal in your head, in your heart? I want to walk with God. I want to live to please God.

I want to know God. Clear vision for your life. That's the theme of our vision resource package that features five excellent full-length messages by Skip, including six things that will surprise you about heaven and God's purpose for people. You'll want to order our vision resource package for this month, which also features a full-color magazine about the vision that drives Skip's ministry. You'll also receive an audio copy of Skip clearly outlining his philosophy of ministry in the past, present, and future. Receive your vision package when you make a donation of $50 or more to Connect with Skip. Give your gift by calling 1-800-922-1888 or online at connectwithskip.com.

That's 1-800-922-1888 or connectwithskip.com. Ready? We're going to open up Jude chapter 1 as Skip begins today's lesson. Yeah, the Book of Jude. I'm really glad to be back in a New Testament book, a verse-by-verse study, albeit a short book.

I'm really glad that we can be going through this incredible section of Scripture. Just kind of a forewarning, this message today is a call to arms. It is a summons to fight. And I know you're thinking, well, I didn't come to church to learn how to fight.

Skip, I came to church to be encouraged. I understand that. When I was a kid, I never liked getting into a fight. That's not to say I didn't get into a fight because I did from occasion to occasion, time to time. But I didn't like it. I tried to avoid it, even though I had friends or at least acquaintances in school who didn't mind even looked for getting into a fight. I think we all know kids like that in school who were like that.

But I wasn't that kid. And as a Christian, I don't necessarily like to fight. Most Christians would agree that fighting is not what we are called to primarily. We follow a savior who said, I am gentle and lowly in heart. The problem is we may think he was always like that. We might think that Jesus never raised his voice, that Jesus would never embarrass anyone, that he would never call anybody out, that he just sort of stood there with a smile on his face, his hand on the head of little kids, maybe healing birds from time to time and just speaking in a gentle, soft, loving voice. I've even noticed that great artists in history have depicted Jesus sort of that way.

They, for the most part, picture and paint a Jesus who is wistful, weak, even effeminate. 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. The one who said, brood of vipers, translated, you bunch of slimy snakes. That Jesus. The one who said to his detractors, whitewashed tombs filled with dead men's bones and all corruption. The one who said, you are of your father, the devil, and his deeds you do. The same Jesus who said to the religious leaders, when you win a convert, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. It is that Jesus that the book of Jude brings into the forefront.

It is Jesus with a backbone. Now Jude is a small book. There's only 25 verses in it, only 613 words.

But though it's a small book, it's a small book that packs a big punch. I look at the book of Jude sort of as a fighter's manual for the believer. It was not Jude's intention originally to write this letter. As you will discover, Jude sat down to write a sweet little note of encouragement, but he ended up writing about false teachers that had come in the church. And what this book reminds us of at just first blush, just looking over the book, is that Christians are not on a playground, but we are on a battleground, a battlefield.

We are called to that. In fact, the whole atmosphere of the book of Jude has sort of a military tone to it, even a militant tone from the language that is used, the grammar, the brevity of the commands, the sort of bullet point directives that Jude gives throughout this book. In fact, in verse three, he uses the term exhorting.

This is what I'm doing. He said I'm exhorting you. And that's a word that describes a general giving orders to an army. So let's read the first four verses of Jude. This is our summons to war, our call to arms. Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ, mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men who turned the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. Did you know that Jude is one of the most neglected books in the New Testament? Most preachers don't touch it. They don't preach sermon series from it. It's filled with all these kind of Old Testament analogies and references, and there's a lot of judgment and condemnation and warning in this book. And I've even noticed that it's hard to find a good commentary on the book of Jude. I've collected a few of them, but most commentators, those who write books on the books of the Bible, don't have a lot of stuff on the book of Jude. Most Christians know it's there, but they don't really know what it's about.

And certainly they don't quote much from it. I dare you to find somebody who will say, my life verse is found in the book of Jude. But all that we really know about it is probably the favorite verse of Christians, which is verse 24. It's the benediction at the end of the book, where he says, Now unto him who is able to keep you from stumbling and present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. It's a great benediction.

But that's about it. But the book of Jude was written about apostasy. Ever heard that term, apostasy? To apostatize, or an apostate. It's a word that means those who defect from truth. They defect from the true faith. Or they never really had the true faith, but they pretended to be a part of it.

