“Keep Yourselves”

Jude urged his readers to contend for the faith and to keep themselves in the love of God.

So how do we do that? What does it mean to contend and to keep? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg considers what we're called to do and what God does for us as we continue our study in the book of Jude, looking today at verses 20 and 21. Jude has spent the greater part of this letter urging his readers to contend for the faith. That is what they need to be doing, he says, because of certain people who have crept into their fellowships, crept in unannounced, unheralded, and yet doing despite to the truth of the gospel. He then goes on from about verse 5 all the way through to verse 19 to explain just why this is such a pressing problem. Now, having explained to them what it is and why it is so important, it is only now that he goes on to say, What is the way in which we are going to be able to handle this predicament?

And it is as he draws his letter to a close that he makes his point. Now, let me just pause and say it is almost inevitable that there would have been some people who were reading his letter who, when the exhortation comes to contend for the faith, found themselves immediately fearful and hesitant—the kind of people who might, by dint of personality, say, It's just not my way to be like that. I don't like to be like that.

I don't want to be like that. And therefore, such individuals then need the prompting and the urging of the letter brought home by the Holy Spirit. However, on the other side, if such fearful individuals needed to be propped up, some who by nature find themselves contentious need to be, if you like, settled down a little bit. Because there is something about being introduced to the desire to deal with error, to contend for the faith, that depending, again, on personality and background, it draws, if you like, both the best and the worst out of people—people who by nature relish fights, people who just like arguing.

And so, if you have that as your sort of MO, then you need to temper that. The great danger—probably the greater danger for us here—is the danger of the latter, not the former. And it is this danger—the danger of being swallowed up by an interest in or a potential delight in controversy, of finding ourselves saying, I love to find out on the internet who's going wrong, what's going wrong, who's saying whatever it is. We need to be reminded that the invitation, the exhortation to contend is not, you will notice in the text, to contend against but to contend for—to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. Surely, that means that if we say this is true, we have to say, and this is false.

But the tenor and the tone in which we do that is vitally important. And again, the history of the church, from the very beginning, bears testimony to the danger. If you turn one page in your Bible, you will be in the book of Revelation, and you will see chapter 2, where, in the word of Christ to the church at Ephesus, it runs along this warning, doesn't it? "'I know your works,' he says, your toil, your patient endurance, how you cannot bear with those who are evil."

You get that phrase? You can't bear with those who are evil. But you've tested those who call themselves apostles and who are not, and you've found them to be false.

So far, so good. "'I know that you're enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at the first.'" Now, notice carefully. He commends them for their ability to distinguish between truth and error. But he says the tragedy is that it would seem that this has so swallowed you that you now have begun to abandon the love you had at the first. So what I hope we can see this morning in these two verses, at least this, that the best reply to the scoffers is not a clever argument.

The best reply to the scoffers is a transformed life. And what you really have in these two verses are four marks of those who are called to live out the faith. The verbs are building, praying, keeping, and waiting.

Now, we could also simply start at the first verb, building, and go from there, but I hope perhaps this will help us. The reason I say this is because you know that we are the called, we are the beloved, and we are the kept. So he starts with that reality, kept for Christ, where we will eventually get to verses 24 and 25, where he says he is the one who is able to keep you from falling. You are kept for Christ. You will be kept from falling. Now, he says, if you're gonna handle this correctly, keep yourselves in the love of God. Let's just think about that for a moment. In other words, he says, Stay where you are.

Stay where you are. In Jesus, you have been brought into the circle of God's amazing love. He has called you. You are his beloved in Jesus.

You have been kept for the Lord Jesus Christ. As John puts it, Herein is love. This is love, he says, not that we loved God but that he loved us, and that he gave his Son as an atoning sacrifice or as the propitiation for our sins. So that the love of God to which he refers, in which we are kept, is an initiative taking love. God's love is an initiative taking love. God has not loved us in Jesus on the basis of how attractive we are or how good we are or how punctilious we are about trying to set aside what is wrong. He has loved us because he loved us. Now, how are we to keep ourselves in the love of God?

Where can we be helped by that? John chapter 15, where we have the record of Jesus using the picture of the vine and the branches. You will remember that. And as he explains to his followers these things, he then says—this is John 15.9—"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you."

It's an amazing thought. The love between the Father and the Son? That's the measure of my love for you. Then what does he say? Four words in English, abide in my love. What's Jude saying?

