'Moving Forward to Prevent Falling Back'

Jude 17-25 July 23, 1989 (Third and last of short series on Jude)

TEXT COMMENT: So far, 'the faith once for all delivered' and 'contending for that faith'

Jude has called upon this church, these believers, to contend for the true faith by rejecting the false teaching which had recently made inroads among them and the false teachers who brought it. And he has warned them, in the most severe language, that trifling with these errors is very dangerous. He spent most of his letter exposing these false teachers as the wolves in sheeps' clothing they were. But now, Jude turns his attention to the Christians themselves, and in vv. 20-21, urges them to take steps that will render them immune to the appeal of falsehood, more steadfast in their loyalty to the Lord and his Word. He wants them to make their calling and election sure, as his friend Peter would have put it; and so urges upon them their own sanctification.

Sanctification means growth in the Christian life, living more and more as a Christian should and less and less as they do who do not know the Lord. And Jude believes that the more a Christian attends to his Christian life, the more he devotes himself or herself to its practice and its cultivation and its growth, the safer, the more secure in faith that Christian will be.

The Christian pilgrimage through this dark and difficult world of sin, is like the passage of a circus performer on the high wire. It is much easier for him to keep his balance and keep from falling, when he is moving forward, than when he is standing still.

It is one thing for our sins to be forgiven, it is another thing for our lives to be made holy and pure: but God's salvation in Jesus Christ has both purposes and accomplishes both ends.

We are inclined to think that forgiveness is the best part of salvation. What can be more wonderful, we think, than to know that our sins are forgiven and that we have peace with God. But a little bit of thought will convince you that the most godly folks from ages past were right when they called sanctification, as Robert Murray McCheyne did, 'the better half of salvation,' or when Samuel Rutherford said that Christ was more to be loved for sanctification than for justification, more to be loved for fashioning a holy heart and life in us than for forgiving our sins.

Rutherford argued this way: it is in sanctification, in the remaking of our lives after Christ's example, that the Lord makes us most like himself. And, he says, for a godly person, it is more of a misery to serve sin and to do the works of the devil, than it is to remain condemned and under unforgiven guilt. Indeed, in Rutherford's characteristically strong way of putting things, he went on to say: 'Let a sinner, if possible, lie in hell for ever, if [God] make him truly holy; and let him lie there burning in love to God, rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, hanging upon Christ by faith and hope--that is heaven in the heart and the bottom of hell!'

Well, it seems also to be the Bible's view that sanctification, God's work in us to make us into the people he wants us to be: pure, loving and good, is the better half of salvation; for Holy Scripture certainly devotes much more of its space to sanctification than it does to justification, much more of its attention to God's removing the impurity and weakness from our lives than getting the guilt off our backs, as wonderful as forgiveness is.

Some Christians are sanctified more than others; some faster than others; some more easily than others--but all genuine Christians are sanctified, the life of every true child of God is subjected to the influences of the Holy Spirit. There is no justification--forgiveness--without sanctification--a holy life.

You may be aware that John MacArthur, the Southern California pastor and radio preacher, who was in Seattle this past year, is presently embroiled in a controversy in the Christian circles in which he runs, for his assertion of this fact in a new book of his. In a church like ours, whose inheritance is the strong, old theology of the reformation, it may surprise many to learn than this is a controversial topic. But there are many in the church in our day who have thought that one could be justified but not sanctified, that you could have forgiveness and heaven without a changed life and the practice of godliness. MacArthur is absolutely correct to reject such teaching--the Scripture could not be plainer that if any man is in Christ he is a new creature, the old things have passed away, behold all things have become new--and we wish him well in his effort to communicate that truth to a community of Christians who have not understood it properly before. God does not work for us, to take away our guilt and give us peace with himself, unless he also works in us to make us holy.

And alongside all the other reasons why God works in us as well as for us, why the Holy Spirit sanctifies those who are truly being saved, Jude adds this reason for sanctification; another reason why God is at work upon the lives of his people in this world, and why he summons us to be at work on them too. A Christian life that is moving forward, growing deeper in the things of God, becoming more godly and holy all the while, is the life that will put up the sturdiest resistance to all the forces within us and outside of us--both human and superhuman--which are ranged against our souls and would undermine our faith in God and our salvation.

