Remember the days of recording over cassettes or burning CDs? Having a mixtape was the perfect way to have all of your favorite songs in the same place. For the next three Sundays, we’re splicing together three short, all-time great letters in the New Testament that are just as relevant & needed today as when they were first cut.
Jude, the brother of Jesus, points out in his book that we become like whoever we listen to the most. Listening to the bad advice that is everywhere today leads to bad beliefs. And our bad beliefs always result in bad behavior. In fact, while many deny it, your behavior is the best indicator of what you really believe.
Jude 1:3-25
Speaker: Phil McKeon
(congregation laughing) Good morning, church. That's a tough buffer video to follow. That's a lot of fun. As you can see, if you've been here for a little bit, we are starting a new series this week. But if you are new with us today, my name is Phil and I'm one of the deacons here in Tunkanic and I have the privilege and I'm blessed to be able to bring the word of God to you this morning. But before we get everything kicked off, I wanna ask a simple question. Have you ever had an unfavorable experience with GPS? Okay, I'm taking some chuckles, yeah, absolutely. It's happened, right? So I'll tell you my very, very recent one, within the last year. So my daughter plays travel volleyball and we were in a tournament that was down the Philadelphia area on a Saturday and played all day long. We had another tournament that was gonna be on Sunday in Harrisburg, so we were driving from Philadelphia to Harrisburg in the evening time. And on a very critical spot in the juncture on the interstate, my GPS glitched and the truck on the picture just started sailing off into nowhere. Like it was back to the future, where we're going, we don't need roads. I'm like, I look down, I look to the back seat and my truck doesn't have a flux capacitor, so that wasn't gonna happen. And if I had followed where the GPS was taking me, I don't know if I would be here today. But that being said, I wanna preface everything with what we're gonna talk about today. But first, I wanna show you a fun little video of someone who actually did follow the GPS to a T. Proceed straight. Well, we're over six. Last chance of the owners of Country Club, other side of the lake on the Southeast side. Oh, get it. I really don't get it. I thought this would work. Do everything I had with that guy, nothing. So I'll go with some times, you know? You lose everything and everything falls apart and eventually you die and no one remembers you. That is a very good point to it. Oh, right, turn. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, it means bear right. No, it said right, so take a right. No, no, no, no, no, look, it means go up to the right, bear right over the bridge and hook up with 307. Make a right. Maybe it's a shortcut for you, let's say go to the right. They can't mean that. There's a lightning, you know, where it is going. The machine knows. Stop yelling at me, oh, it's up here. There's a lightning here. Remain calm, I have trained for this. OK. I sent the window. Here we go. Make a new turn. There we go. Look out there, ladies, do it. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Hopefully, you've never driven your vehicle into a lake. But I think we've all had a similar circumstance, right? GPS led you astray, you know, took you down a road and the bridge was actually out. And it's like, no, you need to go straight and like, but there's no road there. Like, that was my situation, right? Or maybe it took you through a weird part of town and you weren't sure if you were going to get out of that particular part of town. All sorts of things can happen there, right? You know, you get lost. You phone a friend and they're even more confused than you are. There's a zero help, right? So you do the next best thing and you find a local and you say, hey, this is, I'm trying to get out of here. There's a lot going on and they give you all these landmarks that you've never heard of in your life and, you know, in those moments, you want to think it makes a big difference of who you listen to, right? Because there's going to be some potential impacts depending on who, as we saw before, you take direction from. And that's going to lead us into our theme for today, which is pay attention to what has your attention. And we're going to be in the book of Jude this morning and we're going to cover the entire book. And if you don't know anything about Jude, it's fine. It is one chapter, 25 verses and I promise I will summarize a pretty good portion of it. But I want to say something here real quick before we get in. If you picked one of these Bibles up, we have them on the tables here on either side. If you picked one up and brought it in today to follow along, keep it. If you don't have one, grab one on your way out and take it home. It is super important for us that you have a copy of God's Word in your hand. