Third Presbyterian Church

Jude 17-25                                                                     16 November, 2008
 
 “A Call To Persevere”
 
If you have ever seen the film, “The Hiding Place”, you will remember
a scene that takes place immediately after the ten Boom family has
been visited by their pastor.  The ten Booms were devout Dutch
Christians who were secretly risking their lives by making their home
available as a hiding place for Jews who were trying to get out of
Holland during the time of the Nazi occupation of their country.  What
astounded the ten Boom family was that their pastor was voicing
strong Nazi sympathies and warned them against any acts of
resistance.  When he leaves, Corrie says something like, “I don’t
understand how that man can claim to be a Christian!”  Her father
answers back, “Just because a mouse gets in the cookie jar, it
doesn’t make him a cookie.”
 
I call this to your remembrance because Jude (apparently a brother of
Jesus) spends much of his brief letter trying to warn vulnerable
Christians to beware of certain false teachers who were making their
presence felt in and around young churches.  These false teachers
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were apparently what we would call forerunners of a
philosophical/religious movement call Gnosticism that would come to
full-flower in the second century A.D.  To explain the finer points of
Gnosticism would take longer than the time available to us at this
moment, but suffice to say that they claimed to have the real insiders’
scoop on the secret teachings of Jesus, they appealed to Christians
who wanted to be a cut above “common” Christians by joining an
elite inner circle of spiritually enlightened Christians; and they
perversely pushed the idea that if you became one of those in-theknow
 enlightened Christians, you could sin any way you want
sexually because you were saved by grace and therefore your sins
would no longer be held against you.
 
And what is weird is that twenty centuries later, particularly in the last
twenty to thirty years, the church has been plagued by a resurgence
of various forms of gnosticism.  It is a classic case of the saying that
“what is old is new again”.  As a matter of fact, if you will take a
moment to skim through any current secular book club catalog and
check out their “religious” or “spirituality” selections, you will find
them almost exclusively comprised of what we would call “neo” (or
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new) gniostic books.  They won’t always identify themselves with the
label of “gnosticism” but they amount to a newly minted version of
the same basic themes.  Whether it’s “The DaVinci Code”, or “The
Gospel According To Thomas” or “Misquoting Jesus”, they all claim
to give us the insider’s scoop on what Jesus “really” taught; they
appeal to the spiritual snob in us that may want to be at least one cut
above the ordinary and unenlightened rabble sitting next to us at this
very moment, and therefore, more than a few of them are ready to
dismiss the “petty moralism” of the “Bible-thumpers” who are still
locked-in to believing they should obey what the Bible teaches
because it’s “The Word of God” (smirk, smirk).  You see, I wouldn’t
waste my time even mentioning these books, except that I know some
lifelong Christians who have swallowed some of these books hookline-
and-sinker, and have subsequently either abandoned their faith
or have done a permanent disconnect from the church.  What they
have done, in effect, is to jettison a lifetime of solid biblical teaching,
as well as their rightful place in the Body of Christ, because they let
one essentially false teacher over-rule the truth in which they used to
be grounded.
 
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And Jude is begging us to persevere and not be led astray by false
teachers who gleefully contradict the timeless witness of the law, the
prophets, the apostles, and of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He says, “But,
dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ
foretold.  They said to you, ‘In the last times there will be scoffers who
will follow their own ungodly desires’.  These are the men who divide
you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.”  
How do we know that teachers of false doctrine do not have the
Spirit?  Not because we presume to judge their inner spiritual reality,
but because what they are teaching flatly contradicts the long-held
content of the Scriptures, which we have been taught were written by
human authors “carried along by the Holy Spirit”.  And we do not
believe that the Holy Spirit today would contradict what the Holy Spirit
taught the church in its historic past.  God cannot lie.  And his truth is
the same yesterday, today, and forever.  I think Jude’s word to us is, if
in doubt, measure the new teaching we are hearing over against what
the Scriptures teach, and in every case, trust the Word of God to be
your unimpeachable source of truth.
 
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And what is the antidote to the spiritually poisonous and divisive
influences of false teachers?  Jude says, “But you, dear friends, build
yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit.  
Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord
Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.”  We can’t help but notice
here that Jude wants each of us to be active participants in
establishing our own spiritual and doctrinal stability.  There is no hint
here that we can be passive spectators hoping that someone else will
produce growth in us.  Jude says, “But you, dear friends, build
yourselves up in your most holy faith…(you) Pray…(you) keep
yourselves anchored in God’s continuing and fiercely committed
love.”  Christian faith and vitality is not something that can be
produced for us by the perspiration of someone else’s efforts.  We
have to get actively engaged in the process of thinking and learning
and praying and growing in our relationship with Jesus Christ and his
truth.  Otherwise, we will always be coasting on someone else’s
spiritual coat tails, and that will leave us dangerously vulnerable to
false teachers and bogus theology.
 
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And I love how Eugene Peterson paraphrases this next part (verses
22 and 23); “Go easy on those who hesitate in the faith.  Go after
those who take the wrong way.  Be tender with sinners, but not soft
on sin.  The sin itself stinks to high heaven..”  That is a good and
biblically appropriate balance.  If someone is struggling with doubt,
we don’t attack their uncertainties, we come alongside them with
kindness and offer whatever help we can.  If someone loses their
spiritual bearings we don’t write them off with a critical evaluation, we
seek them out and hope to gently walk them back home.  We hate and
grieve what sin does to human lives, but we are exquisitely tender
with sinners because we know that our own sins make it so we could
never pull rank on them.  If you want to get into trouble spiritually,
start pretending that your sins really aren’t that bad.  If I start thinking
I don’t need God’s grace or the forgiveness that comes through the
cross, I may be an inch away from being lost forever.
 
And that’s why we need the reassurance of Jude’s closing words to
remind us of God’s disposition toward us and his power to hold us
fast.  He writes, “(and now) To him who is able to keep you from
falling, and to present you before his glorious presence without fault
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and with great joy – to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty,
power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages,
now and forever more!  Amen”.  And to that we can only say, Amen.  
Amen?  Amen!