It is the Christian athlete who is always exercising his faith, says Jude, whom the Devil can't catch; and should he catch him, will find him too fit, too strong, to quick on his feet to defeat in a spiritual slugfest. Or, to change metaphors, it is the Christian scholar who is always in Christ's library deepening his wisdom and knowledge, whom the Devil will not be able to trick, even with his most subtle and crafty temptations, even with his most life-like substitutes for the real faith and genuine godliness which Jesus Christ teaches.

Well, how does one go about increasing one's sanctification, growing in the Christian life? Make no mistake; God must do the work. Jude says so plainly in the next to last verse of his letter: 'To Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy--to the only God...' The Lord, the Scripture always says, must as surely sanctify his people as justify them. We can no more change our lives than we could remove our guilt.

But God, Jude is saying, in agreement with all of Scripture, uses means. And the great means by which he accomplishes the sanctification, the deepening holiness of his people, are just those means by which he calls them to practice, to exercise their dependence upon him.

And, what Jude does for us in these two verses, more clearly than I think it is ever done anywhere else in the NT is to tell us precisely by what means we are to practice our faith that it might grow and deepen, precisely in what ways we are to grow up in our Christian life and become more and more the godly people, the pure and loving people Christ redeemed us to be.

Four great means of sanctification; four great exercises by which we strengthen our faith and godliness; four ways to practice and by practicing deepen our dependence upon the Lord. They are familiar themes to every Christian, but so vitally important, so crucial to all that we are about as God's children and people, and, says Jude, so vitally connected to our spiritual security and well-being that we can never emphasize them enough. They are the great works of a Christian's private life.

I. The first, says Jude, is the study and the mastering of the Bible.

'Build yourselves up in your most holy faith.' Here 'faith' does not mean the act of believing, but rather what is believed, as we saw three weeks ago in our examination of v. 3. This faith is the body of truth which God has revealed in Christ and in the Holy Scripture about himself, his will, and his salvation.

It is very interesting that Paul uses the same word 'build up' in Acts 20:32. There he says that the Word of grace can build up the Christian. Here Jude says that the Christian must build himself up in that Word. It amounts to the same thing: Christians grow by reading, studying, learning, ingesting, the Word of God.

Now it is important to note that Jude neither with this work nor any of the other three, provides any technology of building oneself up in the faith once for all entrusted to the saints. Neither Jude nor any other writer of the Bible tells us exactly how we must do this. Some people read the Bible in short snatches, others read it in large chunks. Some make it a practice of reading the Bible through in a year's time, year after year. By the time A.W. Pink had been a Christian 24 years, he had read the Bible through more than 50 times.

Some will tell you to read the Bible along with a commentary on that portion you are reading; others will say you should always be reading in both the OT and the NT. John Stott used to recommend that a Christian always be reading in the four Gospels wherever else he might be reading in the Bible. There are all manner of good and bad ideas about how to study the Bible, how to notice its key thoughts, how to remember them, how to memorize important verses, how to meditate upon Scripture so as to take it into your heart, and so on.

I can say with great thanksgiving and conviction that it was the Lord's great gift to me when he put me on a regimen of reading through the Bible each year, annotating my own copy of the Bible as I go, drawing the connections between one passage of Scripture and another as I see them, adding illuminating material from books I read in the margin of my Bible next to the appropriate text of Scripture. My understanding of the Bible, my grasp of its contents, the increase of my mastery of Holy Scripture have been fostered in a wonderful way by this method. But another method may work much better for you.

Jude's concern is not the method you choose by which to build up your understanding of Holy Scripture and your knowledge of its contents. His concern is that, in fact, you constantly are growing in your knowledge and mastery of God's holy book, of that faith once-for-all delivered to the saints, of that truth by which we are saved and by which we are to live.

However you study the Bible, you are to read it and ponder it, John Newton said, not as an attorney may read a will, merely to know the sense; but as the heir reads it, as a description and proof of his inheritance.

