A Call to Battle - Part B

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That's connectwithskiff.com slash donate. Thank you. OK, now we're in Jude 1 as we join Skip for today's lesson. 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. 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. So the Greek term is.

Let me do it again. Agony, agonize. We get the English term agonize from that. So picture an athlete since the 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 La-Z-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 Koran.

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 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, 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. 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's gonna 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. Do 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. So 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 3, 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 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. And 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 4 that is sort of the introduction to the bulk of the epistle going forward. Let's look at verse 4 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 4. 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 lusts.

Now, I counted six times. In 25 verses, Jude uses the word ungodly. What is ungodly?

It means ungodlike, ungodlike. 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, yes, 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 what lewdness is? You know what a lewd 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 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 1. 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 can 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 1, 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 four, they turn the grace of God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and the 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. They want to name his name, but they don't want to do what he says. And I kind of remember Jesus talking about that.

Right? In Matthew chapter seven, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven. I remember Jesus saying in Luke chapter six, why do you call me Lord, Lord, but you don't do what I say? So, fight the fight. You ready to step into the ring?

I am. I kind of look at it this way, you know. We've had quite a year and I've watched what's happening and I listen. I have my ear to the ground.

I listen to what the world is saying and I listen to what politicians are saying and it doesn't look favorable for us in terms of how the world is going to treat us in the coming few years. And I kind of look at it this way. I've had a good life. I've had a good run. I've had a good ministry. Maybe the Lord wants me to have a jail ministry.

And it could come to that, that if you speak the truth and you stand up against this crazy immorality, they'll put you in jail. So, send me notes if I end up there. You'll be there with me. Good. We'll be cellmates. Hey, I just want to close by saying, I hope you know my heart in this.

It's a heart of love. I mean, I'd rather, let's talk about peace and encouragement and Jesus coming back. And I'd love to do all that, and we do. But we think, I think, I believe that this is a series for such a time as this. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series Fight for the House. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Right now, we want to share about a special resource that will help you develop clear vision for your life. What is the purpose that God created man for? Listen to this from Skip Heitzig about God's ultimate purpose. God's creation of man was so that his reflection would be in man, but the ultimate purpose is that God might interact with man and woman.

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That's Connect to 74759. We hope you'll come back tomorrow to hear Skip's insightful message, The Fight, Ancient and Modern. The most haunting question I think I've ever heard from the lips of Jesus is when Jesus said, When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? It's a scary question for Jesus to ask. When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? Make a connection Make a connection At the foot of the crossing Cast all burdens on His word Make a connection Connection Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.