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later as to why it is so important. But if you're looking for Jude, it's a very small book. Like I said, it's a one-pager. If you're looking through, so go to the back, if you flip your Bible upside down and come back a couple pages, there's Revelation and Jude is right before Revelation. If you have your app, you just scroll all the way to the bottom, it's the next one up. So while everybody's turning and while we're getting to Jude, I want to just give you a little background as to what's going on here and who Jude is and kind of what's happening in this passage. So Jude is one of Jesus's brothers, and he was very well known as a traveling preacher and a missionary. And we don't necessarily know who Jude was writing to, it's why the book is called Jude. You know, we have some other books that are Galatians and Ephesians and they're written to those particular groups of individuals. But we can kind of surmise just based on the examples that he utilizes, that he's probably talking to a group of Jewish believers. And it's interesting how he kind of starts everything out here because he finds out that there's a crisis facing this church today. And kind of what's happening is there's a bunch of corrupt teachers that have moved into this body of believers, and he doesn't necessarily go after the false teachers and the things that they're teaching, but more of their way of life, like how they're acting their behavior. And it's interesting because they're doing some things and they're sprinkling in a little bit of truth and spinning it a little bit so people are believing it and they're starting to move this congregation of believers astray. And that's kind of where we're going to pick up. So we're going to start in verse three today, and Jude says this, "Dear friends, I have been eagerly planning to write to you about the salvation we all share. But now I find I must write about something else, urging you to defend the faith that God hasn't trusted once for all time to his holy people." So let's marinate on this for a second. Jude was already getting ready to write something to this group of believers, and he was eagerly planning. So he was excited about what he was about to write about because he was talking about the salvation that we all share, probably going to be a letter of celebration, pretty pumped about it, right? But when he found out what happened, he completely flipped the script. He's like, "I can't write about that right now. I have to address what's happening." And the second part, he uses this word urging to defend the faith that God hasn't trusted to you. And he's pleading, almost begging them because of the concern that he has for the situation that's happening in this church. And he also uses this word defend, which carries the idea of exerting intense effort. And not just like, "I tried real hard or I picked something up heavy," but like almost like a fight, like a battle, right? Like he is coming in hot like, "This is a serious situation, team." And it's interesting to say that as he comes through here, he hits it hard and heavy. Jude's not pulling any punches here, and he goes right into verse four and kind of explains why he's addressing what he's addressing and why he's really changing what he wanted to call the mouth to do. And he says this in verse four, "I say this because some ungodly people have wormed their way into your churches, saying that God's marvelous grace allows us to live immoral lives. The condemnation of such people was recorded long ago for they have denied our only Master in Lord Jesus Christ." So Jude's doing two things here. He's trying to encourage his readers to defend their faith. It is literally under attack by these false teachers. And what's happening is that some of these folks are like, "I kind of like what they're saying. I kind of want to live by that." They're saying because of God's grace, we can live however we want to live. We can live immoral lives. Go ahead. That's cool. Why? Because God's grace is amazing and it's wonderful, and he'll forgive you. So to the point of if you want to sleep with someone who's not your spouse, that's cool because God will forgive you. You want to fly, cheat, steal, that's fine. You can do whatever you want because God's grace is amazing and he's going to forgive you. He'll go get drunk every weekend. Awesome. Great. God's going to forgive you for those things. And I don't want to miss this because that is very true. This is the truth here. Any of those things that we have made up for taking with in our entire lives, God will forgive. His grace is that amazing. It is marvelous. It is an incredible thing to try and wrap your head around. But it is not a license to live immoral lives. When we read about this in Romans, chapter 6 actually, but what's happening here with this group of Christians and Jude is they have begun to listen to these teachers and they're starting to go down this wrong path. And what's important and our first point of the day is you need to pay attention to what has your attention because who you listen to will influence what you do. Now I pay attention and listen to all sorts of voices in my day, sometimes it's my boss, sometimes it's my wife, sometimes those are the same thing. But there's also other voices out there that may influence me in a different direction. And what's interesting is how those things influence you, defines how you live your life. Now you can see in these first couple of verses that I mentioned before that Jude doesn't pull any punches. He hits it quick. First two verses, this is what I'm going to talk about, this is why I'm going to talk about it. And then he goes into this portion here which is where I'm going to do a little bit of a summary of some Old Testament examples of previous followers of Christ or followers of God that have kind of gone down this path and had some pretty dire things happen. So as we move in, I'm going to kind of highlight between verses 5 and 10 and you're more than welcome and I would encourage you to go back and read through some of these. I'm going to tell you where these things are also referenced in the Old Testament so you can go through and read the entire stories for yourself. But he moves in and he's telling these stories and using these examples because he's telling them this is where you're headed if you don't course correct. So first he talks about Israel's rebellion in the wilderness which is recorded in Numbers 14. If you want to take note of that and follow back up later. He then moves into a story about some