Same thing. Keep yourself in the love of God. Well, how will we do that? Verse 10. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. Remember, Jesus came to do the Father's will. Do you remember, in the garden of Gethsemane, in the prospect of all that was before him, he sweat, as it were, great drops of blood?

If there's any other way that this could happen, this would be fine with me. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. Now, if you think about this—which I hope you do—you realize that the big problem with these folks who were ungodly people is that they were perverting the grace of God into a license for immorality.

In short order, it went like this. The grace of God is such that he sets you free from your sins so you can do whatever you want, so that you can be whatever you want. This is the immensity of his grace.

Nothing could be, actually, further from the truth. And when people come up against the notion, for example, of the commandments of God, you find that they get a quiver in their liver, that somehow or another they think, There must be something wrong with this. This is a call to legalism, mentioning that we're supposed to obey things.

Yes! Keeping the commandments of God on account of the love of God by the enabling of the Spirit of God is not easy. We need the enabling work of the Holy Spirit to keep ourselves in the love of God. Because we live, as believers, in a battleground.

Temptation is everywhere every day. The inclinations of our hearts are still sinful inclinations. We're not a finished product. We have been redeemed. We have been set in a new department, if you like, but we're living in this context. And in the responsibility of keeping ourselves in the love of God, we need to do just that. And this, you will notice, is not a solo exercise. Keep yourselves, plural, in the love of God.

Keep yourselves. Isolation is a dreadful situation to find ourselves in. In Ecclesiastes in the NIV, there's a striking just a statement where all of a sudden, as you're reading in that thing about chapter 4, and it says, I saw a man, he was all alone, had neither friend nor brother.

What a picture. The nowhere man. The uninvolved man. The solo flyer. And then he goes on to say, two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work.

If one falls down, the other can pick him up. Now, with that said, as the imperative, let's go to these other verbs. But you, my dear friends, back at the beginning of verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith. Interesting, for some, the adjective here, holy, as to faith, is used only here in the entire New Testament. I'm glad of that, because I think it helps us understand that what Jude is referencing here is not a subjective faith. He's not saying, Your faith, your own personal response to Jesus. No, he's already set the scene for that by saying, I want to earnestly urge you to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints—in other words, to the doctrine which has underpinned the development of God's people throughout the ages.

Ephesians 2.19. So then, you're no longer strangers and aliens, but you're fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. You're not on your own, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets—Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone—in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, in Jesus, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

What's the point? Building ourselves up is a corporate reality. And it is also a lifelong reality. It's not that you can attend a course which is called Building Yourself Up in Your Holy Faith—it's a four-week course, you finish that and you move on.

No, it goes on for all of our lives. Jesus told his followers, I'm going away, the Holy Spirit will come, he will lead you into all truth. When he leads you into all truth, then what I want you to do is teach that truth. They taught it, it was written down, it was left for us, and now we have it. And that is why, incidentally, the regular exposition of the Bible and the application of the Word of God is central if you want to be building yourself up in your faith.

You can't build yourself up in your faith apart from the means that God has provided for doing that. This is how it's done, he says. This is the reason why, as you read all the way through the Bible, God is saying to his servants, whether it's Moses or Joshua or any of the prophets, assemble my people, he says, assemble my people that they might hear my word. It's mutual edification. It's mutual correction. It's mutual consolation.

It's mutual encouragement. You see, how are you going to be working this stuff out? How am I going to work this stuff out on my own? I can't on my own. I need you. You need me.

Really? Absolutely. I mean, who looks after me? You look after me.

Oh, yes, you do. The writer to the Hebrews says, Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you a sinful, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. He says, Look out.

Take care. Be alert. The natural temptation will be declension. So we are on the lookout—in a wonderful way, not in a negative way. So when you put together individuals who have committed themselves to that objective, who have lived their life through the week and have now come together, united in their shared conviction that we worship Almighty God, we listen for God's Word, and we declare his glory. Here is humanity at its best. The world goes by, it's got no notion of this. They don't know this, because they don't know Jesus. That's why we're called to go and tell them about Jesus. He says, actually, a human life is only what it should be if it is a life centered on serving and adoring God while we are assembled as the body of Christ.

And here is his most striking statement of all. If you want not only to know but to be your true self, then you need to go to church. Then, praying—praying in the Holy Spirit. Now, let me just say straight off, you will find people—and you may be one of the people—who immediately says, Oh, this is a special kind of prayer. This is a special prayer where you don't know what you're saying, but you say it anyway, and it's peculiar, and you'll be all the better for it.

