Shepherds watch over their sheep. Keep them protected from danger, but every so often a wolf gets into the flock and can do serious damage. The same can happen within the church. And today on Truth for Life, Alastair Begg teaches us why it's vitally important for us to recognize the threat, heed the warning, and keep the faith. We're listening to an Encore 2025 message titled, See It.
Say it.
Sorted. If you have a Bible, I invite you to turn to. the most neglected letter in the Bible. The second last book of the Bible. And that is the letter of Jude.
With all that said, let me read. The letter. Jude. A servant of Jesus Christ. and brother of James, to those who are called beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ.
May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation. I found it necessary. to write appealing to you. to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.
For certain people have crept in unnoticed. who long ago were designated for this condemnation. Ungodly people. who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality, and deny our only Master and Lord. Jesus Christ.
Now, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels, who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet In like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. When the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses.
He did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, The Lord rebuked you. But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand. and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, Understand instinctively. Woe to them. For they walked in the way of Cain.
and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error. and perished in Korra's rebellion. These Our blemish is on your love feasts. As they feast with you without fear. looking after themselves.
Waterless clouds, swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late summer. twice dead, uprooted, wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved for ever. It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him. These are grumblers. malcontents following their own sinful desires.
They are loudmouth posters. showing favoritism to gain advantage. But you must remember, beloved, The predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, In the last time there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions. It is these who cause divisions.
worldly people. Devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved, Build yourselves up in your most holy faith. Pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of God.
Waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt. Save others. by snatching them out of the fire. To others show mercy with fear.
hating even the garment stained By the flesh.
Now to him, who is able to keep you from stumbling. And to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. to the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority. before all time.
And now and forever. Amen.
Well, a brief prayer. An old Anglican prayer, Father, what we know not. Teach us What we have not Give us what we are not Make us. for your son's sake. Amen.
If you have been recently in the United Kingdom and traveling on public transport, you will have noticed what I have noticed: that every so often, as you're, for example, writing on the tube in the centre of London, an announcement comes out of nowhere and it says this: see it. Say it.
sorted. See it, say it.
Sorted. And if you're not familiar with the use of the verb to sort in uh British terminology, where people will say to you, instead of saying, did you make your reservations for your flight, they will say, is your flight sorted? And if you're not aware of that use, then you won't even understand what's being said. What actually it is, is from the British Transport Police encouraging passengers to keep themselves and those around them safe. And so they say: if you see something that is untoward, if you say it, Say something about it, and we, the transport police, will endeavour to get it sorted.
Well, of course, we understand that. It's not unique to London. The phraseology may be, but everywhere you go in the world at the moment, security and safety are uppermost in people's thinking. Any grandparent knows that being entrusted with the grandchildren for a few days is to be under the scrutiny of the children that lent you their children because they want to make sure that when they come back, they will still be there, that the security is there. And indeed, the terminology of watching out for the invasion of that which would be untoward, would be unsettling, would be of any kind of impact that would threaten and jeopardize life It goes without saying.
The reason I begin in that way is because you will notice that in verse 4, this is at the very heart of this little letter from Jude. Certain people have crept in unnoticed. They're in. It's not that they might be in, it is that they are in. He's writing to them and he's saying, you need to realize that while some of you have fallen asleep on the ball, This is what has been going on.
He tells them that he had been intending to write in a far more general way concerning salvation, the wonder of God's grace and goodness, the things about which we sang earlier in the afternoon and again this evening. But he says I've changed my tag. And I've changed my tag out of a sense of compulsion. It's not as if we imagine that Jude had had a bad evening and he had a sort of cantankerous spirit, and so he determined that he would write in this way. No, he doesn't feel in that way at all.
It is a matter of urgency, he says, and account of the urgency, I am writing to you in this way.
Now Let me take just a moment and set this in a wider context than uh the immediacy even of Jude, and the immediacy necessarily of the time in which we're living. Let's lay it down as axiomatic. That despite the preoccupation of contemporary Christianity in the West, With the inroads of a secular culture. An understandable concern. When we read our Bibles, We discover that the great warning Is not about how to deal with those who oppose us from without.