You could call them nominal Christians, Christians in name only, who slip in, as you will see unnoticed. Now you might ask, well, what's the big deal about that? I mean, why write a whole book or a little letter even about that? Well, that is the question we're going to answer in the next few weeks. And today I want to show you four components to this call to battle. We're going to look at the army, the hostility, the artillery, and the enemy.

Let's consider those four components. First of all, the army. And we find that in verse one and two. Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ.

Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. That's the army. It includes Jude the author, Jesus Christ the commander, and us the troops.

So let's just begin with Jude. I'm going to call Jude the ADC, the aide de camp in military parlance. He is the assistant to the commander. He is the one who is going to give the command of the commander to the troops.

He is the one writing the letter. He is bringing the summons, calling us to war. Now, he is called Jude in our English translations, but here's what you may not know. English translations have altered the original name of Jude for obvious reasons, as you will see momentarily, and given him the nickname, not really the name that is written in Greek.

In the Greek translation, it doesn't say Jude. It says in Greek, eudas, which is the name Judas. Judas. There's lots of different people in the New Testament by the name Judas, but there's only one we remember. That's Judas the traitor, Judas the scariot. It is not that Judas that wrote this book, however. But that's a name that, for obvious reasons, instead of saying, hey, here's the book of Judas, because people are going to go, whoa, I don't want to read that book.

I don't want to find out about how to be a traitor. So they've given him, softened the name Jude. People don't name their kids Judas.

Have you noticed that? Have you ever met a Judas before? We'll name our kids Paul, Peter, other biblical names, but not that one. You won't name your dog Judas. But the Jude or Judas that wrote this book is a different one than Judas the scariot. By the way, let's just throw that out. Isn't it ironic that the only book in the New Testament that speaks about falling away from the faith, defecting, apostatizing, is called the book of Judas?

It's just an interesting thing to note. But the Jude that wrote, notice who he is. He's a bondservant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James.

So that narrows it down. Of all the people named Jude or Judas in the New Testament, there's only one that we know about whose brother was named James, and that is Jude, the half brother of Jesus, literally related to Jesus Christ. Both James and Jude, Judas, in this case, were related physically to Jesus. That is, Joseph and Mary were his parents, Jude's parents and James, whereas Jesus had Mary as his mother, but was conceived in the womb by the Holy Spirit, a half brother of Jesus. We meet them in Matthew chapter 13. The text says, coming to his hometown, that's Nazareth, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed.

Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers, they asked. Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? That's who we believe wrote the book of Jude, Jude, the half brother of Jesus. So verse 1 then speaks of a transformation that happened in Jude's life, for he says, Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.

He wasn't always a bondservant of Jesus Christ, he wasn't always a bondservant of Jesus Christ. In fact, did you know that Jude and James and the other brothers, half brothers, did not believe in Jesus while Jesus went through his ministry, three and a half year ministry on the earth? They thought Jesus was nuts. They thought he was delusional.

They thought the lights were on, but nobody's home. They thought he was one taco short of a combo plate, whatever delusional metaphor you want to use. They thought that about Jesus.

We're told as much in Mark chapter 3, as the crowds gathered in Capernaum, and Jesus, it says, was unable to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, he is out of his mind. They thought he was bonkers. They didn't believe in him. Now, I'm bringing this up, and I'm underscoring it, because I want those of you with unbelieving family members to be encouraged by this.

Even Jesus Christ had family members who were unbelievers. So, the question is, well, what happened to Jude to make him a believer? And isn't it interesting, he doesn't say, Jude, the half-brother of Jesus. He says, Jude, a bond slave of Jesus.

What happened? What transformed him from an unbeliever to a bond slave of Jesus? A very profound event known as the resurrection. See, when your half-brother dies and then gets up from the dead, that'll do it.

That's enough. And when that happened, he became a believer, so we find him in the book of Acts, chapter 1. It says, they all met together, that is in the upper room, continually for prayer, along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, several other women, and the brothers of Jesus.

Jude was in that upper room. The resurrection is what brought him to faith. So, remember this, never give up on those you love. Never quit praying for your family members. Never stop having hope for that unbelieving family member.