I don't subscribe to that view. This is, if you like, the very praying that a Christian needs always to pray. And it is the prayer in the Holy Spirit contrasting with those who are devoid of the Spirit. Verse 19. These are the people who are perhaps telling you, This is the way to really make progress in the Christian life. But he says they are actually devoid of the Spirit, and anyone who doesn't have the Spirit of Christ doesn't belong to him. Romans 8 and verse 14, For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba Father. You see this juxtaposition between building and praying? Praying in the Holy Spirit, enabled by the Holy Spirit.

Praying in line with the Holy Spirit. Paul goes on later in Romans 8, doesn't he, to make clear that we don't know how to pray very often. We don't know how to pray as we ought, verse 26. But our prayers are an expression of dependence upon God. And so we pray with one another, and we pray for one another. I think we need to pay careful attention to this notion of building and praying, given that they're put together. You see, again, all of this we're able to do on our own, but we're not best on our own.

None of us are best on our own. You see, it is when we're prepared to be honest with one another about the fact that we are seeking to keep ourselves in the love of God and building ourselves up in the most holy faith, that we find out from one another that we're not the only person that ever… that ever what? Well, people say, Well, I thought I was the only one who ever felt that way. And then you talk to someone and say, Oh no, I've often felt like that. I thought I was the only person that failed to grasp what he was saying.

And people say, Oh no, none of us can grasp what he's saying. We're together on that. Building, praying, and finally waiting—waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. But surely we began with the mercy of the Lord Jesus.

Yes, in fact, we did. Peter begins his letter in that exact way. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. What we have here is just an indication of what runs through the Bible, and that is that our Christian lives have a now and a not-yet dimension to them.

Best cross-reference, I think, is probably 1 John and chapter 3, and so I'll read it. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are, present tense, presently. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is, and everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. So the reality of being in Christ, an account of his mercy, sends us out into the journey of life where we wrestle not against flesh and blood but again in spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places. And in this whole process, as we recognize the challenges that are within us and the challenges that are around us, we are heeding the exhortation of the Word of God, keep yourselves in the love of God, building yourselves up in the holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, and waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus when on that day you are welcomed into his eternal glory. One of the things that the Evil One has done an amazing job on is trying to cause people who are seeking to follow Jesus to lose confidence in the beginning and the end of the whole story—a complete loss of confidence in the idea that there is a Creator God, that we were personally made for his glory, in his love, and getting us to give up on the notion that there is a Savior in heaven who is awaiting our arrival. And so both these things have to be affirmed if we're going to contend, for the faith once delivered to the saints, that God created the world, that God has provided in Jesus a Savior for sin, that that Savior has ascended into heaven, and from there we await the one who will come. These are marks of the genuine Christian experience. If they're not yours, the chances are you're not a Christian at all. If you're listening to me now, you're going to go out and say, Well, that was fascinating, but it didn't really register a bit to me. Because it never once occurred to me that I was supposed to do any of those things, or even that I could.

Well, then, today you may. You may respond to the beautiful invitation of Jesus to come to him and to find in him a Savior and a Lord and a King, and then to go on out, finding freedom that is really freedom—the freedom that is kept in the love of God. In Jesus, we're all still under construction. None of us are the finished article. Sometimes we make that too obvious to those who love us best, and we need to repent and keep going.

But one day he will finish his new creation. One day we will be pure, and we will be spotless. I'm not pure. I'm not spotless yet.

And I hope you know you're not as well. That way, we're waiting. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg with a message he's titled, Keep Yourselves. If you benefit from listening to this daily program, I want to encourage you to join the team that helps make all of this possible. I'm talking about our Truth Partner Team. These are listeners like you who give an amount they choose each month to help bring Alistair's teaching to a worldwide audience. Any amount you contribute adds up when many people participate. It's the collective giving of the group that cares for the cost of producing and distributing Truth for Life. And as Truth Partners who commit to giving $20 a month or more, you're invited to request not one but both of the books we recommend each month.

We send them as our way of saying thank you for your partnership. Join the team that delivers the gospel message through Truth for Life to a worldwide listening audience every day of the year when you sign up to become a Truth Partner today. You can sign up online at truthforlife.org slash truth partner or call us at 888-588-7884. Today, we want to recommend to you a book we are very excited about. It's Alistair's first book for young children titled, See is for Christian. Ask for your copy of the children's book, See is for Christian when you become a Truth Partner or when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. Tomorrow, we'll learn how we can deal with those who doubt and dispute God's Word. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.