But is the warning of collapse From within. Paul does it as he bids farewell to the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20. He says, I want you to take care of yourselves and the church that is under your care, because after my departure, fierce wolves will come in, they will arise from among yourself, and they will be bright, and they will be bold, and they will draw teachers away after them. It was true in Ephesus. It was true in the context to which Jude writes.
And in actual fact It is vitally important that in every generation of the church, We recognize the threat. We heed the warning. And we keep the faith. I was intrigued in doing a little bit of research about when people were born because I was thinking about particular individuals. I was thinking about when Dwight L.
Moody was born, when C. H. Spurden was born and when General Booth of the Salvation Army was born. And I thought this was probably the case, but when I checked it, I realized it was: that they were all born within about seven or eight years of each other. And they some of them make it through into the twentieth century.
But not all. And General Booth was asked as he was moving towards the end of his life. What They asked him, Is your great concern for the church going into the next century? That is the past century now, the twentieth century. Booth replied, In answering your inquiry, I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be.
Religion without the Holy Ghost. Christianity without Christ. Forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration. Politics without God Heaven without hell. He didn't realize how prescient he was.
His contemporary Spurgeon, who actually preached A four booth. And Booth preached for Spurgeon. Not everybody knows that. But Spurgeon, of course, was dealing with a very similar circumstance, wasn't he? He was dealing with the fact that the church was threatened not by the external realities and vicissitudes of life, but was threatened by the fact that.
that matters of biblical and vital importance were being eroded. And in fact, it's actually worth considering the parallels between the downgrade controversy through which Spurgeon lived and the state of contemporary evangelicalism. I'll leave you to do that for homework on your own. But for Spurgeon, it was a period when the authority and the sufficiency of Scripture was vigorously attacked. That the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement about which we've just been singing.
was ridiculed. And what challenged him and disturbed him greatly was the fact that instead of the church holding the line. There was capitulation. And radical unbelief which began to lay hold in the church. God was being robbed of his glory.
And men and women were being deprived of their hope. Spurgeon always was fairly Straightforward, wasn't he? He referred to this as quotes. These destroyers of our churches appear to be as content with their work as monkeys with their mischief. That which their fathers would have lamented, they rejoice in.
Avowed atheists are not a tenth as dangerous. as those preachers who scatter doubt And stab That faith. You think about this. The great hue and cry about the contemporary atheists. Hitchen is dead and gone, but he ran for a while.
And there are so many of them. And the church is writing books to try and answer these people. That's not the problem. The problem is that within the framework of the Church of Jesus Christ, There is an incipient loss of confidence. In the authority, power, truthfulness, relevance, and application of the scriptures themselves.
And I bring this to you tonight as somebody who feels the weight of this and the burden of this as a pastor. It's not that I live somewhere other than this. This is where I live my life. This is where we live our lives. And every one of us has only our foot in the doorway for a short period of time, for a generation.
maybe two generations. And we keep our foot in the doorway in the hope that the door will be left open for others who will come behind and who will subscribe to. the faith that was once delivered. to the saints.
Now you may be saying Here we go. This is going to be one big long diatribe. No, no. No, in fact, if you find yourself Immediately getting your juices going about this. Just the word contend is enough to get some people going.
Oh, I love to be, I love to contend. While contend is okay, contention is not okay. The spirit and the tone of Jude here is not a spirit of condemnation, it is a spirit of consternation. Don't you like the English language? But Jude historically has been a happy hunting ground for contentious individuals.
who are always spoiling for a fight, They are antagonistic, they are belligerent, they are combative. And they are generally disagreeable. We do not want to find ourselves. included in that company. I tried To write, rewrite the letter of Jude.
I couldn't do it, but I wanted to see if I could. Capture the tone of it. And I gave up after a while, but this is what I came up with. This is due now.
Well, this is. Me, pretending to be Jude. I'm writing like this. Not because I want to. But because I must.