You are to read it as God's own speech to YOU and as what God is saying to you as your loving heavenly Father.

Alexander Whyte used to say that we ought to read the Bible as autobiographical of ourselves; and John Bunyan used to ponder the biblical history until he was in his sanctified imagination carried right back into that history and became a witness of it himself. Reading the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ, he said, 'Methought I was as if I had seen him born, as if I had seen him grow up, as if I had seen him walk through this world from the cradle to his cross...'

Surely there are difficult things in the Bible, which require study and hard work to understand. But this book comes out of the mouth of God himself. And for us, therefore, as Bernard of Clairvaux once put it, 'what is difficult to understand, ought to be a delight to inquire into...'

The idea is to build into your mind, your heart, your thinking and feeling and choosing, such a profound acquaintance with the Bible, that you come to think like the Bible, speak like the Bible, choose as the Bible would have you choose; that you become really and truly a man of the book or a woman of the book; that no matter where they prick you, you bleed the Word of God.

Jude, in the first place, says give the Bible, and the study of and meditation upon the Bible a paramount place in your daily life.

Think of it carefully
Study it prayerfully,
Deep in your heart let its oracles dwell;
Ponder its mystery,
Slight not its history,
For none ever loved it too fondly or well.

II. The second of these great works of the Christian's private life, by which his or her sanctification is advanced, is that of prayer.

'Pray in the Holy Spirit' And what does that mean? Is prayer in the Holy Spirit some special kind of prayer; some ecstatic utterance to God? Some have thought so; but that is not Jude's meaning. That phrase-pray in the Spirit--is used elsewhere in the NT, for example in Eph 6:18 where Paul commands us to pray in the Spirit always.

'in the Spirit' in the NT means simply the opposite of in the flesh or in the old sinful nature. Pray according to the new reality which the Spirit of God has created in us when he drew us to Christ; pray according to his will, which will he has made known in the Bible, the book HE inspired. Pray with a reliance upon his help, as that help is promised in Romans 8:26. Pray as a genuine Christian prays with faith and submission and love and with an intense interest in what interests the Spirit of God. That is what Jude means.

And this life and this practice of prayer, what John Knox defined simply as 'earnest and familiar talking with God', is the life-blood of a growing, deepening Christian life. It is the means by which the wisdom, the strength, the encouragement, the help we need is brought down to us from heaven. As our Savior promised, our Father in heaven will not fail to give the Holy Spirit more and more to his children who ask Him.

Again, there is no technology here. Some pray in a schematized way; some have a list by which they keep track of what they should pray for each day; some pray for a certain length of time at a certain time of day; some pray several times each day. Some use prayer books in addition to their own freely composed petitions to God; others not.

It matters not your method, your style; so long as you are daily and often in prayer, making your requests known to God; confessing your sins; expressing your love and thanksgiving for his boundless mercies. I remember reading in the Diary of Andrew Bonar the record of his struggle to stay on his knees through long stretches of prayer, and his coming to believe at last that his way of prayer was not meant to be lengthy praying at one sitting. He wrote: 'Led to think today that my way of praying is chiefly to be by bolts upward, not by very long prayers at one time.' However, if you read his Diary, you may get, as I did, the disconcerting impression that Andrew Bonar's 'bolts upward' were considerably longer than your and my lengthy prayers at one time.

Prayer is very hard. Every honest Christian admits this. The great Puritan, and founder of Harvard University, Thomas Shepard once confessed that there were times when he would rather die than pray; and Lloyd-Jones gave it as his opinion that 'Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.'

But, difficult to do it faithfully and well as may be, it is as true of our own Christian lives as what Luther said was true of the reformation in his day: 'prayer must do the deed.'

So say with Samuel Rutherford, 'I would rather spoil twenty prayers, than not pray at all.'

And among all other subjects for prayer, make your own heart and life, chief among them. Do as Francois Fenelon, the 17th century spiritual writer:

'Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, its pleasures and its pains to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys that He may sober them; tell Him your longings that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them; Tell him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and to others.... People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation. They do not weigh their words...They talk out of the abundance of the heart; Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved [conversation] with God.'