rebellious angels that are talked about in Genesis 6 and he kind of links that story because they're similar type instance to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah which is in Genesis 19. He then throws in this bonus example that I'm going to call because it's not in our Bible text, it's actually from a book called The Testament of Moses which is a very pertinent Jewish text and you know we do things all the time we read our Bibles right but we also have commentary we also have other things that have been written that are beneficial for us and this would be something that was very important and very well known to the Jewish folks that he is most likely running to. And what this is is a little back and forth between an archangel Michael and the devil himself and they're kind of going back and forth about what to do with the body of Moses now that he has passed. And the devil is trying to pull up all these different things because no one's perfect right none of us are. So Moses did some things that weren't on the level and he was trying to call those things out to say well this is what's going to happen to Moses and the archangel Michael was going back and forth like well he was actually a pretty good guy he did some really great things for followers of God but at the end of that story Michael pretty much says I'm done arguing with you we're not going to have this conversation I'm not going to make this call you're not going to make this call God is going to make this call. And that's kind of where he wants to go with is we need to understand who's got the final call right and as you look through these verses and you read back through some of these stories you might look at him and be like kind of cringe because the examples that he's using are pretty dark and there's some really really not great things that happened here but he uses that specifically to have them understand the severity of what's happening but the main theme between all these examples is that these are in every single situation here they were belled against God's authority so whether they listen to somebody else or whether they listen to their own beliefs or do whatever they want to do Jude is pointing out the dire consequences of acting this way because what had happened with a lot of these folks is they were pretty much wiped out again Jude is coming in hot and throwing some things out here that are super important for us to understand and will continue to dive in but that's why it's important to go back to our main point here of who you listen to influences what you do right so then Jude moves in and he kind of goes in a little bit on these false teachers and this is kind of like verses 11 through 16 but he comes in the same fashion as the previous examples he goes hard he starts comparing these folks to some some pretty bad dudes use their quotes there from from the past and the first one he starts out was one that most of us would probably know Cain who murdered his brother and then he went on to build this city and in that city violence rained take what you want by force so the example is Cain rebelled against God and then he convinced others to move away from God and the second one you brings up a prophet Balaam who in the book of numbers 22 to 25 if you want to look back at that story and read through it was hired for lack of better words to to curse Israel and God wouldn't allow that he's like I'm not going to let you do that and so what he did was he lured Israel into idol worship and got them to move away from God and not pay attention to God and pay attention to these other things so immediately similar story right he rebelled against God and then he corrupted others and our third one here is Cora who was a Levite and which was part of the nation of Israel and he led a rebellion against Moses and this is recorded in numbers chapter 16 that ended up in disaster did it did not work out very well for those folks that were following Cora and you can read through a lot of that in the Old Testament but really all three rebelled against God and they took that opportunity to then corrupt others and this were due takes a second to also call them out and he pulls out some more Old Testament comparisons you know saying these teachers that have slipped into your church are like the selfish shepherds that are referenced in Ezekiel they're like clouds without rain they're meant which is mentioned in Proverbs they're chaotic waves that turn up foam this is referenced in the book of Isaiah and the interesting thing about this is not that they're here trying to just cause up discourse they're saying that they're apprentices of Jesus like we're followers of Jesus we are but their actions speak a whole lot louder than their words they're self-absorbed they create chaos wherever they go and this is kind of why Judah is saying we need to pay attention to what these people are saying around us because some of these things make a little bit of sense but then Judah comes with a warning and this is from the book of Enoch again a very prominent Jewish text that comes up and this is where we're going to pick back up in our scriptures here at verse 14 says Enoch who lived in the seventh generation after Adam prophesied about these people he said listen the Lord is coming with countless thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on the people of the world he will convict every person of the ungodly things they have done and for all of the insults that ungodly sinners have spoken against him these people are grumblers and complainers living only to satisfy their desires they brag loudly about themselves and they flatter others to get what they want and when you look at them in that perspective they lovely group of people are they not but what what you is