And because I love you, and long to see you kept. and keeping on. Let me remind you of these sad and powerful examples from the history of the people of God. They make my point. Remember, we were told to expect this kind of thing.
So keep your chin up. Stay steady. Be gracious. Rest in God. He has you under his care.
Now, with all of that, by way of introduction, let's deal with the first two verses. We probably won't get much further than that, I don't know. Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James.
So we are introduced to the writer. It's fascinating to me that he introduces himself in this way. There is actually only one Jude in the New Testament who has a brother called James. And we can read of that in the Gospels, and you can do that on your own. I take it that his name has been shortened in this in order to distinguish him from the disciple who denied Jesus.
He identifies himself by his family relationship with James. His family relationship with James. The James who led the church. in Jerusalem. The James, I take it, who penned the book of James.
James is my brother. And I I'm a servant. of Jesus Christ.
Now think about it, if he was the brother of James, That means that he was the half-brother of Jesus. I don't know about you, but if I had been right in this, That was what I would have put right up front. Hey, this is me. I'm the half-brother. of Jesus.
But no, because why?
Well, he wants to make sure that we understand this. that he is the servant of Jesus.
Now, John tells us that the brothers of Jesus didn't actually believe in Jesus. They didn't believe in him at all. John chapter 7. It was only after the resurrection that they actually came to declare Jesus as Lord and Master. Jesus is in Galilee.
He's not able to go into Judea. The Jews are threatening to kill him. He retreats, as it were, to his own family dwelling. And even John says his brothers did not believe in him. No one is too privileged.
to be exempt. From the need. to be converted. Yeah, he was Jesus' half-brother. But Jesus was his Savior.
I am Jude. A servant of Jesus Christ. and the brother of James.
Now, I'm writing to those who are called beloved in God and kept for Jesus Christ.
Now, I don't have a very good memory, so I have to come up with things to help me to remember. This is what I have for these three. That is, this is the Central Bank of Kenya. All right, Central Bank of Kenya. To those who are called.
Cold. He's not addressing them by who they are or by where they are, but by what they are. First of all, they are called. The Bible refers with frequency to the fight. That the Christian, the child of God, is one whom God has called.
This means more than simply invite it. You remember, we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, folly to the Gentiles, but to those who are called. Both Jews and Greeks cried. Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. You see what he's doing here.
He's about to delve into material that is. Pretty hard both for him to write and pretty difficult for people to receive. And so he sets it immediately within the context of his love for them and his concern for them, so that they might understand how much they mean to him.
So that they know they can trust the heart of someone who cares this much. Because they know that he would ever he is too kind ever to be cruel. And he's too wise under God ever to make a mistake in what he's doing. Cold. When a person comes to faith in Jesus, whether a Jew or a Gentile.
They discover themselves to be standing in a long line of succession that goes all the way back to Abraham. The story of the Bible is really the story of God's free decision to call out a people for Himself, from every nation, tribe, language, and tongue, as we read when we get to Revelation. Keep in mind that this is a letter. It shouldn't be spoken about in such short order, despite the fact that I'm doing it in that way. You need to remember how he both begins and ends.
Keep yourselves in the love of God. You are loved by God. That's exactly how he starts. What grace is mine? that He who dwells in endless light called through the night to Save my guilty soul.
Do you ever wonder why it is that you believe? Do you ever wonder how it is that you still believe? When all thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul surveys. Transported with the view, I'm lost in wonder, love, and praise. Unnumbered comforts to my soul.
Thy tender care bestowed, Before my infant heart conceived, from whom those comforts. Yeah. This is the identity. of the child of God. And this is where he starts.
You're listening to Truth for Life with Alastair Begg. We'll hear more tomorrow. A few months ago, we were able to add our teaching to a platform that reaches more than 2 billion people around the globe. It's called WhatsApp, and it's widely used internationally. WhatsApp is a great platform for sharing with others if you live or listen outside the U.S., or if you have friends, or family, or work colleagues outside the U.S.
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I'm Bob LePine. We hope you'll join us tomorrow when we'll learn about the truths believers can hold on to even when bad news is being delivered. The Bible teaching of Alastair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.