III. Then, says Jude, the third of these great works of a Christian's private life by which his or her sanctification is fostered and advanced is that of keeping fresh one's love for God.

'Keep yourselves in God's love' And it isn't very difficult to know how one goes about doing that! Husbands and wives, if your love has grown stale and dull how is it that it is freshened and awakened? Is it not simply by giving and receiving that love once again?

What would a husband do but buy his wife a gift--something he knows from long experience she would especially enjoy--and then when giving her that gift declare his love for her and his appreciation of her and his delight in her all over again as if for the first time. And receiving that awakening love from her husband a wife would respond joyfully in kind. And a marriage in which love is kept lively, fresh, and new is a marriage full of joy and strength.

And it will be the same for you. The Lord is forever declaring his love for you; and by the Spirit's witness with your heart; on every page of his holy book; which is one reason why it is so necessary to open that book each day. But you must respond to his love with love of your own. Give the Lord something that would delight him--some difficult act of obedience; some act of service you have long delayed giving; some public expression of your devotion and gratitude to him. Do it for love's sake. And see if the Lord does not make you to feel anew and afresh his great love for you; see if the Lord does not pour out his love into your heart and fill you full with all the fullness of himself.

Love is deepened in one way and one way only: by practicing it, by speaking it, by giving and receiving it. And that is how you keep yourselves in the love of God.

IV. And, finally, Jude says, do not neglect, with your study of God's word, your praying, and your cultivation of the love which exists between God and your soul, to keep your eye fixed upon the future and the great consummation of your salvation.

'wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.'

Do not permit yourself to forget that this world and this life is passing away, that our citizenship is in heaven, that we do not have here an enduring city, but are waiting for the city which is to come, the city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Do not forget where your true treasure lies--for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

As false teachers of every kind and as the Devil himself shouts 'NOW' into your ear; you refuse to turn your head to the right or the left, but keep your eye fixed on the soon-coming Son of God and all that will be yours and all that can be left behind forever when the great day comes.

Our society waits for nothing; but we must ever be a waiting people, because our God has kept the best for last and told us that we must patiently wait for it; and, what is more, we will live the best kind of life here, if we always remember that this world is not our home and that Christ Jesus has gone on ahead to prepare a place for us in the City of God.

Jude does not deny that God must make us students of his word and people of prayer and he must give us that sense of his love and patience to wait. But God gives his people those important things by drawing them to seek after them themselves.

Are you now so seeking, beloved. Have you learned some new thing from God's word in the last few days; received some correction, or encouragement, or instruction from that holy Book; are you often and regularly in prayer and finding that close and intimate conversation with the Almighty more and more a natural part of your daily life? Are you seeking hard after ever deeper experiences of divine love--yours for God and his for you? Have you loved Him in some definite way in these last days. And are you watching yourself to see that your head is not turned by the deceitful pleasure or heavy cares of this world, but that you keep your mind's eye fixed on the eastern horizon to keep watch for the first sight of the Son of Man coming on the clouds?

It is a great leap forward when one first becomes a Christian and first enters the new world of grace and the love of God. But once in that world life proceeds by small steps not great leaps. "Break off a piece of sin every day" was how Samuel Rutherford would have put it. And if a great many small steps must be taken then by all means let's take a step each day; let no day go to waste without movement forward in our life with the Lord Jesus.

['Nulla dies sine linea' a.w. after the Greek artist, Apelles.]

If you do this, Jude says, you will not only greatly increase in your usefulness to God and to others; you will not only experience to a greater degree the peace and joy of the Xian life, but you will live a safer, stronger Christian life, which the Devil himself, with all of his wiles and all of his power, cannot dislodge from the straight and narrow path that leads to life.

Move Brothers and Sisters, move onward in the things of our God and our Christian life. Refuse to stand still. Always forward! Not a day without a step forward! In the Word, in prayer, in the love of God and in the Christian's hope. What a great thing to know exactly what we must do if we would live the very life that pleases God and brings the most immense fulfillment and satisfaction and well being to ourselves.

Thank you Jude and thank you Holy Spirit for such clear instruction. God help us now to follow it.

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