referencing here is final judgment that's talked about in the book of Revelation hey you know you can live all this way you can do all these things but I'm telling you right now it's this has been mentioned before that inevitably God's going to come back and he's going to have something to say about what you did not about what you said right and he moves into a more recent warning that has come with the current church today and we're going to pick that up here in verse 17 but you my dear friends must remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ predicted they told you that the in the last times there would be scoffers whose purpose in life is to satisfy their ungodly desires these people are the ones who are creating divisions among you they follow their natural instincts because they do not have God's spirit in them and what he's referencing here is a couple of different places that I'll call out and you can write these down but he's talking about Peter and John and Paul and they have called out this specific thing so Peter specifically second Peter chapter two talks about this exact thing John in first John chapter four also talks about this and Paul when he's writing second Timothy chapter three all tell this exact same story that hey people are going to come to the church they're going to weasel their way in you're not going to know about them they're going to come in with all the best intentions and they are going to try to cause discourse among you so Judas saying we need to start paying attention why because who you listen to will influence what you do it's a third time you might want to write that down it's probably on the test later just kidding there's no tests but that being said right when I listen to people who say follow your heart you do you right do whatever makes you feel happy how I react to that and how I take that and how you take that can directly impact your life if I take one moment to make a decision that makes me happy in that moment there may be many many things that I'm sacrificing for that happiness in that brief period time could be my marriage could be my kids could be my relationships with my friends could be something at work right it's not always about doing what makes you happy but that's the philosophy of the world that we live in today so we got to be careful super pertinent to what we're talking to today but then June has brought us along this journey right started out with talking about the significance of what's happening here and then goes into his examples of here's what happens if you don't course correct if you continue to follow this path here's what's going to happen and then he calls out some of these things that these false teachers are doing so we can identify what's happening and then as we move into verse 20 he tells us what to do about it right so now he's given us all this information now we're prepared what do we do and he talks up and he says this here in verse 20 but you dear friends must build each other up in your most holy faith pray in the power of the Holy Spirit and await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ who will bring you eternal life in this way you will keep yourself safe in God's love and you must show mercy to those whose faith is wavering rescue others by snatching them from the flames of judgment show mercy to still others but dude so with great caution hating the sins that contaminate their lives so it's a little bit to break down here but June is saying there's a couple categories of people that are working through this process right there's some people that are just they don't know they're struggling they doubt they don't know what to believe they're trying to figure this whole thing out and then there's some that are involved with these false teachers kind of like listening but maybe not making action yet but contemplating sounds pretty good and there's this third set of folks that have already made the decision and they're walking down a pass they have literally been led astray and Jude's counsel to us what do we do about it is rescue them he said go get them pursue them chase after them they have been led astray they have been lied to and we need to figure out a way to bring them back and then lastly Jude kind of goes into this last piece which is what you believe determines how you behave it is interesting to kind of walk through this what you believe about God will overflow into your life in fact we can we can pretty much tell by evaluating our behavior what we believe for example I get cut off in traffic I curse and scream and yell and follow that dude to the next place that he gets off so I can give a piece of my mind what does that tell you about what I believe about God in that scenario one of two things either one I don't believe that God is everywhere so he doesn't even see what I'm doing which is fine so I can go do what I want because God's not there or I do believe is God that God is everywhere but I don't believe that he cares about what I'm doing in that moment like this is insignificant in the grand scheme of God's things he doesn't care what I do here neither one of those things are really great right and we don't want to base our decisions off of either one of those because God is everywhere and God does care about what we do so we're going to move back into verse 24 here as Jude tends to you know comes to wrap this up and he says in verse 24 now all glory to God who was able to keep you from falling away and will bring you with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault all glory to him who alone is God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord all glory majesty power and authority are his before all time and in the present and beyond all time amen I love this little verse because in