You never know when the grace of God is going to break through and grab that heart, have something happen, and there'll be a transformation. So, that's Jude. Jude is the ADC, the aide-de-camp in this army. The commander is Jesus.

Jude, a bond servant of Jesus Christ. Now, I call him a commander because that is how he is depicted in Revelation, chapter 19. That's his second coming. He is depicted as a commander.

He comes on a white horse. John, who wrote the book, said he comes with the armies of heaven. He pictures him with a sword to strike the nation, so he's battle-ready. John further says he judges and makes war.

He even has the bloodstains of his enemies on his uniform. So, this is not gentle Jesus, meek and mild. This is giant Jesus, mighty and wild. This is the warrior Christ. This is the second coming. So, he is the commander of this army.

And the troops were the recipients of this letter and, by proxy, us today. For, he says in verse 1, to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father. Sanctified means set apart and, I like this, preserved in Jesus Christ. So, God called us to himself, he set us apart for himself, and he will protect us by himself. You are preserved.

Just latch on to that word for a moment. Preserved in Jesus Christ means to carefully guard or protect. I tell you what, it's nice to know before you're going into battle that you're going to be preserved. It's like, okay, you're calling me to fight here, but then the commander says, yeah, but I want you to know the odds are so in our favor. We are so going to win this battle.

Hands down, the ultimate victory is already ours. You're going to be preserved. Now, there's going to be skirmishes along the way, hence the book of Jude, but you will be kept. You will be preserved. And notice in God's army, there are some great military benefits.

Mercy, peace, and love multiplied. So, you're in the army now. It's not a question is, the question is not, will I be a soldier? The question is, will you be a good soldier? Will you be a faithful soldier? Will you be a loyal soldier? You and I are part of this army.

So, that's the army. Let's look at the second component to this battle, the hostility. That really takes us to verse three. That's the heart of this whole introduction. Beloved, I like that it begins that way. Loved ones, people that I love, because he's going to talk about some really heavy, hard-working people.

He's going to talk about some really heavy, hard-hitting things. So, he wants them to know they are deeply loved by him. Beloved, or beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints.

That's something I think you need to know. The first few verses of this letter are the nicest part of this letter. Just remember that, because it's going to sort of go downhill from here as far as niceness is concerned. It's going to go uphill in terms of revelation, but the first few verses are like the nicest part.

Beloved, and then the very end of the book is going to get nice again. There's that benediction, but you just kind of hold on to that. So, what he's saying is this in verse three. I originally sat down to write you a letter of encouragement about our common salvation, following Jesus and celebrating being saved, but it didn't come out that way. I'm giving you, rather, a call to arms to get into a fight.

Warren Wiersbe wrote, the Holy Spirit led him to put down his harp and to sound the trumpet. Now, I can relate to Jude. Jude is saying, I'd much rather tell you about something else. I'd rather write to you something really sweet and encouraging. I didn't, but I'd rather.

I mean, I relate to that. I'd much rather preach encouraging sermons. I would much rather talk about heaven. I'd much rather do a series on family relationships and love within that relationship. I would much rather do another series on give peace a chance and talk about the peace of God. Love all those subjects.

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 JB 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 idea. He's calling us to fight. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series Fight for the House.

Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Now here's Skip with an invitation for you to join he and Lenya Heitzig on a Holy Land tour next year. Hey, our 2024 Israel tour is coming up.

This is Pat or Skip and we still have space on this trip that Lenya and I are hosting. We will be touring Israel from May 1st through May 12th. I hope that you'll join us firsthand to see some incredible sites like the Sea of Galilee.

I'm sure you've always wanted to see that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Garden Tomb the place many people believe is where Jesus rose from the dead. The final day line for registration is December 31st. So there's still time to take action and join Lenya and I for the trip of a lifetime.

Find full Israel information at connectwithskip.com. We're glad you've tuned in today. Connect with Skip is all about helping listeners like you strengthen your walk with Christ. We want to invite you to connect others like you to the life-changing power of the gospel with a gift to help keep these teachings you love on the air all around the world. Your support helps keep this broadcast going and growing for you and many others as we expand into more major U.S. cities. 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 tomorrow to hear the conclusion of Skip's message and discover how to wield your most powerful weapon, truth. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.