the previous twenty three verses Jude is hitting it hard and calling some things out and saying we got to double check ourselves but then he comes in with these two verses right here with some encouragement and praise right if we do what we're supposed to do if we love God we obey God and when we do that we are safe he will keep us from falling away and leading down these paths and I love that he just kind of goes out and just throws more praise just just to God and who he is right he has the best interest in our mind right yesterday today tomorrow as we heard about a little bit earlier God's not surprised by anything he's got a plan for everything and as we kind of start wrapping these things up here if I were to summarize all of the things that kind of Jew just put together here I would put it in this type of statement how you live is the most reliable indicator of what you believe heavy sigh right I will tell you that every time I've had an opportunity come up here this has been something that's been pertinent to me and I thank God works in really awesome ways that way to say hey man you can be better here you're right you're right but it was pretty clear what these false teachers believe by the way that they live and fortunately unfortunately for us it will also be equally as clear what we believe by how we live and I want to take a pause for a second here before we move in to kind of wrapping everything up to say if you're here today and you're kind of listening to what's happening and you're trying to navigate this world on your own and asking friends for how to how to navigate this thing called life one and about who this Jesus guy really is as Kevin mentioned earlier I would encourage you and challenge you to talk to somebody today before you leave we would love to have a conversation with you talk to Kevin talk to myself find someone wearing a name tag ask the person who invited you here today we would love to answer your questions because there's a lot there's a lot to take in there's a lot to understand and we're here to help and we know that it's for us the most important decision that we've ever made and we want to share that with you so where do we go from here well luckily for you I have some next steps so the first one that I want to point out as I mentioned before it says you version Bible app get a copy of this in your hands okay if you don't have a smartphone wonderful this is just as good this is better actually sorry sorry for you tech people I mean I'm a tech person don't get me wrong there's nothing better than having a Bible in your hand so if you don't have one please put one in your possession before you leave here today you cannot get to step two without step one which is know what you believe so you can defend it the whole premise of Jude writing this letter was because the people that he was writing to didn't know how to defend their faith they were being led astray because they just didn't have the knowledge you got to be in this book and you got to be in it consistently in order to make the right decisions and to be able to defend your faith effectively take inventory and evaluate what is being said versus scripture so you say right this is our theme for the day pay attention to what has your attention take an inventory what has your attention who has your attention what and who are feeding into your lives and does that line up with what the scripture says then after we've taken inventory choose one choose one thing I got a pocket full I'll be real with you folks we're not perfect I'm not perfect nobody is and there's plenty of things that we can work on in our journey in our walk with Christ but it's a journey it's not a sprint we'll get there inevitably right how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time choose one thing choose one thing to focus on and use a scripture to figure out how to level set and align it back to God and then finally once we're on the right path and we're moving on the right path we can grab others to help them to turn them around right find those folks that have been led astray there's so much that goes on this world and I'm grateful to be a part of a ministry that makes sure we preach out of here every week and don't take that from me don't take anything that I say to heart look in here for yourself and understand what we're trying to do as I close up here there was still is he's still around a very savvy businessman that was in my life still is and he gave me this phrase as I was learning some things in business he said you can't expect what you don't inspect and there's no way that you can expect to live by this book if you're not inspecting what's inside it so I'll challenge you today as we leave here to look at those things to evaluate what is influencing you today put it up against scripture make sure it's profitable make sure it's good make sure it's moving you closer to him let's pray have a follow we just thank you so much for this morning lord we thank you for your word and how beneficial it is to us and how important it is to us as we continue to move throughout our week god that we evaluate what we're doing on a day to day by what you would have for us god you know that we're not perfect and we're never going to get it all right but we're also trying to be better help us to take that seriously help us to engage in your word on a regular basis so that we can grow to be more like you and god there's anybody in this room today that's questioning that's maybe followed some bad advice in trying to navigate this thing that you would just spur them on this morning to be bold enough to ask someone that question what do I do help me understand god we just thank you and praise you for all the things that you're doing and it's in Christ's name that we pray amen
